"to touch the dark cheek": Facing the Postbellum South in "Clytie"

Readers of "Clytie" have rarely studied the face in the rain barrel.¹ Scholarly interpretations consistently conclude that the face the title character confronts at the end of Eudora Welty's 1941 short story is merely a reflection of her own countenance.² This reading has allowed for a persuasive scholarly consensus to emerge identifying Clytie Farr as an "ugly, warped, inverted" anti-Narcissus character, whose lack of any familial or community connection and of any positive sense of selfhood leads to the despair that ends her life (Vande Kieft 40).³ At the same time, however, this reading de-emphasizes the significance of the rain barrel in the yard as the place of Clytie's suicide. If the rainwater merely reflects her face, which she has seen countless times before, then it could not have any intrinsic power to force Clytie to her next action; her impetus would have to be incidental to the image in the rainwater. But the story's own treatment of this tragedy suggests otherwise; its action is centered around Clytie's all-consuming search for a particular face that arises from a memory of her childhood and its conclusion clearly fixes the face in the rain barrel as the object of that search. Whose face is it? Against the prima facie reading, I argue that the face in the rain barrel is not Clytie's own, at least not simply, but a revelation to her about her heritage that effaces her will to live.

This possibility has been partially explored by Don James McLaughlin, whose psychoanalytic approach to "Clytie" leads him to conclude that "the face Clytie seeks is, in part, that belonging to her mother, the member of the household missing from the story" (54). Based on Clytie's memories of the face from her childhood, I agree that the face in the rain barrel is most cogently read as Clytie's mother. But what if her mother is not missing? If McLaughlin's analysis is correct and Clytie's submersion into the rain barrel signifies an attempt to find her mother through a "regression to a womb-like space," "a place where her face and her mother's may not be perceived as separate," then it is remarkable that the face she confronts there does not resemble herself or any of her family members (57, 59). The female face, with its "dark cheek," unruly "dark hair," and "mouth old and closed from any speech," cannot be merely Clytie's own, because she has just been described as ghostly pale, and is not particularly old ("Clytie" 110). Nor can it be her sister Octavia's, for her mouth is rarely closed from speech; readers know, moreover, that Octavia's face is "thrust between" Clytie's and the one she seeks (105). Instead, the features of the face in the rain barrel—the silent mouth, the pained brow, the look of long suffering, and the dark hair and cheek—most noticeably resemble Old Lethy, the family's long-standing Black servant, who discovers Clytie's body after her suicide.

Lethy occupies a liminal space that is both part of and separate from the Farr household, for despite her past servitude there, in the story's present, she appears only at the threshold of the manor's back door. Her physically liminal position at this boundary—once the servant's entrance she would have used to go in and out—exemplifies her relational liminality to the Farrs: once an established figure in the family's daily life, she is now shunned and forced to remain separate from them. Lorinda B. Cohoon makes the case that Welty was concerned with "the nuances of the controlled movement and position of the characters" within the spaces of the story and in relation to one another when revising "Clytie" (47). Applying Cohoon's framework of position and movement to Lethy reveals that her "entrapment" is as severe as that of the Farrs, but rather than being trapped within the mansion, she is trapped outside it against her will (Cohoon 52). Her liminal relationship...