In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "Giving voice to the tireless relish of life":Listening for the Plantation in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
  • Laura Wilson

"Long before I wrote stories," Eudora Welty recalls in her 1984 memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, "I listened for stories." "Listening for them," she clarifies, "is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on" (854). Reciting one of her earliest memories, the author describes the aural fascination she felt as a child toward Fannie, an African American seamstress who tailored clothes for the Welty family, and who, besides her "speed and dexterity, brought along a great provision of up-to-the minute news" (853). Relishing the local gossip that her mother admonished Fannie for sharing, Welty admits that, even though the "gist of her tale would be lost on me … Fannie didn't bother about the ear she was telling it to; she just liked telling. She was like an author" (854). Though Welty supplements this childhood recollection by suggesting that she would have to "grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken," the piqued attunement she demonstrates toward this otherwise marginalized black sewing woman still suggests that the author possessed an acute awareness of subjugated stories from the very start (854).

As Welty describes honing her craft in the first section of One Writer's Beginnings.—aptly titled "Listening"—she reveals a great deal about the influence of hearing and sound upon her own writing style. Reminding us of the nimble-natured Fannie, who could "speak in a wonderfully derogatory way with any number of pins stuck in her mouth," Welty argues that "Movement must be at the very heart of listening," evincing the interconnected relationship between motion and sound that forms the core of her writing (854, 851). Like Fannie, who spun a yarn both literally and figuratively, Welty associated ceaseless motion and sound with another of her most fondly admired literary mentors, Jane Austen. Often described as the "Jane Austen of the South" (Prenshaw 308), Welty used the theme of movement to counter the [End Page 105] sense that the only things she and the eighteenth-century British author had in common were quiet plots concerning marriage and traditional female values. In her essay "The Radiance of Jane Austen," Welty comments on how, in Austen's fiction, "There is always a lot of jumping; that seems to vibrate through time. Motion is constant—indeed, it is necessary for communications in the country" (3). Further associating motion with sound, Welty praises "the noise" that emanates from Austen's novels, exclaiming, "What a commotion comes out of their pages," and commending the British writer for how "The sheer velocity of the novels, scene to scene, conversation to conversation, tears to laughter, concert to picnic to dance, is something equivalent to a pulsebeat" (3). "The clamorous griefs and joys" taking place in Austen's novels, Welty suggests, "are all giving voice to the tireless relish of life," illustrating the vitalizing power of sound and movement in providing adequate animation to a story (4). Finally, she asserts, "never did it escape Jane Austen that the interesting situations of life can take place, and notably do, at home" (5).

While I do not wish to bolster the myth of gentle "Miss Welty," the author's remarks on the domesticity of Austen's fiction do invite initial comparison with one of her own family romances, the 1946 novel Delta Wedding, which describes the loud, bustling preparations of Dabney Fairchild's marriage to the overseer, Troy Flavin. While such a nuptial affair certainly highlights Welty's domestic theme, this does not mean that such a topic prevents meaningful social commentary. On the contrary, as Patricia Yaeger states, Welty's focus on the "quotidian praxis" of southern racism allows her to give a "sense of the ways race functions in the nonepic everyday" (63, xv). Welty's decision to set Delta Wedding in 1923 substantiates this view, as she described her choice in an interview with Charles Bunting: "It couldn't be a war year. It couldn't be a year when there...

pdf

Share