The Mediating Voice of Humor: The Shoe Bird and Welty’s Adult Texts

“Freddy never appeared to notice. His nose wasn’t even dented” (from The Shoe Bird, UP of Mississippi, 1993, p. 59). Illustration copyright Beth Krush.

Humor is an integral and pervasive element in Welty’s works. Her use of humor indicates an awareness that humans need some relief from the tragic potential and effects of everyday life. As Michael Cart asserts, humor is “something so fundamental to our survival as a species” (1), and literary humor can offer “a distancing from pain that is, in short, essential to existence” (14). If Welty had not incorporated humor into her stories, many of them could have had traumatic effects on her audience. For example, if The Shoe Bird did not present a humorous illustration of what happens to birds that decide to wear shoes, the story might be a despairing and brutal tale of birds being devoured by Freddy the Cat. While some children may find such a conclusion incredibly exciting and amusing, many could be bored beyond belief and others could be terrified. The humorous quality of this fantastic story keeps the action moving and maintains the reader’s attention: who knows what those crazy birds may do or say next? The Shoe Bird is a smaller, lighter version of Welty’s adult works: all are concerned with the essential nature of relationships and the interaction of the collective unconscious and the individual’s search for identity. Northrop Frye has suggested that romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy are all integrated scenes within the larger “quest-myth” of life and that comedy has the potential to become tragedy (qtd. in Hart 78). Welty addresses the various aspects of everyday life in terms of these elements existing in confluence. The family stories are examples of this confluence.

A brief synopsis of The Shoe Bird, Eudora Welty’s only children’s book, will facilitate this discussion that juxtaposes her children’s story with her adult works. The Shoe Bird is a story about Arturo the Parrot, who works in the Friendly Shoe Store, and the dilemma he faces with the entire bird community after he repeats “Shoes are for the birds!”—words uttered by Robbie Thompson, a disenchanted boy customer. This one statement and its misinterpretation by the birds lead to a party after closing time at the Friendly Shoe Store. Birds from around the world come together to claim shoes for themselves. This sets the stage for the humorous language and actions throughout the text. Arturo is quite surprised what repeating one phrase can do and must sort out this confusion with his fellow birds. The birds demand shoes, and they are soon fitted into their new mode of transportation. The frustration of community demands and loss of flight culminates in a fearful conflict when the store cat Freddy comes calling. The birds are grounded by their literal-minded desire for shoes and cannot escape the cat.

In The Shoe Bird as in Welty’s adult texts, the tellers of community tales, however protective of their fellow citizens they may be, do not take themselves so seriously that they and their listeners do not enjoy laughing. In fact, humor is an important element of Welty’s community stories as well as the action and the voices that surround and create them. Jan Nordby Gretlund asserts that humor in Welty’s fiction is a mature means of dealing with the problems of everyday life; Welty uses humor to separate us from our daily problems long enough to enable more objective insight into living (79). Whether she is writing for children or adults, Welty incorporates humor to soften the harsher reality her characters are facing. Peter Schmidt discusses Eudora Welty’s skill at combining myth, humor, and mock heroes in her works: she brings to light a form of women’s comedy in which the fairy tale theme of the damsel in distress is turned upside down in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque mode. “In Welty’s version [of fairy tales],” says Schmidt, “the men are still cast in the role...