2019 Welty Fellowship Research Report: Eudora Welty and the Technological South

Introduction

In the summer of 2019, I was fortunate to receive the Eudora Welty Fellowship to study Eudora Welty as a southern theorist of technology. My goal was to understand how Welty used, interacted with, and wrote about forms of technology that shaped both her daily life and her understanding of the South as a region. My initial hypothesis was that Welty's method of writing about technology was different from some of her southern contemporaries (and certainly her contemporaries outside the South), and that she uniquely treated technology as a medium through which to view and depict the South. While other writers of the time period seem to adopt technology as a symbol of progress or urbanization, Welty seems interested in how technology integrates itself into existing models of human relationships in the rural South. My research so far has confirmed this hypothesis: although Welty does have confidence in national progress, she does not seem to think that the adoption of modern technology—automobiles, electric lighting, telephones, etc.—immediately results in the adoption of modern values. Thus, technology in her fiction can be used to reinforce the social boundaries of the South in such varied ways as improving familial closeness or upholding white supremacy. Primarily, Welty uses technology as a vantage point from which she and her reader can regard the fictional South and observe the power relations within it.

During my time at the archives, I pulled 51 boxes from 15 series with the goal of gaining a broad understanding of Welty's interactions with technology in her photography, correspondence, drafts of published stories, and unpublished stories. In this report, I will give a summary of my findings in each area, details of some particularly interesting findings, and my ideas for further research. Because my intention was to broaden my understanding, these findings are sometimes varied and related to other subjects such as race, ability, and gender, but they all reveal how technology augments both the body and the land in Welty's work, and all will find their way into my dissertation project. I will also reflect on the social media component of my fellowship, which I found to be an unexpectedly productive part of the process. I would like to reiterate my gratitude to the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for this extremely enlightening research opportunity.

Photographs

Welty photographed the technological South at a fascinating moment in the history of technology—born in 1909, she would have witnessed rapid industrialization of the South, rapid increase in the use of automobiles, and the integration of electricity into everyday life. Although many of these technologies were invented or implemented at the latter end of the nineteenth century, the South progressed more slowly than the Northeast (the West, which developed differently than both regions, had other circumstances affecting its progress). The South's slow progress could be attributed mainly to a resistance to northern or federal intervention, but by the time Welty had begun her writing career, the South had made some concessions to the federal government and began participating in roadbuilding projects and the Rural Electrification Administration (Schulman 9–11; Ingram 2). Welty's photographs taken at this juncture reveal the past and the future existing simultaneously in the changing South—dirt roads existing among paved roads, a car tire in the yard of a home that does not appear to have electricity, Confederate flags festooned along the outside of a statehouse newly wired for electric lights, and children playing in the husks of longdefunct automobiles.¹ For my future research, I hope to use Welty's depictions of daily life among emergent technologies to contradict some of the existing narratives on industrialization of the South. I believe that Welty shows ways that technology can be used to make the South's regional uniqueness more obvious instead of homogenizing the region with the rest of the nation.

Welty's photography of the 1930s immediately reoriented me in both time and space to her thoughts about technology and region. My expectations that technology would be...