“Remember right”: Disenfranchised Grief and the Commemoration of Queer Bodies in Welty’s Fiction and Life

Winners of the 2013 Ruth Vande Kieft Prize awarded by the Eudora Welty Society

Even as biographers, historians, and literary critics routinely comment on Eudora Welty’s friendships with gay men and her apparent knowledge of the functions and stresses of the closet, precious little discourse links the author’s awareness of the closet with her representation of it in her fiction. Perhaps the difficulty in reading Welty’s queer representations lies in the writer’s fondness for indirection, what Harriet Pollack describes as Welty’s “preference for the oblique in literary performances” (1). Obliqueness certainly informs Welty’s characterization of Roscoe Chisom in The Optimist’s Daughter. Emblazoned on his mother’s mournful memory of him, Roscoe’s life and death become obscured by his retreat into the closet. In two other scenarios in the novel that involve the Dalzells and the McKelvas, Welty’s characters have to balance between public memory and private devastation. The unusual difficulty of recognizing queer life surfaced for Welty herself in 1975 when she felt compelled to commemorate the life of her friend Frank Hains whose homosexuality and love of the arts had been implicitly linked to his murder. Motivated to recuperate Hains’s reputation, Welty refused to allow Hains’s life to be foreclosed and diminished by bigoted perceptions of his homosexuality. By reinserting Hains into the “familial” group of Jackson artists, Welty presented him as a nurturing and inspirational force.

Welty’s commemoration of Hains expands on an often overlooked pattern of literary productions in which characters grieving gay lives must contend with the staunch moral conservatism that makes up much of southern society. In The Optimist’s Daughter during Judge McKelva’s wake, Fay’s extended family, including her mother, Mrs. Chisom, unexpectedly arrive from Madrid, Texas, to pay their respects. Amid the reminiscences about the judge, Mrs. Chisom tells the tale of her late son, Roscoe, whose flight away from the family to Orange, Texas, and his subsequent suicide still confound her. Roscoe’s friends, obeying his wishes, refuse to tell her about what exactly had been troubling him. Despite the silence and confusion that surround Roscoe’s life and death, his story recalls a number of tragic gay male figures appearing in twentieth-century southern literature. Two of these figures, penned by Tennessee Williams—Allan from A Streetcar Named Desire¹ and Sebastian from Suddenly, Last Summer—foreground Roscoe’s placement at the fringe of Welty’s novel, his sexual Otherness overshadowed by innuendo and implication. That all three men cling to the edge of their respective texts while dominating the thoughts of those they leave behind suggests a paradox in the formation of their power and influence. Implying the men’s social marginalization through a parallel positioning at the texts’ periphery, Williams and Welty also indicate the enormous force these characters exert on their loved ones.

Confounded by tragedy, the mourners must grapple not only with the men’s untimely deaths but also with the frightful mystery of their lives. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche recounts how she tries to bury her discovery of her husband Allan in some kind of sexual embrace with an older man. The double memory of this discovery and of Allan’s suicide that soon follows haunts her, perpetuating her inability to come to terms with the meaning of their marriage, his misery, and his death. Informing her new suitor Mitch of these past events, Blanche expresses only a fragment of what she knows and remembers, and the omitted details of her disclosure become all the more telling for their absence: she speaks of “coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty—which wasn’t empty, but had two people in it” (95). At this point, her words fade away. Blanche’s failure to articulate, to tell what she actually sees, suggests her unwillingness to accept without contempt Allan’s sexual difference. Unable to disclose Allan’s homosexuality openly and freely to more people, Blanche can hardly experience the comprehensive weight of her grief, a...