Morality and Perspective in Eudora Welty’s Flowers for Marjorie and A Memory
The great thinker Socrates once said, “A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” This statement of Socrates reflected his frustration with an Athenian legal system that the rest of the world saw as revolutionary – one that implemented the concepts of trial by jury and democracy in the court system. Why did Socrates disapprove of the system? It subjected the defendants in a case more to the “whims and capricious natures” of the common people and less so to the real and established laws: it deprived the litigants of due process of law. An excellent example of this was the philosopher’s own trial. Socrates expressed his distrust and disgust of a directly democratic system, and he was condemned not because he did anything truly wrong, but because he did something unpopular. He spoke out against the Athenian system, and was convicted of treason by a panel of biased Athenians when in fact he did nothing wrong. While Socrates was ultimately executed for his disloyal sentiment (and solely his sentiment) to the Athenian system, his lesson remained clear. Direct democracy, especially in the court system, could not, and would not work because of the unstable relative emotional values that the law would always be subject to. In a world where morality can be manipulated by peoples’ perceptions, justice will be lost amidst a sea of confusion. His prescient ideas about morality are certainly still applicable today.
Literature has played a significant role in influencing popular perception of laws, and of morality. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind both helped frame moral and legal issues that were pertinent to their respective time periods. Literature has the capability to create either perfect situations with which to highlight a moral dilemma, or to conjure murky circumstances with which to cloud the reader’s judgment. Eudora Welty was a 20th century American author. Welty mastered the art of framing a story by its narrative voice. This was done to the extent that she can hold a magnet to the moral compass of the reader and maneuver it in one way or another.
Welty poses many moral questions throughout her stories and frames them in clever ways, but what stands out is that in the end, each story seems to return to Socrates’ sentiment that relative emotional values, while they might be able to blur the line between right and wrong temporarily, must ultimately give way to the established right and wrong.
Eudora Welty’s story Flowers for Marjorie most adeptly frames the conflict between absolute morality and relative morality. From the beginning of the story, Welty highlights Howard, a discomfited southerner in Manhattan, She reveals his fragile state of mind through the third-person-limited narrative technique. The reader is introduced to the story while Howard is sitting on a park bench. His thoughts about his wife, Marjorie, suddenly “rise impossibly out of stagnation and deprecation … towering over his head, pounding … leaving nothing behind.” The severity of this description gives some background into the magnitude of the mental toll that Marjorie – who we haven’t even met yet – seems to have on Howard. As Welty introduces more of Howard’s life to us, we can further see the emotional challenge that he faces and ultimately succumbs to. The first time we see Marjorie in person, Howard looks at her “as if she were a mirage.” Marjorie is about to have a child, but Howard is not financially, mentally, or emotionally ready to take on the challenge of raising a human being. Welty writes that “there were times when Howard would feel lost in the one little room,” seemingly overwhelmed by the future.
When Howard sees a pansy that Marjorie has produced, he is filled with despair. The pansy is symbolic of Howard and Marjorie’s future, and especially, to me, of their baby. It fills Marjorie with pride, but frustrates Howard to the point where he feels the need to crush it. We also learn that Howard has recently moved, and has been out of work for a year. He exclaims, “Time isn’t as easy to count up as you think!” With this, Howard now seems not only lost in the present, but also detached from the future and the past: he is simply living in an expansive void that transcends both time and place. Out of this void, sparked by the pansy and Marjorie’s “inquiring into his hunger and weakness,” comes a “flash of lightning”: the narrator frames the story as if the knife that enters Marjorie seems perpetuated by Marjorie herself, with Howard barely conscious the entire time. After he kills his wife, Howard flees into the city, and is bombarded with both guilt and good fortune. He sees signs that compound his guilt – ones that show images of the Virgin Mary and ones that say “God sees you”, and he wins the lottery and the keys to the city in two strokes of luck. Howard wins these prizes that could have saved him and Marjorie, but it is too late.
Welty reinforces this conception of his being in a dream state. After Howard returns back to his apartment, he sees the clock that he had previously thrown out of the window in his confused fury. Time had literally shattered for Howard. “Everything had stopped.” Throughout the entire story, Howard had not been aware of what he was doing, and when he finally does come to his senses, he confesses his guilt immediately. He has been in a dream state, and now, “He [has] had a dream to come true.”
The narration seems to frames this murder of a wife and child as the act of an innocent man who couldn’t help what he was doing. The reader is torn on whether or not they should side with Howard. In the end, though, Howard surrenders to the policeman, and his fate is sealed. Welty shows with this story that even though relative morals can adapt to absorb any situation, absolute morals will always prevail. She uses the framing of the story to bend, but ultimately not break, our malleable moral alignments.
In another of her stories, A Memory, Welty shifts the narrative perspective. This story is in the first person: it seems to be a memoir, and with its personal, revealing, and emotional narrator, A Memory takes a confessional tone. The story starts with “One summer morning when I was a child”, and the narrator then admits to often creating a picture frame with her fingers, “to look out at everything,” much like Welty herself would have done, since both she and her father were avid photographers. The narrator seems to be looking back on her young self in a scrutinizing manner, admitting that “I was at an age when I formed a judgment upon every person and every event which came under my eye.”
The main character in both stories is almost unconscious until the moment that the main event hits them. Howard kills Marjorie from a state of confusion, and the narrator of A Memory notices the bathing family next to her after falling asleep daydreaming: “I did not notice how the bathers got there, so close to me.” She recluses herself from reality, “in the protection of her dream” and opts to occupy herself with her first crush, who she’s never even talked to. The narrator makes out the event of the bathing family arriving to be almost as grievous as Howard’s stabbing of Marjorie. And while the background that the third-person narrator gives on Howard leads us to sympathize with him, the background that the narrator of A Memory gives on herself has the opposite effect. Her confession that “love somehow made me doubly austere in my observations” seems more like an excuse to justify her subsequent descriptions. At the end of the story, the main character’s emotions border on the absurd. She lay there “feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bulwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around their bodies, which had changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm.”
Welty’s ability to subtly control the reader’s moral alignment is on full display in these two pieces. Marjorie, Howard’s wife and victim, and the family that arrive at the beach both act as foils, highlighting the absence of mind of the two main characters, as well as revealing their mental instability. Because these stories are framed by narrators that aren’t fully aware of their situations, the reader, too, is confused about which side they should take. Through her literary manipulation, Eudora Welty shows us how malleable our “relative emotional values” are. Overall, Welty’s message is that we can’t trust our relative emotional values to make our judgments.