The Aesthetics and Morality of the "Natural" in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding

Although Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding (1946) SEEMS DETACHED from its historical and political moment, critics have demonstrated that the novel is inseparable from the context within which it was composed. The novel depicts the interactions among members of the Fairchild family who gather to celebrate the marriage of a daughter, Dabney Fairchild, to Troy Flavin, the family overseer. It begins with Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin from Jackson, entering the Delta on the Yazoo-Delta train nicknamed the Yellow Dog. Delta Wedding does not have a central plot with clear causes and effects but consists of various fragmented episodes involving the family members. Welty herself famously stated on several occasions that she had to make "a careful investigation" to find a year in which "nothing very terrible had happened in the Delta by way of floods or fires or wars which would have taken men away" (Kuehl 81-82). She settled upon 1923, "a year that would leave [her] characters all free to have a family story" (Bunting 50).¹ Michael Kreyling's and Albert Devlin's observations that the novel dwells more on aesthetic concerns than on political and social ones seems to follow Welty's lead. Kreyling has pointed out that Delta Wedding is "more lyrical than narrative in its attention to setting, event, plot, and language" and that "Its thematic territory is not the world of politics or natural disasters" but "the human heart and its tangled relationships with others" (Achievement 55). Similarly, Devlin has related Welty's "fusion of act and consciousness as the model of artistic perception" to Henry James's phrase, "experience conditioned" (which appears in an essay, "Mr. Kipling's Early Stories" [1891]) (256).

Central to such readings of the novel is the Yellow Dog episode, which is repeatedly told in various ways by different characters so as to give a thematic unity to the whole novel (Kreyling, Understanding 94) and to exemplify the diversity of human perceptions. We hear that the Fairchild family went on a picnic on Sunday two weeks before Laura's arrival in the Delta, and on their way home, Maureen, Denis's intellectually disabled daughter, caught her foot in the railroad trestle. The locomotive approached, but George Fairchild, Shelly and Dabney's uncle and the owner of the plantation, remained on the track to help Maureen out while the others escaped. The train nearly hit them, but stopped just short. The version that Orrin, George's oldest son, tells (DW 23) can be regarded as a straightforward, "matter-of-fact" account of the incident (Kreyling, Understanding 88). Another version told by nine-year-old India (DW.75-78), however, includes digressions and delays and reveals her pleasure in telling the story (Kreyling, Understanding 89-90).

Nevertheless, such a vision of Delta Wedding—as a whole in which the Fairchilds' different perceptions and conflicts are aesthetically reconciled—can be read as Welty's response to the historical situation of the 1940s, when the South was frequently associated with Nazi Germany because of its racial segregation (Brinkmeyer 2-3). I argue that Delta Wedding offers a vision of liberal imagination² not only through the issues of race and class, but also through representations of children and adolescents. By reading the novel alongside Welty's memoir, One Writer's Beginnings (1983), which similarly connects artistic vision with the perceptions of the child, I interpret Laura as representative of aesthetic values. I also focus on Shelley Fairchild, the eldest daughter, who feels ambivalence toward the family and anxiously reflects on the relationships between Dabney and Troy; George and Robbie; and her own parents, Battle and Ellen. As an adolescent, Shelley realizes at the end of the novel her own relative powerlessness as a woman; she starts to enter the adult world, becoming conscious of love, sex, and the division between men and women. Though Shelley retains some of the childlike aesthetic perception associated with Laura, the contrast between her and Laura suggests Welty's perception of the child as a moral agent who synthesizes...