Animosity towards Women in Eudora Welty's Literary Canon

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.

Specters on Staircases in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a haunted house seeking to climb the stairs only to be thwarted by a seemingly supernatural African American woman. These scenes signify the women’s contradictory roles as powerless property and powerful specters. Treated as property, the women do not just haunt the houses, they haunt as houses; they are conflated with the legal property of white families, even after the end of slavery. The women’s status as housekeepers, however, allows them a “keeping,” or possession of property, that provides them the power as specters to block the outsiders, who want to transgress the boundary of time to travel back into the past. Legal possession established by property rights confronts spectral possession signified by haunting.

Specters on Staircases

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.

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

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.