Inside Welty’s mind: a vision for fiction

“Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being who will never be confined in any frame.” 

~Eudora Welty

The best stories are created when a character is not in a stereotypical box or is held back by anything and are those where a character lives on in the reader’s mind after the work is complete. However, this is not what Welty is trying to convey. Instead, this quote should be seen as a gradient because Welty says “greater than…”. At the height of her gradient, she talks about a character that will never be confined in a frame. This could make a memorable character, as it is most evident in Phoenix Jackson from “A Worn Path”, and Joel the deaf boot boy in “First Love”. But in some stories we see that Welty creates characters that are oppressed and bound to the end. In fact, these are the characters that stay with us longer because we ache for their liberation. 

The definition of a gradient is the degree of a slope on a graph. That being said, if a story cannot reach the highest level on the gradient, it does not imply that the story is inadequate. In fact, some of Welty’s stories don’t reach the highest point of this gradient. Aside from Welty’s gradient, what sets her apart from other writers is her ability to portray the characters’ different states of mind. There is a repeated pattern of her using dreams, dreamlike states or hallucinogenic states to convey information about a character. She uses these dreamlike states and this gradient to build clever stories.  

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909, and became a great short-story writer, novelist, and photographer. She was the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Mary Chestina Welty and the older sister to Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Both of her parental influences helped her later on to write beautiful and captivating short stories. Her mother influenced her passion to read while her father inspired a love of mechanical things. You could say that she grew up in a close-knit and above all, loving family.  

While Welty attended Central High School in Jackson, she moved to a house on 1119 Pinehurst Street which is now known as the Eudora Welty House and Garden. She graduated at the age of 16 and studied at the Mississippi State College for Women. She finished her studies at the University of Wisconsin and received her bachelor’s degree. After graduating in 1929, she came to Columbia Business School expanding her knowledge on advertising then went to Manhattan to work at an advertising firm. After what she called, “a most marvelous year” the sudden death of her father brought her back to Jackson effort to look after her family. Here, she began to write for the Memphis newspaper Commercial Appeal. Then in 1933, (during the Great Depression) she began to work for the Works Progress Administration. She had to collect stories, conduct interviews, and take photographs of daily life in Mississippi. Three years later she left this job to become a full-time writer.

In 1936, Welty published her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and five years later she published her first book of short stories, A Curtain of Green. This is what sparked her career. In 1942, she published a short novel called The Robber Bridegroom, and in 1946 a full-length novel called Delta Weddings. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter which was published in 1972, won a Pulitzer Prize. Because Welty’s books were such a hit, she wrote an autobiography called One Writer’s Beginnings. The autobiography is a three-part memoir of her lecture at Harvard University. The first section of this book is called “Listening”. The beginning is about her being surrounded by books and constantly being fascinated by them even if she was unable to read them. She even says at one point that she tries to find stories by listening. This in fact made me wonder how Welty’s childhood influenced the stories that she had written. 

Trying to figure out Welty’s inspiration for her books, we can look at One Writer’s Beginning where she writes about what makes a writer a writer. In it, she says, “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.” Welty, from a young age, has been fascinated by books. Her mother grew up reading Charles Dickens, Jane Eyre, Trilby, The Woman in White, Green Mansions, King Solomon’s Mines, and her father kept a set of Stoddard’s Lectures. Even though Welty was unable to read at this age, she says, “In my own storybooks, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials…”. This is interesting because one of Welty’s short stories, “First Love”, is about a boy who is deaf but is mesmerized when people talk. Similarly, Welty is fascinated by the letters but has no clue what they say. Is this why “First Love” seems so realistic because she understands how Joel feels? She does say that in kindergarten, she was told to draw a yellow daffodil but she also wanted to include its smell if she drew how it looked. She wanted to immerse the person looking at the art to have the same feeling as the artists did. 

Not only does One Writer’s Beginning depict how Welty’s childhood provided inspiration for her stories, but we get a glimpse of this wonderful childhood. She tells us that “[My] childhood was taken entirely for granted that there wasn’t any lying in our family… [and later] I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates and went to their parties, children lied to their parents [and vice versa].”. This reveals to us that while other writers have different stripes in the sense that they might come from abused, neglected, or foster homes, Welty grew up in a positive and loving environment. She had this overall idea that families were honest and kind to each other. This might be why Welty creates characters that are poor, neglected, and lied to, because this is reality she only came to know, and perhaps felt that people needed to be aware of it.  

To illustrate, if we look at one of Welty’s short stories, “The Whistle ”, we find an old couple, the Mortons, who sharecrop near Dexter, Mississippi. They pour all of their efforts into raising crops then they sell them to the landowner, Mr. Perkins, who then ships them off. By the early 1870s, a significant form of agriculture was sharecropping in the cotton-planting South. This system functioned with poor families renting a small portion of the land to farm on. At the end of the year, they would give a certain amount of their hard-earned crops to their landowner. In fact, while sharecropping gave families freedom from the gang-labor system which dominated the slavery era, most of the time sharecroppers would owe more crops, tools, or supplies to their landowner. The Mortons are never able to escape this unfortunate cycle of misery. 

Welty starts the story off with, “Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through the bones”. She implies that the Mortons have been through the cold to a point where they are unable to stop caring, similar to how they are unable to stop the night and cold from coming. The Mortons are neck-deep into poverty to the point where they don’t talk to each other, causing their souls to be trapped in “… poverty which may have bound them like a disaster too great for any discussion but left them still separate and un-desirous of sympathy.” This is heartbreaking because a couple should be able to lean on each other and talk difficult situations out to relieve their pain. But Welty is showing that when you know that there is no way out, there can be a breakdown in communication for it seems as if there is no possibility to live life happily. 

The reader is able to see this when Jason and Sara lay down to sleep “between the quilts of a pallet which had been made up close to the fireplace”. While the reader is able to visualize that after a long day’s work, you fall asleep and possibly fall and escape into a vivid dream, however, for the Mortons, it’s not that easy. Welty doesn’t allow her for her character to fully dream, and instead describes it as a ‘vain dream’. She foreshadows this idea by portraying the fire, “still flutter[ing] in the grate… its exhausted light beat up and down the wall… over the dark pallet where the old people lay, like a bird trying to find its way out of the room.” The bird who simply wants to rest, is never able to because it will never escape the “grate” no matter how much it noise it makes. This is additional evidence as to why the Mortons do not talk: they can’t escape. The only noise that is made is the fluttering of the fire and “…the long-spaced, tired breathing of Jason… like a conversation or a tale – a question and a sigh.” Does this imply that it is only when he sleeps that Jason can ask these existential questions? As in his conscious mind cannot even engage this way? Even Sara lays there with her mouth agape but not sleeping, thinking about the summer and spring. 

In this vain dreamlike state, she imagines color, the warmth, the people, the energy: “… dusty little Dexter became a theater for almost legendary festivity, a place of pleasure.” She was not in the room where the fire was the only source of warmth and the only sound was the inhalation and exhalation of Mr. Morton. Instead, she was in a place where “The music box was playing in the café… With shouts of triumph the men were getting drunk… In the shade the children celebrated in tomato fights.” It’s clever of Welty to include the tomato fights because Sara was able to imagine kids throwing tomatoes instead of growing them to survive which reveals a carelessness and entitlement around her. This brings up the question, are these kids perhaps Mr. Perkins’? It’s like a rich man letting his kids splurge in front of poor neighbors. 

This being said, when one is not liberated, can one be selfless? In some ways, the Mortons’ behavior seems entirely selfless. For example, when a freeze threatens, they take the only clothes they own (the ones they’re wearing) and put them on the crops to protect them. Keep in mind, they will never get to enjoy these crops. Indeed, they cannot even communicate with each other. Therefore, they are unable to be selfless, as they have no self to give. And when Sara hears the whistle, the story ends. She must understand that it’s impossible for her to walk out of the frame. She’s trapped. While we ache for the Mortons to be free, it is Welty’s social obligation to create characters that are “confined in a frame” because this was the reality of the 1930s Mississippi. So, looking at the situation the Mortons are in, there is this implication that the Mortons are stuck in this frame because they will never truly be free in this situation, which itself suggests that sharecropping is unjust and bad for society. Although Sara wishes she is able to dream, she is the first one to wake up when the whistle initially blows: “[Mr. Perkins’ whistle]… sounded in the clear night, blast after blast… Jason Morton was not woken up by the great whistle… [but] Sara felt herself waking.” She lets the situation control her soul, implying that because she is confined, she and Jason are doomed; like the flames that looked like a “bird trying to find its way out of a room”, they will not succeed. 

Another short story of Welty’s is “A Visit of Charity”. This story is about a Campfire Girl, Marian who visits an Old Ladies Home. Marian, during the whole visit, is extremely timid around the old ladies. But why is that? The way Welty describes the old ladies, having claws and being seen as robbers almost makes the ladies seem violent. This behavior of Marian’s then seems appropriate. But if we look at it from afar, we see that the old ladies want to leave the home but they are stuck in a single frame, a single room, making them go insane. “Then something was snatched from Marian’s hand… ‘Flowers!’ screamed the old woman. She stood holding the pot in an undecided way.” The old ladies lose their identities and are treated badly, almost like animals: “… an old lady cleared her throat like a sheep bleating.”

“With her [(Marian’s)] free hand, she pushed her hair behind her ears, as she did when it was time to study science,” as if Marian was going to study these animals or has the mindset of “Let’s get to work”. All the old ladies wish for is a small part of the outside world, because they are constantly being studied, or observed coldly by the nursing staff. So when they see Marian, a young girl, it is a visit of charity, and just because “Marian wished she had the little pot for a moment – she had forgotten to look at the plant herself before giving it away” does not mean that her heart is in the wrong place. She simply wants to know “What did it look like?” 

Later, Marian, trying to make conversation while feeling trapped, asks one of the old ladies, Addie, about her age. However, Addie starts to cry because of this question. It is hard for the reader to imagine that these two old ladies can be free. They are confined in a frame because their quality of life is forgotten due to being stuck in a Ladies Home. While Marian gave a small token to the ladies, she left because she was scared to death. As a reward, she eats the apple she’s left outside. If we see the apple as a symbol of youthfulness, it is as if Marian wants to keep her youth so she will never be confined in any frame, and in fact, the bus whooshes away with her in it, eating the apple. She had no chance to look at the plant she gave the ladies, and that’s ok – it was a gift. But she has nothing else to give.  

In the stories I have read by Welty, I have noticed that she applies dreams, dream-like and hallucinogenic states in her work and uses this in a variety of ways. In her breakthrough story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1941), R.J. Bowman is a salesman (of unknown age) who has been at this job for over a decade. After losing more time in the hospital because he contracted the flu, he suddenly regrets the decisions he has made throughout his life. However, he doesn’t understand that he is dying and his perceptions, while intensely personal, also simply portray the breakdown of the body and mind, approaching death. In other words, as he slowly starts to figure out that constant traveling prevents him from living his life, the more he realizes what he’s missed all along. This causes him to brush away any symptoms of death, denying what his body is trying to tell him. 

Bowman has traveled for a shoe company through Mississippi for a long 14 years not allowing him to find a woman and start a family. It is when he stays at a young couple’s home that he realizes this. The reader implies that Welty puts Bowman into a situation, traveling constantly, to the point where it confines him. The first Welty hints at this idea is when she says that whenever “Bowman stuck his head out of the dusty car to stare up the road, it seemed to reach a long arm down and push against the top of his head, right through his hat…” In “The Whistle”, Sara lets the whistle control her and her life because she is at its beckoning call and similarly, Bowman lets his situation of traveling control him. All he wants to see is how much longer he has to drive, but when doing so, something forces him back into the car. He is never able to escape this job. All he does is drive. 

One of the landscapes Welty includes is a “… cloud [floating] there to one side like the bolster on his grandmother’s bed. It went over a cabin on the edge of a hill, where two bare chinaberry trees clutched at the sky…”. Perhaps distracted by this image, Bowman’s car goes over the cliff: “his wheels stirring their weightless side to make a… whistle as the car passed through their bed… [and] he saw that he was on the edge of a ravine that fell away [and the car tipped over]”. It is interesting how Welty creates this scene similar to a description of a bed with a bolster because previous to this, Bowman wishes to lie down in his grandmother’s bed. Hence, Bowman was meant to fall over the cliff. He wanted to go to sleep. 

However, does Bowman manage to survive after the fall? Yes. Bowman does manage to escape. Welty describes this as: “He got out [of the car] quietly, as though some mischief had been done to him and he had his dignity to remember”. Later “… he saw that his car had fallen into a tangle of immense grapevines… it [rocked] it like a grotesque child… [and he was] concerned somehow that he was not still inside it…” The only vehicle that allows Bowman to do his job is his car. He is a traveling salesman. But the car is being “held” like it is a “grotesque child”. What does that make Bowman? You have to submit your whole life when you become a salesman and this might be why Bowman wonders why he was not in the car if he wanted to sleep? If the car was to go down, he must too, and this is why Welty describes this act as “mischievous”. 

The word “mischievous” has a more playful and less harmful connotation. For example, when he finds the house of the young couple, “he took a bag in each hand and with almost childlike willingness went toward it. But his breathing came with difficulty, and he had to stop to rest”. Even though he had to catch his breath, for a split moment he was not thinking of his fatigue, the rest of the trip he had to travel, or the hospital, but instead reverted to the childlike willingness to be cared for.

Throughout the story, Welty makes it clear that Bowman has no one and the only person he remembers is his grandmother, but he deeply wishes to have a woman in his life. This is implied because Welty never mentions the name of a woman Bowman likes. It is ambiguous to the reader because whenever he is around a woman, he is unable to hear his heart beat uncontrollably, which for him is a shock. Is this because he feels alive and connected to humanity or simply because it is a woman? For example, when Bowman saw the woman at the house for the first time “his heart began to behave strangely… It began to pound profoundly, then waited irresponsibly, hitting in some sort of inward mockery first at his ribs, then at his eyes…” and he “automatically judged… her age at fifty.” But we learn later in the story that this woman is young and expecting. It is as if Welty is implying this idea that when his heart started to beat at irregular patterns, this hallucinogenic state began. The mockery was that instead of seeing the young woman, he saw a fifty-year-old woman because he was longing for someone. When he found out “he set his cup back on the table in unbelieving protest”. It is as if he is protesting the fact that whenever he likes a woman, his eyes continue to deceive him. “A pain pressed in his eyes.” At this point, Bowman puts the puzzle pieces together: how she was able to find Sonny in the darkness and how they flow together like nature, how proud she was of Sonny towing the car out of the ravine, making his own whisky and how gets wood to have a steady fire. Bowman describes it as “A marriage, a fruitful marriage. That simple thing. Anyone could have had that… The only secret was the ancient communication between two people.” This literally kills him. 

In exploring Welty’s stories and scoring them against her quote, one finds that her some of her stories were written to educate people about the awful ways that the Great Depression diminished Americans. She realized this as a young, wealthy, and loved child who became an adult who could deliver to the world her vision for fiction.