Vision and Violence: Ran's Monologue in "The Whole World Knows"

In Eudora Welty's short story "The Whole World Knows," the narrator Ran MacLain exults in his "good eyes" (451); however, his story is characterized by a wavering of vision which issues in a startling mixture of bold experimentation and uncertainty. Early in the story, Ran recounts how he sat on the porch of his mother-in-law's house, looking from his estranged wife Jinny to his current companion Maideen. As Ran explains to his imagined audience (his absent father King MacLain), this moment of vision reveals that Ran has chosen Maideen because she is a copy of the unfaithful Jinny. Ran remarks, "[I] almost listened for some compliment—a compliment from somewhere—Father!—for my good eyes, my vision. It took me, after all, to bring it out. There was nothing but time between them" (451). Pursuing this vision of the symbolic relationship between the two women in his life, Ran later takes Maideen to Vicksburg, where he threatens her with his father's pistol—the same pistol he imagined shooting Jinny with earlier—and finally rapes her. In this final episode of the story, Ran acts in accordance with a narrative vision of revenge only to realize that he may have been misreading the signs all along. Ran's interpretations of experience continually break down, and his vision and violent actions alike dissolve into illusion.

Scholarship on "The Whole World Knows" has tended to explain Ran's erratic imaginings and actions as a ritual negation of his identity or as a failure of characterization. Rebecca Mark and Carey Wall have both explained Ran's behavior as involuntary participation in the town's sacrificial rituals of renewal. According to Mark, the violence of Ran's personal story interacts productively with the communal need for regeneration because his story exposes patriarchal obsessions with virginity and returns males to their proper places in the community (147–49). Reading "The Whole World Knows" as a modern "ritual drama" of maiden sacrifice, Wall suggests that Ran's personal violence rarely, if ever, emerges from his imagination "because Ran does not really want to kill." Instead, for Wall, Ran is a ritual figure being forced "to play outside his personal type" (28–30). In such a reading, Ran serves as a mere conduit of the voices and wills of his community. As Susan Donaldson laments, Ran's is "the plight … of anyone reduced to the status of Other to serve the ends of communal discourse" (495). Ran's story is the province of the entire town; all of Morgana expects that Ran must "ruin" Maideen as a way of wreaking revenge on Jinny before they can be reconciled. If Ran adopts this narrative in which renewal is impossible without sacrifice, his voice is necessarily limited, and his understanding filtered through this patriarchal lens. Gail Mortimer similarly identifies a limiting of Ran's voice and understanding, but focuses on his inability to process his experience. For Mortimer, Ran's problem is his absorption in the sensory details of his experience: because he "cannot forget" those details in order to "generalize among events," he cannot "learn from the past in order to secure a different future" (37). Alfred Appel goes further than Mortimer to dismiss Ran as an unrealistic character, citing Ran's delicate attention to detail as a regrettable inconsistency in his "'masculine' voice" (225).

Reading Ran as primarily a ritual figure, however, oversimplifies his agency as the story's narrator, while reading him as a hopelessly fragmented character overlooks the significance of his ongoing attempts to craft a cohesive narrative for himself. While the existing readings address some aspects of Ran's character and situation, none satisfactorily account for Ran's obsession with vision and the complex pairing of assertive violence and uncertainty that results from his unreliable vision. I argue that reading Ran's narrative as an experimental dramatic monologue illuminates his character in the context of the precarious modernist search for narrative understanding. Whereas dramatic monologues often seek to explain or justify violence, Ran's monologue reveals how his ongoing search for clear vision prompts...