“Welty’s White Girlhoods In/As History”

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Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ I borrow the descriptor “girl stories” from Pollack. Other scholars who have directly addressed girlhood in Welty in terms of gender and sexuality include Rebecca Mark (Dragon’s Blood), Kelsey Moore, Ruth Weston, Patricia Yaeger, and Joel B. Peckham, Jr.

² English translation published in 1962.

³ For more detail on this history, see: Bernstein, Levander, Duane, and my manuscript-in-progress, Made Strangely Beautiful: Representations of Southern Childhood in U.S. Literature and Film.

⁴ I am identifying as “middle-class” Welty’s otherwise unmarked white girl protagonists who clearly understand themselves as of a higher social class than white girls who are “common” (i.e. the “furious” girl in “A Memory”), or must work (i.e. Virgie in “June Recital”) or are poor and “orphaned” (i.e. Easter in “Moon Lake”). (Another major marker of class status is the inability to afford Black domestic “help.”) The majority of Welty’s girl protagonists fit this category, lending them a representative or “ordinary” status both within her work and many of the worlds (such as Morgana) that it creates. These “middle-class” characters do not generally bear the marks of modernist “belles gone bad” like Faulkner’s Temple Drake or Caddy Compson, although Welty’s fiction does include girl characters who hew a little closer to this model and might plausibly be labeled “upper class in decline” such as Jinny Love Stark in The Golden Apples or the Fairchild daughters in Delta Wedding.

⁵ For a survey of different articulations of this “moral panic,” see Cahn, especially chapters 1–3.

⁶ I borrow the characterization of “the belle gone bad” from Betina Entzminger’s useful book-length study of the same name. Cahn places the publication and film release of Gone with the Wind as “the midpoint in a period of several decades during which the potential or actual sexual behavior of adolescent girls through this equation [of white women as pure and Black women as sinful] into doubt” (6) Entzminger details a concurrent shift as reflected in fiction by white southern women writers.

⁷ Of course, these traumas are seen, thought, known, and experienced directly by those on the receiving end of subjugation, but this cannot be admitted as such by the traumatizers.

⁸ All citations from Welty’s short stories are from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.

⁹ See my discussion of “woman” as a “blackened” term below.

¹⁰ Devlin discusses the significance for Welty of the 1920s rise of public parks in Jackson, with controversy over loosening standards of sexual and class propriety, but does not mention racial segregation, de facto or de jure. For the history and everyday and symbolic workings of park segregation, Berrey, Free, and Welty’s Jackson contemporary, Richard Wright.

¹¹ The “coaxing” of the girl narrator’s “hope or expectation” of middle-class order appears similar to the adult curations that puzzle Miranda and her sister in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality,” where all women in the family are thin and Aunt Amy is a great beauty – narratives directly contradicted by what the children see. The extent to which Welty’s girl narrator has subscribed to these narratives comes through in the self-described “austerity” of her romance story, with its demands for strict protection and adherence to conventions, that enable her to “identif[y] love at once” (76).

¹² Morrison 17. As Welty herself puts it in “Moon Lake,” “The dreamed-about changed places with the dreamer” (360). Orr argues that in “Moon Lake” the middle-class dreamer betrays herself, disrobing (via Welty) whiteness to the seeing eye (127).

¹³ If not quite out of narrative: Cassie’s father speculates that he sees Miss Eckhart hoeing beans at the County Farm, and bets that “she could still do the work of ten nigger men” (308). This more direct blackening of Miss Eckhart reflects her more completely “settled” denigration; the “still” suggests that she has been doing the symbolic “work of ten nigger men” from the beginning.

¹⁴ This is of course “the face that was in the poem” by W.B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897) (“June Recital” 330). Welty’s engagement with this poem has been treated extensively, including by Yaeger, “’Because a Fire Was in My Head;’” Rebecca Mark, Dragon’s Blood; and most recently, Carol Ann Johnston, “Eudora Welty and the Poetry of W. B. Yeats Before and After The Golden Apples.”

¹⁵ “Moon Lake” is the fourth of seven stories in the collection. Pugh offers an extended analogy of Nina and Easter to Cassie and Virgie in “June Recital,” with Easter as the “still center” of that story and of The Golden Apples’s structurally “pendular movement” (450).

¹⁶ Jean C. Griffith elaborates the argument that the purpose of inviting the orphan girls to Moon Lake summer camp is for “inculcation” of proper white middle-class race and gender roles, but that, crucially, this is also the case for the middle-class girl campers (85, 97). She concludes that “the figure of the ‘orphan’ was used by the genteel to test the promises and dangers of a white racial identity untethered by fixed categories of class, a whiteness, in other words, supposedly more representative of American democracy” (99).

¹⁷ For an extensive exploration of this history and its ramifications for the characters in “Moon Lake,” see Griffith.

¹⁸ I concur with Pollack’s suggestion that “Easter” evokes parallels with Faulkner’s Joe Christmas in Light in August, another abandoned “orphan,” whose name (pointedly unlike Easter’s) indicates the day he was left at the orphanage door. That Nina assumes this is the case for Easter may be a sly reference and correction of course by Welty. His timber mill coworkers insinuate that Christmas is a not-white name and they have “never heard nobody a-tall named it,” (33) and Jinny Love echoes this when she proclaims “Easter’s just not a real name … nobody ever had it. Not around here” (357). By literary and historical reference, Easter’s name is part of her “blackening” for the Morgana girls, and in the story.

¹⁹ Extending Jeffrey Folks’s contention that fear “governs the psychological existence” of Morganians, Christin Taylor argues that “fear is a repetitious concealment of desire” in The Golden Apples, the type of fear that “reveals white racial consciousness and desire as dependent upon the fear of black attack” (123). While she does not address Easter’s fearfulness before her near drowning, Taylor suggests that Easter is resurrected to full whiteness through her new association (via Exum’s “little wilted black fingers”) with fear of Black sexual assault (133–4).

²⁰ Such a reading highlights that Nina’s performance of fearlessness in taking a boat out onto Moon Lake is a parody of Easter’s.

²¹ Griffith makes this argument, although she concurs with Nina’s speculation that Jinny’s rebellion is just a further indication of her narcissism.

²² This is perhaps as much in relief for a potential lynching averted, as joy in Easter’s resurrection. Griffith asserts that Exum’s terrified howling after Easter’s fall signifies “his inadvertent entry into the white-supremacist adult world that awaits him,” where lynching is a constant and very real threat (92). Rebecca Mark (“For Crying Out Loud”) contextualizes these and other African American “extradiegetic expressions” in Welty’s work in an “awakening” project challenging racist violence and segregation.

²³ Major exceptions include Mark (Dragon’s Blood 135–144) and Costello (85–88). Rather than a diminishment, Christin Taylor argues that the threat of Black male attack (embodied in Exum’s touch) “rebirths” Easter into “privileged white feminine status” (134).

²⁴ For examples of such readings, see especially Yaeger (“Because a Fire Was in My Head”), Schrock, Arnold, and Byron.

²⁵ With “racialized,” I mean to encompass justice not only toward African American characters in Welty’s work but also for characters Othered by class or sexuality who are “blackened” precisely to rationalize injustice.

²⁶ See “’My Childhood is Ruined!:’ Harper Lee and Racial Innocence” for the example of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I argue replaced Jean Louise “Scout” Finch’s confrontation with her father’s and her own culpability in Lee’s draft novel, Go Set a Watchman, with a story of white girlhood innocence attained.