Reading to Learn Lessons

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a popular and influential author, and still is to this date. Her short stories and books include many American classics that will continue being read and respected. Welty’s writings are not only engaging, but also always have a deeper meaning. Through analyzing a few of her most popular short stories, lessons are revealed to me. Two of her short stories deal with the pain and sufferings that people have faced and continue facing, while another two look into the minds of young children, who use their senses to understand and establish their own idea of the world. There is always something to analyze when it comes to Welty’s work, and I believe that is what makes her, and her writing, compelling.

“Their lives were filled with tiredness, with a great lack of necessity to speak, with poverty which may have bound them like a disaster too great for any discussion”. The Whistle describes the lives of two elderly sharecroppers, employed by a demanding man named Mr. Perkins, caught in an endless cycle of hard labor with no reward. Sara and Jason Morton lived a harsh life, and had given up hope that they would ever be able to rise from the poverty that was drowning them. The Mortons were being worn down slowly by their difficult job and extreme living conditions, and they were simply too tired to do anything besides their necessary work. The poverty is compared to a disaster they cannot bring themselves to speak about, because they do not have the strength to talk about it (both mentally and physically). The cold though, was more punishing than the grueling labor. The labor ended by sometime during the day at least: the cold would last twenty-four hours of the day. “She [Sara] was just so tired of the cold! That was all it could do anymore— make her tired”. Jason and Sara lived their wearisome lives in the routine of work, then freeze, freeze, and then more work. However, everybody has a tipping point, a point at which they simply cannot bear whatever is going on any longer. After there is nothing left to protect their plants from the frost. Jason cracked. He first stripped down his own clothes (and Sara follows) to cover the plants. To keep warm, he eventually went so far as to burn all their flammable furniture. “All of a sudden Jason was on his feet again. Of all things, he was bringing the split-bottomed chair over the hearth. He knocked it to pieces. It burned well and brightly. Sara never said a word”. They were THAT desperate. Jason and Sara finally reached the point where the unfairness toward them was no longer bearable. The lesson from this story is that sometimes, the determination for wealth and power (in this case, what Mr. Perkins wants) is not worth it if people under you must work so hard and be treated so horribly that they burn their own furniture to survive. Another lesson that comes from this story is that the unjust treatment of people in the world is comparable to trapping them in a net— a net of poverty or hatred, a net that is inescapable.

“Do they seriously suppose that I’ll be able to keep it up, day in, day out, night in, night out, living in the same room with a terrible old woman— forever?” A Visit of Charity is about a young Campfire girl, Marian, who goes to The Old Ladies’ Home to visit an old lady living there as an assignment. Instead of one lady however, she gets stuck with two. There she observes the behavior of the two women as they bicker and moan about being trapped in the dark room in a lonely home. The old women are uncomfortable to be around for Marian, and she eventually escapes. “She pushed the heavy [entrance] door open into the cold air and ran down the steps… her bare knees flashed in the sunlight”. The heavy door represented the depression and seriousness of the jail-like nursing home and her running away can be compared to an inmate escaping from prison. Her knees in the sunlight represent the contrast of the lighter mood outside the home to the darkness inside it.  Marian was escaping her temporary prison, and yet the old women inside were to stay there until they died. What she did was not the most respectful thing to do, and yet, I can relate to Marian. Being in a nursing home with old women whose states of health are deteriorating would make me feel anxious as well. The dread and the fear of becoming older and ending up in a lonesome place without family members is unsettling. The old women do act intimidatingly and unnervingly, but they are not fully to blame for their mental states. Being confined in any area for too long is unhealthy, and knowing that none of your loved ones will ever visit you is painful in its own way. Welty’s moral position in this story may be that she believes that nursing homes, while not intentionally harmful, may have detrimental effects on the people who are placed in them.

The short stories I have discussed above have differences and also have many similarities. It is true that Mr. Perkins did not care about the well-being of his employees, Jason and Sara in The Whistle, and the staff at the nursing home did indeed attempt to care and provide for the women living there in A Visit of Charity. In both stories, people were neglected or trapped by those who they were closest to. But, in The Whistle, Mr. Perkins, the man who had been Jason and Sara’s boss for so many years, had never bothered to do something about the horrible working conditions the Mortons had to suffer through, and in A Visit of Charity, the women’s families neglected them. In both stories there is a sense of confinement. The Mortons are trapped in their miserable routine of life, while the two old ladies are stuck in the nursing home. Also, Jason and Sara, and the two old women, are very lonely and isolated, with no one but each other. The two stories braid into each other with their moral lesson, which is to never underestimate the extreme effects loneliness and confinement can have on a human being.

First Love tells the tale of Joel, a young orphaned deaf boy who works as a boot cleaner at an inn in Natchez, Mississippi. There he meets Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhassett when they sneak into his room to discuss matters pertaining to an odd chapter in American history. Joel becomes attached to these men because he feels accepted by them. One night when Blennerhassett’s wife comes in and is playing a song on her fiddle, Joel feels something he never had before. “He did not realize that he had heard the sounds of her song, the only thing he had ever heard… for a moment his love went like sound into a myriad life and was divided among all the people in his room”. Joel’s sense of love overcame his lack of hearing, and it resonated with everyone else as well. In a way, love became a sixth (or fifth for him) sense here. Joel, for the first time, experienced a sense of community. This allowed him to discover that he was more than simply a boot cleaner: he was part of something bigger than that. However, love was not the only sense that helped make this moment special for Joel: eyesight naturally dominated, as well as the sense of smell. “When she played she never blinked her eye. Her legs, fantastic in breeches, were separated slightly, and from her bent knees she swayed back and forth as if she were weaving the tunes with her body. The sharp odor of whisky moved with her”. Joel observed the woman carefully, and her motions moved him, and with the liquor dancing alongside, the beauty of the moment is evoked. While Joel’s sense of hearing is nonexistent, his other senses are strengthened. Joel is able to feel the music and through the music realizes that he is not alone— he can be loved.

“Ever since I had begun taking painting lessons, I had made small frames with my finger to look out at everything.” A Memory describes a small girl’s (perhaps Welty herself) mind at work. The child was at an age where she “formed a judgment upon every person and every event”, and yet was fearful of everything at the same time. One day, while at a beach, she witnessed a family that rather annoyed her. “Sprawled close to where I was lying, at any rate, appeared a group of loud, squirming, ill-assorted people who seemed thrown together only by the most confused accident”, the girl observed. As she continues on surveying the eccentric family she becomes more and more frustrated with them. This girl became frightened and upset when order seemed lacking, so she is exasperated that they have no regard for having a controlled lifestyle. She wanted everything in little frames, like the ones she made with her fingers, and the family has disintegrated them, leaving her even more vulnerable than before. This short story reveals that Welty’s idea of a child’s thought process and its independence. Only through difficult moments, like the one portrayed in  A Memory, would a child be able to develop his or her own conceptions of the world.

Just like The Whistle and A Visit of Charity have many similarities and differences, A Memory and First Love do as well. Both Joel and the young girl are just beginning to form their own personas. Just as Joel experiences a sense of love (and many other senses) in First Love to overcome his hearing disability, the little girl in A Memory uses her sense of sight even though she is often afraid of what she is seeing. However, there are some differences between the two young children. In her 1984 memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings  Welty said, “children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world”. The lesson the two short stories share is that to truly form your own opinion, you must first observe— with not just one sense, but with all your senses. In A Memory, the child uses only her sense of sight to observe, and she ends up upset and frightened by the family. If she had gone a little deeper, she would have recognized that the family was a happy one and a loving one, even if they weren’t ideal appearance-wise. Joel in First Love, however, even though he is deaf, uses his other senses to observe. Because of this, he is able to feel for the first time love as a sense. There are some key similarities, as well: Joel and the girl are both silent thinkers and they both are quite independent in their thought processes. Joel had no parents to teach him, and the little girl’s observations were made only by her and not influenced by parents or other people. There is something admirable about how both characters were basically on their own in their stories, and had to think for themselves. I believe that Welty must have admired children who could think for themselves and do things on their own, because that is the only way for one to truly express one’s own creativity: the most fulfilling discoveries are the ones one makes him or herself.

Eudora Welty said once, that “writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.” However, I have realized that reading a story or novel is also a way of remembering lost moments in the reader’s life. While reading and writing about Welty’s short stories, I have come across many memories that I had kept in the back of my mind until now. For example, while reading A Visit to Charity I remembered one day in first grade when I went to sing at a senior citizen home with my school; I remembered seeing how happy the elderly people were while we sang. After reading the A Visit of Charity, their smiling faces mean so much more to me. Fiction is also capable of teaching lessons. Her fiction has taught me lessons while at the same time it has entertained me with its dynamic characters and intriguing plots. The net of poverty is a tangled up and complicated one, the effects of loneliness are damaging, love can be a sense on its own, and children must think for themselves to be able to allow their minds to develop freely; these are the lessons I have received from Welty.