“The Piano Player at the Picture Show”: Virgie Rainey and Navigating High and Low in The Golden Apples

JASON DUPUY River Parishes Community College “The Piano Player at the Picture Show”: Virgie Rainey and Navigating High and Low in The Golden Apples IN AN OFT-CITED PASSAGE FROM HER BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY,ONEWRITER’S Beginnings (1984), Eudora Welty reminisces about watching movies during her youth: “All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons” (880). This passage suggests Welty’s clear interest in film, and some scholarship has attempted to make a substantive connection between film and Welty’s writing. In the first essay to discuss Welty’s relationship to film in detail, Leslie A. Kaplansky suggests, The presence of these film allusions in her stories attests to Welty’s engaged involvement with film culture, to be sure. But I would argue that her work reveals a formal association with film as well—one that centers on her use of various cinematic techniques that, learned from her experience as a moviegoer, afforded Welty new ways of experiencing “stories” and, in turn, inspired new ways of writing them. (580) As a specific example, Kaplansky writes that “one of Welty’s most pronounced and characteristic manipulations of rhythm is her verbal equivalent of filmic slow-motion—a specific cinematic rhythm used to heighten a profound moment of (subjective) revelation” (583). The problemwithKaplansky’sformulationisthatthereisnothinginherently cinematic about slow motion, and there’s no reason that slow motion in film has to be used in the way that Kaplansky describes. Any examples of Welty’s languid writing style could be attributable to other sources. Her use of slow motion might be like a movie’s, but it’s also like a lot of other things. Taking a similar cue, Dina Smith, discussing The Golden Apples (1949), says, “We enter into Morgana and the lives of its former citizens through a myriad of voices and eyes, or through a series of narrative ‘reframings.’ In this way the text operates like a camera that moves about a space, repositioning its gaze” (84). Again, there is nothing 518 Jason Dupuy inherently camera-like in any type of floating, changing narrative point of view. Both of these critics make worthwhile observations about Welty’s work, but they also engage in a type of criticism that allows almost anything to be labeled “cinematic.” A more useful approach to Welty and film is the one taken by David McWhirter in “Eudora Welty Goes to the Movies,” an essay arguing that the Bijou’s showing of “Orientalist” movies such as The Sheik (1921), with Rudolph Valentino, allows not only for examples of multiculturalism in the seemingly closed-off world of Morgana but also sustains “an ambivalent function, providing both an escape from and a reinforcement of the conventional southern scripts of female sexuality that surround and restrict Morgana’s white middle-class and movie-going girls” (78). These movies “also provided a means for the Mississippi middle-class girls to project themselves into the world, a language that helped them not only to give names to their desire, but to see themselves and be seen, differently, out there, and ‘terribly recognizable’” (83). Virgie Rainey, one of the central characters of The Golden Apples, plays piano at the Bijou, the local movie theater, and is frequently associated with silent film stars by the book’s narration and characters. The fact that Virgie makes her living playing piano in the Bijou is significant, even more so since Virgie makes one of her first appearances in a scene that calls specific attention both to movies and to the act of movie-making. In fact, we often see her, both implicitly and explicitly, treated as a silent movie star. Through Virgie’s experience with film, The Golden Apples explores the high/low divide between art and mass culture in showing the ways that people can use mass culture as a framework to help them make sense of the world around them.1 Virgie, in Miss Eckhart’s estimation, also reaches a high level of technical proficiency at playing classical music. But...