Category: Eudora Welty

“A Visit of Charity” was written by Eudora Alice Welty and was published in the year of 1941. This story is very intriguing and will catch the attention of those who read it. Through youthful diction and vivid imagery, the author describes the adventure of a Campfire girl who travels to a nursing home with the intent of her own personal interests. From the moment Marian entered the compound, she depicts that she did not want to be there. She only volunteered based on her incentive rather than genuine charity and intention of hoping to feel proud and accomplished. Welty emphasizes Marian’s intent by connecting her actions with the gratification she would earn, explaining that one gains extra points every time they brought a potted plant while visiting the elderly. Many people in this world partake in generous acts such as donating large sums of money clothes, sacrificing their time to help not because they are driven by benevolence but because they want a distinct image in the society. There actions don’t align with their intentions at heart. Ultimately, Welty narrates Marian’s story to highlight the differences between charity driven acts by self-interest versus sincerity, which is an essential lesson that the younger generations ought to learn.

Throughout the short story, Welty utilizes rhetorical devices such as imagery to illustrate Marian’s thoughts and emotions while in the nursing home. One of the most interesting imagery was “being caught in a robbers cave” (Welty 3). As Marian commits to visiting the old ladies, she feels trapped in a tiny room. The symbolism of a cave—small, dark, and confining—conveys Marian’s lack of autonomy as her yearning only grounds her for achievement. Welty’s second imagery applies that of the nursing home itself, which was “whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice” (Welty 2). This captures the gloominess and lethargy of the place, therefore justifying the distress Marian experienced. Since the nursing home emulated a lifeless and a pathetic atmosphere, the negative ambiance most likely drove her even farther away. To appeal to the readers’ sense of smell, Welty adds another imagery to represent the unpleasantness of the scenery, “there was a smell in the hall like the interior of a clock” (Welty 2). Welty employs rather weird imagery to describe the unsettling scent of the corridor, further expressing the dreadfulness young visitors such as Marian herself feel as they attempt to execute charitable acts for the elderly.

Conclusion

To a certain extent, the distressing imagery could excuse Marian’s halfhearted charity; however, the theme of the story that Welty highlights is the duality of charitable acts and the intent behind it—whether it be driven by sincerity or self-interest. From striving to get good grades to earn a pizza party to participate in after school activities for external rewards, society encourages young people to be extrinsically motivated to engage in benevolent acts. Reading about children like Marian who represents people who are primarily driven by introversion, readers find it amusing that one’s true character can be revealed in a simple situation. For instance, there were many occasions in the story where Marian’s negative commentary and attitude towards the nursing home and the elderly was very immature—further dictating her self-seeking motivation to earn her badge. Marian was impolite and did not show compassion towards the elderly.

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family. From her father she inherited a “love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate,” from her mother a passion for reading and for language. With her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, she shared bonds of devotion, camaraderie, and humor. Nourished by such a background, Welty became perhaps the most distinguished graduate of the Jackson Public School system. She attended Davis Elementary School when Miss Lorena Duling was principal and graduated from Jackson’s Central High School in 1925. Her collegiate years were spent first at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus and then at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her bachelor’s degree. From Wisconsin, Welty went on to graduate study at the Columbia University School of Business.

After her college years, Welty worked at WJDX radio station, wrote society columns for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and served as a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works Progress Administration. During these years, she took many photographs, and in 1936 and 1937 they were exhibited in New York; but they were not published as she had wished. Her first publication was instead a short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” In 1936, the editor of Manuscript literary magazine called it “one of the best stories we have ever read.”

Her first book was published five years later. In A Curtain of Green, Welty included seventeen stories that move from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, and that display a wry wit, the keen observation of detail, and a sure rendering of dialect. Here she at times translated into fiction memories of people and places she had earlier photographed, and the volume’s three stories focusing upon African American characters exemplify the empathy that was present in her photos. Toni Morrison has observed that Eudora Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing — it’s the way they should be written about.”

In 1942, Welty followed with a very different book, a novella partaking of folklore, fairy tale, and Mississippi’s legendary history. A year after this novella appeared, Welty published a third book of fiction, stories that were collected as The Wide Net (1943) and that were fewer in number and more darkly lyrical than those in her first volume. Then came Delta Wedding, her first novel. Set in the Mississippi Delta of 1923, though published in 1946, the book was originally criticized as a nostalgic portrait of the plantation South, but critical opinion has since counteracted such views, seeing in the novel, to use Albert Devlin’s words, the “probing for a humane order.”

In Welty’s next book, the unity of the novel is missing but not wholly. The Golden Apples (1949) includes seven interlocking stories that trace life in the fictional Morgana, Mississippi, from the turn of the century until the late 1940s. When Welty began writing the stories, however, she had no idea that they would be connected. Midway through the composition process, she finally realized that she was writing about a common cast of characters, that the characters of one story seemed to be younger or older versions of the characters in other stories, and she decided to create a book that was neither novel nor story collection. It is perhaps the greatest triumph of her distinguished career, an unmatched example of the story cycle.

After the publication of this book, Welty traveled to Europe and drew upon her European experiences in two stories she would eventually group with “Circe,” a story narrated by the witch-goddess, and with four stories set in the American South. Though the interlocking nature of The Golden Apples is gone, a new theme emerges. Most of these stories investigate the ways individuals can live and create meaning for themselves without being rooted in time and place. Even before she pulled The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) together, she published The Ponder Heart (1954), an extended dramatic monologue delivered by Edna Earle, a character who truly is a character.

Welty had produced seven distinctive books in fourteen years, but that rate of production came to a startling halt. Personal tragedies forced her to put writing on the back burner for more than a decade. Then in 1970 she graced the publishing world with Losing Battles, a long novel narrated largely through the conversation of the aunts, uncles, and cousins attending a rambunctious 1930s family reunion. Two years later came a taut, spare novel set in the late 1960s and describing the experience of loss and grief which had so recently been her own. Welty would uncharacteristically incorporate a good bit of biographical detail in The Optimist’s Daughter, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Welty’s exploration of such different subjects and techniques involved, of course, more than art for art’s sake. In her essay, “Words into Fiction,” she describes fiction as “a personal act of vision.” She does not suggest that the artist’s vision conveys a truth which we must all accept. Instead, she suggests, the artist, must look squarely at the mysteries of human experiences without trying to resolve them. Eudora Welty’s ability to reveal rather than explain mystery is what first drew Richard Ford to her work. It drew Reynolds Price as well. Price, though, focuses not on the term mystery, but on the complexity of her vision. He writes that Eudora is not “the mild, sonorous, ‘affirmative’ kind of artist whom America loves to clasp to its bosom,” but is instead a writer with “a granite core in every tale: as complete and unassailable an image of human relations as any in our art, tragic of necessity but also comic.”

Welty’s achievements include more than her fiction. Her early photographs eventually appeared in book form: Her photograph book One Time, One Place was published in 1971, and more photographs have subsequently been published in books titled Photographs (1989), Country Churchyards (2000), and Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009). Her essays and book reviews were collected in the 1978 volume titled The Eye of the Story, and her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings, published in 1984 by Harvard University Press, was a nationwide best seller. For a time during her last three decades, Welty periodically worked on fiction, but completed nothing to her own high standards, standards that made her a literary celebrity. She appeared on televised interviews, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor, served as the subject of a BBC documentary, and was chosen as the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series. After a short illness and as the result of cardio-pulmonary failure, Eudora Welty died on 23 July 2001, in Jackson, Mississippi, her lifelong home, where she is buried.

Like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and a few others, Eudora Welty endures in national memory as the perpetual senior citizen, someone tenured for decades as a silver-haired elder of American letters. Her abiding maturity made her seem, perhaps long before her time, perfectly suited to the role of our favorite maiden aunt.

But when I visited Welty at her Jackson, Mississippi, home on a bright, hot July day in 1994, I got a glimpse of the girl she used to be. She was eighty-five by then, stooped by arthritis, and feeling the full weight of her years. As she slowly made her way into her living room, navigating the floor as if walking a tightrope, I could see that her clear, blue eyes retained the vigorous curiosity that had defined her career. She still wanted to know what would happen next.

And while she sat with me for one of her last interviews, Welty seemed acutely aware that she had been young once—and slightly surprised, like so many people touched by advancing age, that the seasons had worked their will upon her so quickly.

Physical decline had kept Welty from the prized camellias planted out back, and they were now forced to fend for themselves. “The garden is gone. It makes me ill to look at it,” she told me in her signature Southern drawl. “But I’m not complaining. It’s just the state of things.”

Welty’s comment about the sad state of her yard was just a passing remark, and yet it appeared to point toward the center of her artistic vision, which seemed keenly alert to the way that time pressed, like a front of weather, on every living thing.

What Welty once wrote of E. B. White’s work could just as easily describe her literary ideal: “The transitory more and more becomes one with the beautiful.” Her three avocations—gardening, current events, and photography—were, like her writing, deeply informed by a desire to secure fragile moments as objects of art.

Tellingly, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty’s celebrated 1984 memoir, begins with a passage about timepieces: In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents had a smaller striking clock that answered it. . . . This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

One Writer’s Beginnings recounts Welty’s early years as the daughter of a prominent Jackson insurance executive and a mother so devoted to reading that she once risked her life to save her set of Dickens novels from a house fire.

Welty’s childhood seemed ideal for an aspiring writer, but she initially struggled to make her mark. After a college career that took her to Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Columbia University, Welty returned to Jackson in 1931 and found slim job prospects. She worked in radio and newspapering before signing on as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, which required her to travel the back roads of rural Mississippi, taking pictures and writing press releases. Her trips connected her with the country folk who would soon shape her short stories and novels, and also allowed her to cultivate a deep passion for photography.

Welty took photography seriously, and even if she had never published a word of prose, her pictures alone would probably have secured her a legacy as a gifted documentarian of the Great Depression. Her photographs have been collected in several beautiful books, including One Time, Once Place; Eudora Welty: Photographs; and Eudora Welty as Photographer. In hiring Welty, “the Works Progress Administration was making a gift of the utmost importance to American letters,” her friend and fellow writer William Maxwell once observed. “It obliged her to go where she would not otherwise have gone and see people and places she might not ever have seen. A writer’s material derives nearly always from experience. Because of this job she came to know the state of Mississippi by heart and could never come to the end of what she might want to write about.”

Because of the years in which she was most active behind the camera, Welty invites obvious comparison with Walker Evans, whose Depression-era photographs largely defined the period for subsequent generations. Walker’s pictures often seem sharply rhetorical, as when he captures poverty-stricken families in formal portrait poses to offer a seemingly ironic comment on the distance between the top and bottom rungs of the economic ladder. But Welty, by contrast, seems uninterested in using her subjects as symbols. She appears to see the people in her pictures as objects of affection, not abstract political points.

“Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.” (adl.org) It is a problem that has long been prominent in our history and is something that sadly many Americans still experience today. Racism is depicted in many of the readings we have discussed as a class recently. Some examples of these works that will soon be discussed in this essay are; “Dry September” by William Faulkner, and “Where is The Voice Coming From.”. In both of these works, it is easy to realize that racism takes its form in the stories.

In “Dry September,” a young African American man named Will Mayes is accused of attacking an unmarried white woman by the name of Minnie Cooper. The beginning of the story takes place in a barber shop where a group of men is discussing the situation. During the discussion, the men are arguing that Minnie could be lying about the situation and one even says that they know Will Mayes and that he would never do such a thing. At one point early on in the story, McLendon uses a racial slur that was used a lot in the past. He went on to say to Hawkshaw “’ that you’d take a nigger’s word before a white woman’s? Why, you damn nigger-loving…” (Faulkner 1) While the whole accusation is a rumor, in part 3, some men believe that because it is known by the public, Mayes needs to serve as an example to African Americans in the community that if you were to attack a white woman you would be dealt with. As the men continue talking some decide there should be something done about the situation. A group of men began to eventually take it upon themselves to “punish” Mayes by hunting him down like predators hunting prey and then picking him up and forcing him into the vehicle they were riding in. As the men are forcing Mayes into the vehicle he says, ‘What you all going to do with me, Mr. John? I ain’t done nothing. White folks, captains, I ain’t done nothing: I swear ‘fore God.’ (Faulkner 5), all while the other men in the car are screaming, “kill the black son” as if he were some sort of bug that needed to be squished. Even though Will Mayes tried to explain to the men that he did not do what he was being accused of, they refused to listen to him. The time this story took place is not known, but it is clear this story took place in a time when racism was more than common, and because of the color of Will Mayes’s skin he was discriminated against and was wrongfully accused and murdered because of a false word from a white woman. This was a problem that was prevalent in earlier times in the United States. Wrong accusations and sudden interactions are what led to the deaths of a lot of African American people in the past. Another thing that was also common is that whenever incidents like this happened no one legally took action against African Americans even if it did or did not actually happen. White men would grab up these men or women that were accused and they had no chance to tell their stories before they were killed illegally by racist white men who thought they were above the law. Clearly from this story, it is easily shown that there is a high amount of racism in that took place within the story.

In “Where is The Voice Coming From,” the same can be said. At the beginning of the story the narrator and his wife are watching an African American man speak on the television and the narrator says to his wife, “You can reach and turn it off. You don’t have to set and look at a black nigger face no longer than you want to, or listen to what you don’t want to hear.” (Welty 1). It is at that moment when the narrator believes he formed the idea to murder the African American speaker on television. He begins to think to himself about how close the man may live to him and how easy it would be to kill the man. Why would a man want to kill another for no reason? Is it because the speaker on the television is black and wants equal time? The narrator’s hate for this man is clearly because of the man’s skin color and because of a deep-rooted hatred for African Americans, planted there most likely by a family member or friend. Because one is simply not born with hate towards someone or something, it is taught. After thinking about how he could go about his plan he acted on it and waited for him to show up. Once he saw the man, he pulled up his rifle and killed him. When the narrator returned to his wife at home, they began to discuss what had just occurred for her husband, and she eventually says to the narrator, “Well, hear another good joke on you… Didn’t you hear the news? The N. double A. C. P. is fixing to send somebody to Thermopylae. Why couldn’t you wait? You might have got yourself, somebody, better. Listen hear ‘em say so.” (Welty 3) They talk about killing African Americans so easily that it is unbelievable. To hate someone enough just because of their skin color and to go out and kill them and to talk about killing someone else for the same reason is pure racism.

In closing, both of these readings shine a light on racism and how it presented itself during earlier times in history. While the stories were completely different, they were also very similar. Both works focused on the murder of innocent African Americans by a white southerner. They both shined a light on how white southerners were willing to act on their hatred towards the African American community and for the most part, get away with it. In both readings, the men who committed the murders did not get punished for it, because no one knew. This goes to show how racism was and still is today, a terrible problem.

Works Cited

1. Faulkner, William. “Dry September.”
2. Welty, Eudora. “Where Is The Voice Coming From?”