Historicizing The Ponder Heart

Welty’s 1954 novella is narrated by Edna Earle Ponder, the owner of the Beulah Hotel in Clay, Mississippi, who is determined that her story be heard. As Welty has noted elsewhere, Edna Earle “has someone by the lapels who’s come in to register at the hotel and can’t get away, you know, like the wedding guest” (Wheatley 132). Edna Earle presses this unwilling stranger into attentive service, pausing once to suggest, “And listen: if you read, you’ll put your eyes out. Let’s just talk” (341). Edna Earle describes her mentally deficient Uncle Daniel, who exasperates his family by giving away money and property and marrying “beneath” him. What else does her story reveal? Scholars have written less on The Ponder Heart than on any of Welty’s other fiction, but it is likely to be read more widely thanks to the 2001 broadcast of a Masterpiece Theatre film based on the book (Thurman). To understand more of Edna Earle’s story, and to savor more of the nuances in Welty’s sympathetic and hilarious characterization, readers should consider the changes that have occurred in rural Mississippi during Edna Earle’s lifetime.

Several critics have noted that Welty’s novel registers changes in Mississippi culture, but most suggest that this change is for the worse. Michael Kreyling writes that “the time in which Edna Earle narrates the story is the heyday of the superhighway.… The Peacocks themselves are the prolific hordes of coming change, just as Edna Earle is the bathed, neat, and proper survivor of the old regime” (115–16). To evaluate Edna Earle and the changes she laments, readers should place the novel in time. The book’s most recent events occurred about 1952. Uncle Daniel’s first marriage, according to testimony given during his trial, lasted two months in 1944, and his second marriage lasted almost six years. Welty has set the novel in approximately the same moment in which she was writing it as a short story in 1952 and has made Edna Earle about her own age (43 in 1952). Her business, the Beulah Hotel, has far fewer customers than it once did, which is why her grandfather did not object when Uncle Daniel gave the hotel away to his niece. As Edna Earle explains, the town of Clay had “gone down so … with the wrong element going spang through the middle of town at ninety miles an hour on the new highway” (342).

Readers will understand the novel better if they are aware that living conditions in Mississippi have changed more in Edna Earle’s lifetime than during any other previous period in history. To Edna Earle, these changes constitute a decline. But the highway that Edna Earle sees as a nuisance represents an enormous increase in mobility for the state’s citizens. Before the 1940’s, Mississippi roads, according to historian Thomas D. Clark, were almost entirely dirt and were poorly maintained by an archaic system of drafting county residents to work on county roads for ten days out of every year (McLemore 279). Before 1914 there were no state roads (286), but in response to the opportunity for federal matching funds, the state was maintaining over 2000 miles of roads by 1925 (295), and over 4400 miles by 1949 (298). Better roads allowed farmers to lower the cost of transporting their produce to buyers and residents to drive year-round and more quickly to work, to school, and to other towns with different stores and additional services.

For most Mississippians before the 1940s, poverty was the order of the day. Before the 1920s the state was almost entirely agricultural, and the farms had gotten smaller as the land had been passed down. There were 144,000 farms in Mississippi in 1890, but 312,000 in 1930, with the average farm size going from 122 to 55 acres (McLemore 201). Farmers suffered from declining cotton prices in the 1920s when the prices fell from a wartime high of thirty-six cents per pound to less than ten cents per pound in 1921, and as low as six cents per pound...