by Eudora Welty
(bio and other
books)
Welty’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a
story of a southern girl who goes back to her home
in New Orleans due to the death of her father and
proves completely unable to cope with his passing.
She quarrels vehemently with her step-mother, until
she begins to realize that she will not find peace
until she deals with her own past and what it means
for her father to be gone.
One of Welty’s favorite subjects to write about is
the art of communication. More specifically, the
multiple levels of communication and the culture of
communication in the South. She enjoys positioning
characters in such a way that they are forced to
deal with the Southern culture of understanding what
is not said. And, the consequences of stating
exactly what one truly thinks.
Simply put, Welty
studies the ambiguity of the South—what people say
and what they don't say. What people perceive and
what they don't perceive. It is important when
reading Welty that you cannot always trust her
narrators. They too can be ambiguous, and say things
they don’t really mean. In this way, the reader
experiences much of the same communication problems
and errors that the characters themselves
experience. While she writes about human perception
in a number of her stories, Welty, indeed, does it
best in
The Optimist's Daughter.
Quote from
The Optimist's Daughter:
"The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to
be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do
to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger
the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the
strangest fantasy of them all.'
"For a long time Judge McKelva was seen as a
reassuring figure by the many who knew and liked
him. They looked at him, with his wife Becky and
daughter Laurel, and they felt good: that was how
well-bred people in Mount Salus, Mississippi,
ought to be. When, yen years after his wife's
death, the Judge marries silly young Fay everyone is
disconcerted: but a lonely old man can be allowed at
least one folly. For Laurel, however, her father's
remarriage is a difficult an puzzling betrayal.
Years later, circumstance brings Laurel back from
Chicago: first to New Orleans, then to Mount Salus
and the old house of her childhood. It is only here,
alone with her memories, that Laurel can finally
come to an understanding of the past, herself, and
her parents."
Buy
The Optimist's Daughter
Read our bio of
Eudora Welty
and peruse her other books.
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Read our bio of
Eudora
Welty and peruse her other books.
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