Intersectionality, Whiteness, Womanhood, Transgression, and Transformation in Eudora Welty’s Stories of Southern Girlhood

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Permission to reference, use, and revisit fragments from Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman has been graciously granted by University of Georgia Press.

² And if these themes prove of interest, they are prepared for in greater detail by the book that precedes this essay.

³ Making a spectacle is a term Susan Donaldson first brought from Russo’s The Female Grotesque to Welty criticism in her essay ”Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.” She effectively uses Russo’s vocabulary to discuss Welty’s gothic heroines—“female stories about hysterics whose bodies provide expression in the absence of appropriate language” (569), “bodies that are inscriptions of suffering and rage” (580). Alternatively, I will follow Russo into discussion of cultural regulation of female display and self-exposure.

⁴ For her unpublished fictions and her career variations treating the theme, see Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography.

⁵ Conversely, her status as not-quite-white-enough arguably lingers some when, as the camp girls tire of lifesaving, Little Missie Spights wishes aloud that the disposable orphan would “go ahead and die and get it over with” (370).

⁶ To be clear, it is Laurel who is class-entitled, while her mother Becky’s story has been about class transition.

⁷ With the support of a research grant from the Eudora Welty Review, I am now engaged in work on this relationship. We in Welty studies tend to think of John Robinson (the romantic partner who would disappoint when he understood and clarified his sexual preference), Ross MacDonald (who, although married, developed a tender epistolary relationship with Eudora), and a number of key female friendships, as the most important couplings of Welty’s life. But in truth Eudora and Chestina were the functioning couple who shared their daily lives, kept a household, and divided responsibilities between them. After the death of Christian Welty, the two shared house and house-keeping as the rising artist worked and traveled but always returned home, and they provided for one another in evolving obligations: Chessie’s management of Eudora’s affairs making her writing and travel possible… Eudora providing for them both financially… Eudora’s writing home of her travels in narratives created for the particular pleasure of an audience of one… Chessie taking care of Eudora until Eudora must take care of Chessie. The Optimist’s Daughter, written after the death of Chestina Andrews Welty, responds to the loss of that complex and evolving partnership.