Burning the Breadboard: A New Approach to The Optimist's Daughter

In one of Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter's most vivid scenes, when Laurel McKelva Hand confronts her stepmother Fay during the novel's climax, Laurel uses a wooden breadboard made by her dead husband Philip to stand for all that she values and Fay trashes. Laurel even weaponizes Philip Hand's handmade creation: "Laurel held the board tightly" as she threatens to smack Fay with it. "[F]or a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her" (991). Defending her family against Fay's invasion, holding up a board that Fay has burnt, scarred, and ruined, Laurel boasts that it represents the "whole story, Fay. The whole solid past," to which Fay replies, "The past isn't a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn't you know that?" (991).

Such a vision of the past as a solid, well-made life raft to be remembered and defended against vandals is a frequent theme in Welty's final novel, voiced particularly by Laurel herself but also by her mother, Becky McKelva. This vision is fitted into the novel's structure as carefully as Philip joined the wood pieces to make the breadboard. In a different medium, but with similar loving and meticulous craftsmanship, Welty pinned together snippets of text when she revised and assembled her manuscripts: just as Phil "planed—fitted—glued—clamped—it's made on the true" (OD 989). Remembering Phil, Laurel admits that she has taken their love (and all of their unrealized possibilities together) and by force of memory "sealed [it] away into its perfection," "undisturbed and undisturbing," following her old urge for "self-protection" and thinking of love as "shelter" (997, 997, 980, 980).

This essay takes several angles of approach towards more deeply understanding these central tensions in The Optimist's Daughter. Goaded by Fay, Laurel, the novel's protagonist, struggles between her need to control and defend a past she feels is under attack and her intimation that her family's life and values can't truly be honored by such methods. The narrator also tells us that Laurel seeks to be "pardoned and freed"—but why, and from what (992)? Welty's text explicitly connects the possibility of pardon with Laurel forgiving her parents. How might we understand this tie in The Optimist's Daughter between forgiving others and being pardoned oneself? Key tropes involving burning, binding, and release figure centrally in this discussion. In Welty's short story "The Burning," burning marks an invasion, something to be defended against. Miss Myra and Miss Theo try to stop the looting and torching of their home, yet Welty's one story about the Civil War, published in 1955, departs sharply from standard narratives stressing southern whites' victimization by Yankees (the most famous of which is Scarlett's and Melanie's defense of Tara in Gone With the Wind). The Optimist's Daughter also features a home invasion, and it too has a twist. Laurel reacts with disgust at how Fay has left cigarette burn marks and gouges on Becky McKelva's favorite breadboard (987). Yet, burning other possessions dear to Laurel's mother and father (Judge McKelva) is shown to be a necessary act of release and forgiveness for Welty's protagonist, as she learns that the past—her parents' possessions and best selves—cannot be defended or honored by using the methods she first tries, which involve blockage, denial, and a self-satisfied sense of her own superiority.

References to binding and release in The Optimist's Daughter are another way to map Laurel's story arc. Becky McKelva's impassioned recitation on her deathbed of Robert Southey's poem "The Cataract of Lodore" was her plea to be released from death's trial and imprisonment, and from what she took to be her family's willful misunderstanding of her crisis: "With her voice [Becky] was saying that the more she could call back of 'The Cataract of Lodore,' the better she...