"A Woman's Serious Foot": Feet and Shoes in Delta Wedding, "Asphodel," and "The Winds"

Eudora Welty's autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, starts with an anecdote about Welty buttoning her own shoes: "When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I'd listen toward the hall" ([837]). In this opening passage, Welty uses the act of buttoning shoes as a concrete way to signal that she was at an age in which awareness of one's surroundings is possible. This part of Welty's autobiography suggests that, for Welty, shoes are significant. Indeed, in many of Welty's texts, feet and shoes provide useful physical and material details that almost always comment on the characters' social or cultural positions. Welty's texts particularly emphasize women's feet and shoes in order to show women's relationships to the surrounding culture.

Welty's detail about the memory of buttoning her shoes marks time in an unusual way. Why does she choose this method instead of a numerical age? Does this choice shed light on her return to shoes numerous times throughout her work? Part of the answer can begin to be found in one of Welty's comments about writing in "Words into Fiction": "Communication through fiction frequently happens, I believe, in ways that are small—a word is not too small; that are unannounced; that are less direct than we might first suppose on seeing how important they are" (140). Welty's use of shoe buttoning as an opening image in her autobiography about her early relationship to writing provides, then, a small, but specific way to mark the complex nature of her awareness—she was young enough to still be learning one of the basic acts of independence, but she was able to master it on her own. The described scene demonstrates that she had also achieved enough physical distance from her parents (the length of the stairs) to make observations about their whistling and what that whistling conveyed. The "communication" that comes through in this one description of shoes "happens" in similarly interesting ways throughout Welty's fiction. This essay will examine how feet and shoes communicate meaning in "small ways" in Delta Wedding, "Asphodel," and "The Winds." Throughout these pieces, Welty uses shoes to comment on the variety of subject positions taken by her women characters and to reveal the extent to which they are anchored into fixed positions within their communities and families.

As Delta Wedding focuses on the shoes worn by the women characters, it explores marriage and families and also the power relationships by which early-twentieth-century patriarchal family structures sought to constrain women and by which women resisted those constraints. As Danielle Fuller points out in "'Making a Scene': Some Thoughts on Female Sexuality and Marriage in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and The Optimist's Daughter," power expresses itself in ceremonial "scenes" but also in daily routines and family tableaux: "If power can be seen to 'operate on the most intimate levels of daily life' then the 'social fields' known to us as the patriarchal family and the institution of marriage represent structures within which men and women continually experience power and within which they struggle to express their sexualities and identities" (294). In Welty's texts, shoes and the women who wear them unveil some of the "intimate levels of daily life" and thereby offer signs to help decode and also complicate their power relationships and conflicts. In Delta Wedding, shoes provide a concrete map of what Fuller calls the "social fields" of the Fairchild family's peculiar patriarchy and their responses to marriage. Both shoes and lack of shoes convey the struggles and complexities of family relationships, sexuality, and feminine subjectivity within the Fairchild clan.

In Delta Wedding, bare feet appear in scenes that show characters experiencing physical pleasure and contact with domestic and non-domestic spaces around them. They also appear in scenes that show physical intimacies occurring between members of the Fairchild family. The children in Delta Wedding often go barefoot. In a scene that illustrates the Fairchilds' connectedness, three of...