Masculinity and Family Bonding in Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding.

The paper investigates Eudora Welty’s concept of animosity towards women in her fiction. Her novels and short stories portray rape, sexual exhibitionism, sexual threats and brutality as inhuman experiences that sarcastically result in a vicious conversion of indignity and humiliation to the female sufferer instead of the male perpetrators. Welty suggests that this context creates a sense of intolerance which acts as a destroyer of women’s identity and sense of self. In this paper, the researchers attempt to reveal the mechanisms that subvert women’s sense of identity in a world usually controlled by men. Welty’s vision, in this sense, is that the social consciousness of the woman does not only evolve from the personal consciousness, but also intricately interacts with it. Welty’s works that are central to this study include Delta Wedding, The Robber Bridegroom, and the short fiction, including The Whole World Knows and Sir Rabbit.

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“As if a rabbit had run over her grave”: Gothic Girlhood in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding

Eudora Welty Review ◽

10.1353/ewr.2018.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 113-140

Author(s):

Kelsey E. Moore

Keyword(s):

Delta Wedding ◽

As If

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White Folks: Literature’s Uncanny, Unhomely Folklore of Whiteness

Implied Nowhere ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496822956.003.0013 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 169-190

Author(s):

Shelley Ingram

Keyword(s):

Critical Race Theory ◽

Hierarchical System ◽

Critical Race ◽

Race Theory ◽

American Novels ◽

Vernacular Language ◽

White Writers ◽

Delta Wedding ◽

The Creation

This chapter looks at moments of constructed uncanniness and unhomeliness in Russell Banks’s Affliction and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, two American novels in which whiteness is inextricably linked to the creation, through acceptance or rejection, of folk groups. Using critical race theory, this chapter argues that the tendency to exempt the literature of white writers from dominant conversations about folklore and literature helps reaffirm a dangerous hierarchical system of power in which whiteness is marked as absence. It argues through a close read of fiction that whiteness is not absent—instead, it is an identity which is guarded and negotiated through negotiations of folk groups. Banks and Welty both construct a whiteness that has stability and variation, that reacts to the presence of a folk Other, and that becomes part of a vernacular language of identity for those inside, outside, and on the borders of their groups.

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Self-Deception in Development

Moral Acrobatics ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190057657.003.0022 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 116-121

Author(s):

Philippe Rochat

Keyword(s):

Social Life ◽

Social Function ◽

Concept Development ◽

Self Concept ◽

Important Process ◽

Social Affiliation ◽

Self In Relation ◽

Social Decisions ◽

The Social ◽

Family Bonding

The social life of children in their development is made up of novel attachments, intimacy, and self-defining social affiliation, beyond the first family bonding or attachment to primary caretaker(s). But it is also a life made of conflicts, prejudices, and fears, particularly the fear of being rejected and not recognized by others. In this context, self-assertion, or the need to affirm and make room for self in relation to others, plays a central role in shaping and driving self-concept development. It is also the source, from an early age, of budding self-deception. Self-conceptualizing is primarily the process by which we situate ourselves in relation to others: how close or how estranged we are in relation to them and what impact and power we have on others. In this respect, children show us that conceiving ourselves might serve a primary social function: the function of asserting who we are in relation to others, an important process by which we capture identifiable characteristics that shape our behaviors, intentions, and social decisions.

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