“Whiter Than Your Dreams”: The Pink-Eyed Ladies of Welty’s Fiction

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Sarah Gilbreath Ford who provided insightful feedback on this work from its beginning stages as a conference paper.

Notes

¹ The quoted phrase in the title is from “Shower of Gold.” All quotes from Welty’s short fiction are from the Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Harcourt Brace, 1980).

² Though focused on albinism in African bodies in literature, Baker’s work examines broad (mis)representations and symbolic orders imposed on those with the condition.

³ Beyond her attendance at state fairs and traveling acts, Welty was also a self-defined “constant moviegoer all [her] life” and a voracious reader interested in popular culture (Prenshaw, Conversations 169). She would have been keenly aware of the varying representations of (dis)ability in early film culture that functioned in much the same way as the American sideshow. These films exploited individuals with disabilities for comedic and melodramatic purposes, even at times crafting them into monstrosities deserving euthanasia, which led to harmful stereotypes that impacted how they were perceived and treated. Though I do not yet know if she screened the Tod Browning 1932 film Freaks, she would most certainly have been aware of the controversy surrounding its production and reception which was well-documented in media outlets. The film’s actors with extraordinary bodies were segregated on set, and its anti-eugenics message was annihilated by critics and audiences alike. Welty was, thus, surrounded by ableist and ever-shifting cultural narratives concerning bodies of difference and was astutely aware of the potency of their construction. For more on the history of disability and film see Martin F. Norden.

⁴ See Charles D. Martin’s thorough discussion of the use of albinism in the staging practices of sideshow circuits in “The Double Bind of the Albino” in The White African American Body.

⁵ Feminist disability theory examines the complexity of ability/disability systems where extraordinary bodies are just one facet of identity. It holds that “subjects are multiply interpellated” by varying “representational systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class” in ways that “mutually construct, inflect, and contradict one another” (Garland-Thomson “Integrating” 15). As a theoretical lens, it helps us see how such interpellation inflicts ascribed identities onto non-normative bodies but also how those individuals resist inscription. It effectively “makes the body, bodily variety, and normalization central to analyses of all forms of oppression” (Hall 6; emphasis mine). Further, this lens draws our attention to how socially constructed definitions of disability change over time and become, as Kim Nielsen points out, “effective weapon[s] in contests over power and ideology” wherein “African Americans, immigrants, gays and lesbians, poor people, and women … [are often] defined categorically as defective citizens incapable of full civic participation” (xii).

⁶ As the field of disability studies delineates, it is the sociopolitical response to differently abled bodies that produce the disability itself, a site of identity politics; see Davis (xvi). When viewed through this lens, “albino” is a “rhetorical thing,” as Vida Robertson notes, “a political term” whose purpose is “to deconstruct the humanity and therefore, the profundity of [the] individual” (51).

⁷ Though focused on Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction, Jordan Stouck’s work addresses the ways in which tropes of racial passing are a performance about power that “reaffirm[s] … racist distinctions” in southern society (280).

⁸ King is a form of the settler-colonial figure. He wanders the woods – dressed all in white – to conquer the feminine and people the land with his own progeny that blur the lines between legitimacy and illegitimacy. Welty writes that King has children “growing up in the County Orphans’ … and children known and unknown, scattered-like” throughout the land (264). As such, he participates in a form of physical and discursive erasure – that of nonwhite bodies – that evokes the historical violation of the plantation masters’ sexual abuse of enslaved women and their disregard of their own children as mere property. This toxicity of white colonialism remains ever present in the Jim Crow South of Welty’s text and time. For more on King and the white mythos as the real “lurking beast … . part of an old order, … somehow out of time,” see Christin Marie Taylor (107).

⁹ I would further suggest that King’s calling Snowdie to the woods to conceive their twins – the space of his varying sexual violations throughout the collection – is an attempt to enforce normalcy onto her body.

¹⁰ Mattie has just engaged in a form of play rape with the twin sons of King, whom she believed was there to sexually conquer her. Here, she constructs Snowdie’s physical difference as a means to excuse her own responsibility for yielding to the generational violence perpetuated by his legacy.

¹¹ Welty edited out instances of the n word when working on the 1980 edition of The Collected Stories. Where they remain, as in “Shower of Gold,” may signify the monstrosity of whiteness.

¹² I would argue that Snowdie’s albinism, marking her visually as “pure” whiteness, is the site of King’s desire for her: where her condition represents the potential for the (re)production of an impenetrable hierarchy of race and power that is white and male. Placing her next to Old Plez intertwines these ever-recurring colonial fantasies. Thus, Welty’s text aligns her socially perceived disability as one that manifests that which actually disables society, especially in the South: racism and misogyny.

¹³ Here, Katie speaks directly to Snowdie’s incomprehensibility for the community: “And like people said” (266).

¹⁴ In a separate essay currently under development, I trace this dual and dueling thread of Snowdie as a transgressive, actualized body throughout the entirety of The Golden Apples. In that, I contend that Snowdie is far from the “gentle wife” that critics, such as Louise Westling and others, frame her as (99).

¹⁵ Watson pulls from José Esteban Muñoz who defines disidentification as a process by which “the encoded messages of a cultural text” are reassembled to specifically expose the “message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and … to account for, include, and empower” other marginalized forms of identification (31).

¹⁶ I am not the first to suggest that Snowdie is one of Welty’s glimmering girls. Yaeger, for example, refers to her as an “avatar” of this figure (“Because a Fire” 960). Where I enhance this point is in my claim that it is precisely her albinism – something codified by society as a disability – which locates her as a multivalent site that, in permanently situating her outside of the normate, radiates the potency of Welty’s retooled glimmering girl: the potential to generate new discursive possibilities. Feminist disability theory, thus, allows us to recognize more clearly how Welty may be mobilizing albinism as a critique of a litany of exclusionary systems such as gender, race, class, sexuality, etc., in Morgana and the American South.

¹⁷ In Renaissance and early modern hermeneutics, this term denoted the mysterious key that would unlock a realm of secrets.

¹⁸ Given that albinism equally affects individuals of all races and ethnicities, something commercialized in sideshows of Welty’s time, Mag may indeed represent an intersectional identity rendered impenetrably white through this condition.

¹⁹ Here, much like Ruth Porritt contends regarding Virginia Wolf’s use of repetitive “I am I” constructs, Welty’s shift in this scene (from you to it to I) associated with the repeating of the negated “to be” construct upends the ideological sites these multiple selves were “assumed to both present and represent:” hierarchies of hegemonic masculinity, the location or sites of its circulation, and the object of its subjugation (332). In short, it is the socially defined interminable body with albinism that Welty imbues with the power to reconfigure language itself in a way that invalidates, or rather disables, repositories of identity construction tied to colonialism and white supremacy. Mag disavows presumed shared meanings – the regional we – in favor of a self-identification suggestive of other and multiple valid discourses of identity.

²⁰ “At the Landing” is the culminating story of The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), a collection that insightfully critiques a “national historical consciousness rooted in colonization, empire, and destructive individualism, whose toxic consequences still resonated in Welty’s South;” see Harrison “Altering the Course” (46).

²¹ Several critics have discussed Jenny’s sexual violation, including but not limited to Ann Romines, Carol Manning, Harriet Pollack, Peter Schmidt, Colleen Warren, and Barbara Carson. I add to the conversations they have established by focusing on direct and evoked comparisons with the albinic Mag in this scene – a differently abled body that does not succumb to toxic masculinity.

²² In describing her move into nature to find the missing Floyd, Jenny juxtaposes a state of “know[ing] the most” with his presence versus her own perceived state of knowing “very little” when alone (256).

²³ Of note, while the text tells us that Jenny says Floyd’s name in his presence and to the fishermen, Mag is the only name that Jenny actually speaks in dialogue with the individual in question. This may be another Yeatsian reversal in Welty’s story. His glimmering girl calls the narrator by name, an act that aligns the muse with his own imagination. Mag has her name called, a speech act that legitimizes the subject – the other – that society has deemed illegitimate.

²⁴ Welty patterns Mag’s three statements, represented in parenthesis here, as back-to-back, uninterrupted assertions, just like the old woman’s three questions to the fishermen.

²⁵ For more on the social process of marking, or rather stigmatization, see Erving Goffman.