Eudora Welty and Stealth Feminism

To claim that Eudora Welty’s relationship with feminism is complicated would be an understatement; her work might be more at home in a contemporary age that understands gender fluidity than in her own time. When Alice Walker asked her in 1973 about the “Women’s Movement,” Welty’s answer was “equal pay for equal work, and so on, fine,” but she claimed not to have much use for “some of the effervescences” (Conversations 135, 136). Instead, Welty insisted that as an artist, she already had “freedom” (136). Added to her dismissal of the political energy of her time is her essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (1965) in which she argues that “great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion” (806). Against the kind of writing that argues, persuades, and crusades, she writes that “there is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer” (806). Toss into this reticence her literary reputation as a southern writer at a time when “regionalism” could mean provincialism, along with her famously warm and genteel personality, and an image of Eudora Welty can emerge as tame and safe – the very opposite of feminism.

And yet, her fiction is anything but tame or safe. Although she often depicts “ordinary” people, her storyworld also contains modern wanderers, hitchhikers, several murderers, at least one serial killer, carnival acts, and a pre-Hamilton-makeover Aaron Burr. She writes arguably the weirdest rape scenes in American literature, which can leave the reader wondering why the characters do not react appropriately, or why the tone is light or even comic, or why something not overtly violent, like a watermelon fight or a person performing CPR, takes on the brutal language of rape. She writes a Circe-figure bored with Odysseus, a Zeus-figure as ridiculously snoring after a conquest, and a Perseus-figure who cannot save the damsel. Her women own their own property, laugh at supposedly powerful men, choose to remain unmarried, engage in sex without apology, obsess over other women, and kill with sewing scissors. Her fiction is, as Lois M. Welch calls it, nothing short of “wild” (16). Instead of being too tame or safe to fit nicely into the twentieth-century parameters drawn by feminism, perhaps her work was simply too wild to be contained by them.

Theories of feminism have, however, helped critics both to open up significant avenues into Welty’s work and to redefine Welty as a writer apart from that regionalist label. We want to acknowledge the impact and legacy of these critics before we turn to how the critics in this volume attempt anew to capture and discuss what is truly radical in Welty’s constructions. In 1979, Peggy W. Prenshaw argues that although Welty’s work acknowledged “man’s place” in society, her texts build a “woman’s world” through depictions of matriarchies and an attention to the lives of women (46). In 1984, Patricia S. Yaeger, in an influential PMLA article, uses Welty’s The Golden Apples as a model for how women writers could appropriate “myths, genres, ideas, and images that are ‘populated’ with patriarchal meaning” while they are “continually endowing a male mythos with their own intentions and meanings” (995). Ruth D. Weston in 1987 and Franziska Gygax in 1990 both focus on Welty’s form as a source of feminist meaning, with Weston arguing that Welty “is always writing about writing” and Gygax asserting that Welty uses “female narrative strategies” (76, 10). Rebecca Mark in 1994 writes a book-length study of feminist intertextuality, focusing on how Welty in The Golden Apples rewrites the larger myths and stories of Western culture. In 1997, Susan V. Donaldson tackles Welty’s connection to Faulkner, demonstrating their differences, while Suzan Harrison posits Welty’s connection to Virginia Woolf. In more recent studies, Barbara Ladd examines Welty’s use of history, Carol Ann Johnston reads the female imaginary, and Harriet Pollack examines perspective and race. Even this brief and woefully partial listing of critical projects reveals how feminist lenses have helped to unpack Welty’s work.

We would assert, however, (and imagine these critics would agree) that something ineffable remains in the weird wildness of Welty’s writing. When Welty asserts that her fiction will not crusade, she explains that “a plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument” (807). Her fiction certainly unsettles the reader’s sense of gender along with perspective, character, plot, tone, and genre – all the basic building blocks of narrative. While a certain amount of mystery is inherent in great art, many moments in Welty’s texts remain unusually opaque. A contemporary conception of gender as fluid and therefore not defined in the ways that Welty seemed to find confining in the twentieth century may unlock some of this mystery, and critics in this volume, with a twentieth-first-century sense of feminism, are able to posit new readings of her work. These critics also have the benefit of new tools and lenses at their disposal, including theories from disability studies, whiteness studies, and narrative theory as well as new revelations about Welty’s biography produced from archival sleuthing.

Harriet Pollack employs the lens of intersectionality to read how Welty’s privileged middle-class White girls are paired with women made Other by their class and/or race. As the White girls watch the lower-class characters make spectacles of themselves, the White girls benefit from their status but are paradoxically confined by its protective barriers. Sarah Gilbreath Ford explores how Welty rescripts the female coming-of-age narrative. She uses ecocritical theory to argue that submersion in water can allow a young female character an experience with an active, vibrant natural world, which then unsettles the generic narrative script for the options young women have for their adult lives. Ebony O. Lumumba reads quilts as acts of Black women’s liberation. She strikes a new path for reading race in Welty’s work by asserting that Black women speak through Welty’s work, not due to nor despite Welty’s depictions but because of their own craft. Katherine Henninger draws from childhood studies theory to investigate the historical context of Welty’s depictions of White girlhood. She posits White girlhood as a filter technology through which to see the interrogation of White innocence. Rebecca L. Harrison uses the lens of disability studies to read Welty’s use of albinism in crafting two female characters. She finds that Welty employs bodies as texts as a way into investigating larger frameworks of identity and social otherness, including race, class, and gender. Rebecca Mark explores how Eudora Welty transports her characters by car, train, bus, horse, and foot, out of the lanes of strict symbolic binaries – sun=male, moon=female – along the road of “zigzag” wandering. These narratives create a transexual symbology that is profoundly liberating for each of her characters. Carol Ann Johnston relies on archival work to argue for a more explicitly romantic relationship between Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, a relationship that Johnston reads into both of their works. She consequently offers radical new readings of their biographies and their fiction.

If Welty’s relationship with feminism writ large is complicated, then, we would argue, it is the generative version of complexity, the kind that leaves the reader with more questions but the desire to keep reading, the kind that might need critical approaches to catch up to the radical nature of the project, and the kind that might embrace the wildness as a statement in its own right. In declining involvement in a political movement with “effervescences,” Welty does not dismiss the need for change, only the level at which change needs to happen. Her feminism is not the kind that pickets in the streets; it is a stealth feminism that explores and explodes the foundations under conceptual structures. As an artist with freedom, she chooses to delve into the realm of the unknown where gender could be less of a political fight and more of a space for fluid conversation. The following pages reveal new paths for that conversation, and together these critics construct an image of Welty’s writing that perfectly matches our own time period.

Disclosure statement

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