An Economics of Apathy: Anxieties of Capital and Care in Delta Wedding

Winner of the 2018 Ruth Vande Kieft Prize Awarded by the Eudora Welty Society

It has been a favorite conviction of mine that there can hardly be an art of living where there is not moral and material security, like a capital fund stored up by original thrift. I have no doubt that the Fairchilds have a high art, but I am inquiring about what looks like the obsolescence of their capital investment.

—John Crowe Ransom, Review of Delta Wedding, 64

Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things. A phenomenology of happiness might explore how we attend to those things we find delightful.

—Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 23

Scholars need not read far in scholarship on Eudora Welty before encountering a reference to Diana Trilling's scathing contemporary response to Welty's 1946 novel, Delta Wedding. Indeed, Welty scholars seem "compelled"—to use the Fairchilds' favorite word according to Laura McRaven, the initial narrator—to address Trilling's allegations (DW 103). But why has Trilling's response produced such an affecting hold on Welty scholars? What is it about the response that makes it necessary for Welty champions to continually address Trilling's accusations and argue for her political and moral activism? In her review for The Nation, Trilling argues that in not directly condemning the Fairchilds for enjoying the fruits of an exploitative southern labor system, Welty condones the Fairchilds' behavior and the Delta plantation culture they embody. As Welty's punishment for not passing "moral judgment" on the Fairchilds, Trilling concludes that the author "gives signs of becoming, instead of the trenchant and objective commentator we hoped she would be, just another if more ingenious dreamer of the Southern past" (61).

Yet, if by "objective" Trilling means one who can provide a true-to-life representation, then she does not seem to really want objectivity at all; in fact, no one seems to want this. Trilling's response to Delta Wedding and critical responses to Trilling are equally telling of how disconcerting, even unnerving, readers find "objectivity" or a lack of clear political partiality in the face of southern culture. Trilling wants Welty to indict southern culture, but Welty writes instead of baking cakes. Care—and monitoring the dispersal of care—seems to be the focus of Trilling's anxiety, not a concern with objectivity. Continual reference to Trilling in Welty scholarship suggests that scholars want to clear Welty from charges of social apathy. Scholars who find Welty's familiarity with the Fairchilds uncomfortable—for reasons similar to Trilling's—are therefore compelled to make arguments for the political activism of baking cakes and enacting circumscribed social roles.¹

In fact, much scholarship on Delta Wedding focuses on small details in the novel, marshaled as if to avoid a rather obvious claim: the apathetic Fairchilds are quirky and likable, even delightful. In "Dark-Purple Faces and Pitiful Whiteness: Maternity and Coming Through in Delta Wedding," Tenley Gwen Bank suggests that readers who like the Fairchilds are either ignorant—"that they see, but that they do not comprehend"—or morally deficient, practicing racist "mental acrobatics that must be performed in order to refuse recognition of human suffering" (65).² No one seems to want to say that one might find the Fairchilds delightful. However, I need to talk about this quality because their delightfulness is key to how the novel works and to how the Fairchilds sustain their social status and their apathetic posture. The Fairchilds are able to live on what I call an economics of apathy because of their delightful quirkiness.

Such a lack of care, an apathy, is an affective and aesthetic mood driven by systematized myth. Delta Wedding shows an economics of apathy in which apathy is promoted to maintain a myth. This apathy produces anxiety in the novel's readers—but, just as significantly, it also produces pleasure. I would find any claims that the only real pleasure for scholars who write about or teach the novel comes from critiquing the Fairchilds to be disingenuous. Critical investigations into the formal and affective elements...