Eudora Welty’s Challenge to Fascism in The Robber Bridegroom

Although recent criticism acknowledges that Eudora Welty should not be read as simply a regionalist who writes about the interior lives of individual characters to the exclusion of wider-reaching sociopolitical issues, we have not fully dismissed this reductive categorization of the author held in consensus by earlier critics. In 1946 William Holder termed her a “distinguished regionalist” (qtd. in McHaney x); Jonathan Yardley in 1970 called Welty a “great regionalist,” but he dampened the positive qualifier by classifying a regionalist as someone “whose view does not extend beyond the first hill” (qtd. in McHaney 167). Diana Trilling calls Welty’s writing “at best, apolitical,” while Richard King claims that Welty’s writing is both “ahistorical and apolitical” (qtd. in Pollack 3, 4). Since many reviewers have not seen political implications in her work, she has had a reputation as being “indifferent to the larger social and political problems of [her] region,” according to Jan Nordby Gretlund (Welty, “An Interview” 226). More recent criticism (since the 1990s, according to Harriet Pollack [2]) has seen Welty as a political writer, contending that her southern setting does not prohibit her from addressing national or international issues. Ten essays in the 2001 collection edited by Pollack and Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty and Politics, refine the view of Welty as consciously writing political themes despite her apparent disavowal of the practice in her 1978 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?”

Eudora Welty’s 1942 novel The Robber Bridegroom tacitly responds to the growing threat of fascism, and this can be seen through the construction of the evil stepmother Salome. My purpose here is to show one way in which Welty’s novella is proof that, although the engagement with international events is not as explicit as in the bestselling war novels of the time, Welty deals with issues in her fiction that connect far beyond her region of Mississippi and the American South. In this essay, I will first explain the context during which The Robber Bridegroom was written and published, and then I will expand upon parts of the character Salome in order to support my argument.

Few contemporary reviews of The Robber Bridegroom address the curious fact that the source material for the novella comes primarily from German folk tales; it is a glaring omission not to note that a country at war with the United States was responsible for creating the lore at the backbone of an American story. Reviewer Marianne Hauser holds the strange belief that The Robber Bridegroom “outdoes in its fantastic exuberance any of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm from the folklore of old Germany’s elfin woods” precisely because it is “an American fairy tale” (22). Hauser knows the plot elements are “transplanted” from Germany, but does not discuss the politics of such a revision (22). Nash Burger oddly seems unaware of any German connection to the novella; he states that Welty understands that “the connection of the Southern Anglo-Saxon with his English forebears is universally understood,” and that she writes “in the feeling and style of an Elizabethan or even Middle English folk tale” (28). Burger says that the plot is insignificant, but the connections are “close to the English ballad, close to the Middle English romance,” and include “matter-of-fact acceptance of the supernatural found in the Celtic tales” in order to create something “charming” (29). It seems incredible that this reviewer would so consciously exclude the Grimm connection—and I do believe it was conscious, since the fairy tale had been mentioned in American letters for years and the plot motifs are too easily apparent. Moreover, Burger was a childhood friend of Welty’s, and as such surely could have consulted with her on her source material (Welty, WE xix). Burger’s wording seems like a conscious political choice, focusing on America’s cultural heritage with the British rather than anything touching on Germany.

Readers may not see the international interests in Welty’s fiction because of her artistic beliefs about what she called the political “crusader.” Statements by Welty and those who knew her...