Three Collections of Welty Criticism: A Review

Eudora Welty’s seventieth year has been a rich one in published assessments of her work. For more than forty years Welty has been publishing fiction and criticism; for nearly that long reviewers and critics have been interpreting and judging her work. The three collections listed above indicate a major stage in the course of Welty criticism. Essays published therein confirm the viability of previous judgments and refine others. A few strike new paths. In the end, happily, Welty’s unique and elusive art rises intact from the smoke of literary criticism.

I will deal with the books in the order of their publication, leaving the lion’s share of attention for the Prenshaw volume.

A Still Moment is a feeble contribution to Welty criticism, although a few individual essays in it are fine. The better essays are reprinted from sources (Virginia Quarterly Review and RANAM) that are at least as accessible as this volume itself. J. A. Allen’s “Eudora Welty: The Three Moments” deserves more exposure, even though it was more handsomely printed in VQR. Allen has made very few changes in the reprinted version. M. E. Bradford’s review of Losing Battles, reprinted from RANAM for 1971, is still a review. Its first appearance was significant, for it struck a balance among readers who were mistakenly taking sides on Julia Mortimer and Losing Battles in general. Bradford had not expanded the review enough; more is still left for further study than is actually stated. Douglas Messerli’s essay on the “encounter between myth and history” in The Golden Apples uses some fresh language to discuss what has probably been Welty’s most consistently criticized book; his discussion is a justifiable addition to the many myth-tracing studies of it. Albert J. Griffith’s essay on Welty’s “poetics of prose” is excellent; he ranges over the breadth of her critical writings (before The Eye of the Story appeared) and convinces us that her status as a critic has been underrated.

Not much of merit can be said of the other six essays in the Desmond collection. Some repeat previous critical statements and add little that is original. Some are confused and confusing. Desmond’s own contribution is a case in point. He collects the imagery of The Optimist’s Daughter into categories that eventually overlap, clouding his point. And he fails to credit others whose earlier responses to this novel relate to his own and would have helped him to concentrate his essay. A Still Moment contains too many essays that are in themselves poorly conceived and executed and that often fail to allow for previously published work.

Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks is one of the finer examples of its type: the published proceedings of a symposium. It possesses a varied nature and contains some important essays not to be found elsewhere. Cleanth Brooks’s paper, which opened the University of Mississippi meeting in November 1977, moves from his discovery of an 1869 text of the Bible in a Sussex dialect that resembles the Southern American idiom to a major point: the American Southern idiom (by extension the folk culture of the South) is not a corruption of the standard in language and culture, but a vital surviving link with an older tradition. Brooks sees two dangers to that tradition at the heart of The Optimist’s Daughter. His patient progress from old Sussex text to a fresh view of Welty’s most recent novel should be an example to all of us: the best literary critics are those whose equipment is a rich and enthusiastic life, full of reading and experience kept whole, not segregated from “the real world.”

Peggy Prenshaw’s essay is a careful evaluation of the women in Welty’s fiction. Prenshaw...