A Dark Rose: Love in Eudora Welty’s Stories and Novels by Sally Wolff (review)

Sally Wolff’s A Dark Rose is many things.

It is an act of communal (sororal mostly, with a touch of fraternal) literary criticism. Wolff does not claim any of her readings of Eudora Welty’s fiction to be original or proprietary, although there is a “dark” tonal quality that makes them personal. Before she knits her interpretations of Welty’s usage of rose imagery to a more comprehensive interpretation of Welty’s understanding of the facets of human love, Wolff acknowledges many of the critics who have prospected Welty’s texts before her. Inasmuch as some of the earlier critical views are my own, I almost wish she had ignored them: a lot of what I wrote then sounds awfully callow now. Still, this is a generous gesture on Wolff’s part, one that evidences the communal (sometimes tribal) nature of Welty critics. Welty conferences are often like the Beecham-Renfro reunion in Losing Battles, and Wolff has fashioned her text to include such a chorus of voices.

A Dark Rose is also a deeply personal tribute to Welty from a woman who first met her at Emory University a little more than thirty years ago when she was completing her doctoral dissertation on Welty’s work. Welty was, and became, more than a writer for Wolff. The preface to A Dark Rose is written as a personal memoir, linking Wolff’s first meeting with Welty at Emory to subsequent meetings and visits to Welty’s home in Jackson, then orbiting outward to embrace Wolff’s mother, Welty’s mother Chestina, and the gendered universe of meaning and feeling imaged by the rose garden. Roses, rose gardens, cultivating the myriad species of the genus Rosa comprise the bare fabric on which Wolff embroiders her contemplation of Welty-on-love.

There might be no riskier premise than proposing to follow the rose to a comprehensive statement such as Welty-on-love. Next to the lily, the rose is probably the flower most intimately associated with the feminine in western culture. Wolff steers well clear of the Bermuda Triangle of authors who have made the rose famous; there is not a whiff of the sick rose William Blake, nor of Gertrude Stein modernist enigma. A Dark Rose, then, is not about the rose in literary traditions and Welty’s place within that nested package, but rather about roses in Welty’s life and writing exclusively.

The “darkness” of the roses Wolff sees is, probably, a more intriguing way through her book, for there is a strong note of melancholy that orders her view of Welty’s vision of love. Wolff offers condensed readings of many of Welty’s works, but the masterplot she sees in A Dark Rose is densely summed up in “A Curtain of Green” (53–57). A dark through-line runs from Mrs. Larkin to the women of The Golden Apples to Edna Earle Ponder and ultimately to Laurel McKelva Hand in The Optimist’s Daughter (177, 187, 198). The themes identified in the index as broached in “A Curtain of Green” (“alienation of Mrs. Larkin from the community,” “grief,” “isolation,” “loss,” “psychic pain,” “emotional life” [214]) return in Wolff’s readings of all of Welty’s stories of women stranded out of love and culminate in Welty’s final published novel.

It is next to impossible to exhaust the topic Wolff chooses in just under 200 pages of text. She points a way to comprehensive understanding of Welty’s vision; she does not conduct us all the way there. Her summary statement will not satisfy all readers: “The dark rose is the quintessential metaphor for the dichotomies that Eudora Welty portrays. Her outlook is often, and perhaps ultimately, positive and filled with quiet possibilities, like the almost inaudible, falling petals of a rose” (198–99). To shift the metaphor just a little: Wolff sees the vase half full when other readers...