One of our book club members expressed her frustration in a recent note: No possible plot line was followed to its conclusion. It’s all about poor, retarded Maureen, who is actually the heir to the Marmion mansion.” Well, it wasn’t about any of those things, and it was about all of them. I found myself thinking, “Ah, now I know what the story is about, Dabney will cancel the wedding.” Then, “Oh, now I get it, it’s about George raping the girl in the woods.” Later, “Oh, here it is. There may be a central event (in this case, a wedding) but there is no real beginning, middle and end to the action. We are accustomed to texts with a definite plot, and you will be hard pressed to find one here, any more than you could find a “plot,” in the life of your family over the course of a week. This “shared act of the imagination,” can be both exhilarating and frustrating. Inherent in the novel is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader.” (The Eye of the Story, 147, italics added.) “The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader. Why didn’t she speak out more about racial injustice, women’s rights, or any of the other ills that beset her generation? Though she wrote that “morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction,” Welty stubbornly refused to “campaign,” as she called it, for any particular cause. Her stories and novels were often criticized because they lacked the social themes of great contemporary literature. She lived in Jackson, Mississippi a shy, single woman who spent her life watching, listening, and writing about her own people. You can be sure that Welty’s easy, descriptive prose is just the tip of an iceberg of meaning, but she expects us to bring as much to the story as she does.Įudora Welty died just last year at the age of 92. patriarchy, abuse, rape, theft, and of course, love in all its glorious varieties. Nobody explains much of anything, but there is a whole lot going on under the search for the perfect bridesmaid dresses: class warfare, racial tension, questions of inheritance, matriarchy vs. We live a week in that house, observe the action through the eyes of various family members, and then we leave. In Delta Wedding, we are dropped right in the middle of a large, Southern family about to celebrate the wedding of their prettiest daughter to the overseer of the family plantation. Eudora Welty takes my breath away, because her books are like life.
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It just keeps coming, in wonderful, terrible rush. Life, on the other hand, is more like an avalanche. A climax of the action occurs, someone gives a speech or has an epiphany and all the confusing, interlocking story lines get resolved. Have you noticed that your life is not like a book? I mean, in a book, there is always a moment when everything gets explained.