Finding (M)other’s Face: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Eudora Welty’s “Clytie”

An early draft of “Clytie” accompanied the first letter Eudora Welty ever sent Diarmuid Russell, the Dubliner turned New Yorker who would remain her agent from 1940 to 1973. A response to Russell’s initiatory request that she hire him as such, the letter consents, “Yes—be my agent,” explaining, “Just as [your] letter was given to me, I finished a story, and holding one in each hand, it seemed inevitable…. As a sign of the agreement, I enclose the story just written” (qtd. in Kreyling 23). Three days later, Russell wrote back, pleased with the working relationship commenced but less impressed with “Clytie” itself, admitting,

I like it but I don’t think it is as good as others of yours that I have seen. There seems to me to be some obscurity about it that makes it difficult to understand. The face of love that you refer to is obviously some dream or imagination that has haunted Clytie…. But I think that that dream or imagination is hardly made clear enough to the reader to [explain why] Clytie commit[s] suicide.

(Kreyling 24)

Russell immediately qualifies the critique, instructing, “If the comment seems unjustified you dismiss it and write the agent a letter calling him an unliterate ass” (Kreyling 24–25), but the evaluation soon proved prophetic. “Clytie,” the story of a woman’s incessant search for a face, took on the life of a similar quest—a seemingly endless search for a place, or a journal willing to publish it. While Russell preferred to find publication for all that would compose A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, he met significant resistance with three stories in particular—stories Michael Kreyling calls the “orphans” of the bunch—“Clytie,” “The Key,” and “A Visit of Charity.” When, at one point, Harper’s Bazaar actually agreed to buy “Clytie,” they soon switched it out for “The Key” instead. Kreyling, retaining his orphan metaphor, describes the rest of the story’s journey: “Poor ‘Clytie’ was out on the street again. Russell sent her down to The Southern Review, and she was published there shortly before the magazine folded in 1942” (66). Welty’s wandering “Clytie” had finally found refuge.

Demonstrative of the story’s significance to Welty and Russell’s working relationship, on the one hand, the brief history recapped above serves also to introduce that “obscurity” addressed by Russell,¹ which is the greater subject of this study. The letter Welty wrote Russell immediately following his critique shows her brief attempt to elucidate the protagonist’s bizarre behavior. She writes, “The face Clytie was seeking would have been more definite, except that Clytie could not ever concentrate. Perhaps the events were not strong enough to justify her sticking her head down the rain barrel, but I felt sorry for her” (qtd. in Kreyling 34). Regardless of what reservations Welty had about the rain barrel at the time, she did not throw out the drowning scene when she revised “Clytie” for Russell afterwards. And while the revised version appears to have satisfied the agent according to correspondence that followed, the story can hardly be said to have lost its obscurity—obscurity as to what face she is searching for, why the face haunts her, and why she drowns herself by the story’s end. Now nestled safely inside a box at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History,² an early draft of “Clytie” may be the best resource for answering some of these questions presently.³ By paying close attention to what Welty subtracted, added, and altered in the story’s revision, I aim to illuminate Clytie Farr’s behavior in psychoanalytic terms as a type of regression, a failure to establish herself within the symbolic order. Demonstrating this failure with her limited speech patterns, in reactions reminiscent of what Julia Kristeva has called abjection, and in her preoccupation with the human face (which I tie to prelingual modes of identification), I find that Clytie appears devoid of any coherent sense of self or agency, a deficit corroborated all the more...