Seminar Roundtable: Eudora Welty and Mrs. Brown

Like most aspects of life in 2020, my graduate class on Eudora Welty's fiction ended up being quite different from the one I had initially planned. Given the tight parameters of a summer term, I had imagined that discussing Welty's work in the context of modernism would give the class a helpful focus. Because of Covid, though, that modernist lens came with a contemporary filter. In the past, my graduate students have gravitated towards modernism's experimentation with subject matter and form. In Welty's fiction, they have found rich material in her attention to women's perspectives, her rewriting of traditional narrative structures, and her wonderful play with language. This time, however, our conversations kept returning to the modernist interest in isolation and the larger problem of one human trying to find connection with another. Certainly, the fact that we were not in the same room fueled this interest. A Zoom call may mimic a live classroom discussion, but the boxes framing each person's face on a screen highlighted that we were in separate places. Consequently, stories such as "Why I Live at the P. O." and "Clytie" took on a particularly acute tone. While Sister's choice of living alone at the post office may be laughable, it also reveals the inability of the characters to communicate through spoken or written language. Sister's loneliness felt too familiar to be only comic. Clytie's story, on the other hand, became a touchstone we returned to time and again to think about how the need for connection can be reflected in a simple human touch. In his essay, Andrew Hicks explores what happens when characters neglect the value of the tactile in establishing connections.

Our attention to human connection was amplified by Virginia Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," one of the essays I had assigned to provide that modernist context. In defending the novelists of her time against the accusation that "they are unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing," Woolf famously claims, "on or about December 1910, human character changed" (21, 22). To illustrate her point, Woolf tells the story of entering a train car only to discover that she was interrupting a conversation between two people. As she processes the awkwardness, she becomes more and more drawn to the elderly lady she decides to call Mrs. Brown. The key to Woolf's interest is that Mrs. Brown is not generally the stuff of stories. She is ordinary. Woolf, though, imagines the challenges that Mrs. Brown might be facing and decides that in all her ordinariness, Mrs. Brown should be seen as "an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety" (33). Given this context, our class began to identify the Mrs. Brown characters in Welty's stories, that is, the people who might have gone unnoticed in the "real" world but become special with the spotlight provided by the story world. Phoenix Jackson clearly fits Woolf's description of a person of "unlimited capacity," as does the motherless and overlooked Laura McRaven. Allison Scheidegger's analysis of Ran MacLain reveals how ordinary characters can become central, changing our conception of what constitutes the subject of a narrative.

In asserting that modern novelists were interested in plumbing the extraordinary in the ordinary, Woolf's project values the role of a perceiver, the one who might upon entering a train car find meaning by observing a stranger. Our class then began to identify the Woolf characters, those who were watching the Mrs. Browns. Cassie Morrison and Nina Carmichael in The Golden Apples both play this role in their keen observations of Virgie and Easter. The students persistently asked, however, whether perceiving was the same as connecting, or if modern characters were, in the end, left isolated despite their interest in each other. This query finds its way into Ryan Sinni's analysis of whether perceiving equally benefits the perceiver and the subject and into Hannah Wells's analysis of the unspoken roots of the dysfunction and alienation of the Farr family.

Although questions of isolation, perception, connection, and...