A Dark Rose

Love in Eudora Welty's Stories and Novels

Sally Wolff

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780807158296
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the heartbroken protagonist she depicted in her first published story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman, " to the reflective widow she described in her last novel, The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Welty wrote realistically about the shadows and radiance of love. In a meticulous exploration of this theme, Sally Wolff combines new readings of Welty's fiction with contextual information and background drawn from a nineteen-year friendship with Welty. A common image in much of Welty's fiction, the rose has traditionally symbolized love in literature. Wolff argues that the dark rose-from the height of its brilliance to the end of its life-serves as an apt metaphor for the dichotomies Welty presents, equally suggestive of beauty and sadness, as well as the comic, tragic, and mysterious qualities of love. While some of Welty's characters seem autobiographical-a daughter remembering her parents' marriage or a broodingly hopeful member of a large family wedding-at times Welty analyzes from a distance the dynamics of successful and troubled loving relationships. Although Welty experienced love several times during her life, she never married, and Wolff argues that this vantage point allowed Welty to write from an objective perspective in her fiction about the varied dimensions of love. A Dark Rose explores several texts to examine Welty's nuanced and intricate portrayals of love. Though love in Welty's fiction fails, wears thin, and even faces death-it remains a vital force in her characters' lives.

CHAPTER 1

“A Fruitful Marriage. That Simple Thing”

Early Stories of Rural Love

Eudora Welty frequently represents the comic and tragic in images that are dichotomous, such as light and dark. Love may be pervasive thematically in her stories, but she offers greatly multifaceted depictions and coequivalencies of the dark and light sides. These topics are consistent over the long years of her writing life. She considers the “dark side,” in which her characters and fictional situations range from disappointment to the grim and even ghastly, but then alternately, she depicts those whose love relationships defy obstacle and overturn expectation as they achieve joy, trust, and satisfaction. A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net, two volumes of stories published within four years of each other, for example, illustrate this pattern. In these volumes Welty offers portraits of successful relationships and marital situations, but she positions them alongside their dark twin of loss. Welty’s major fiction supports this essential dichotomy over time. The early stories and late novels alike may shelter a love story at the center, but a dark fate inevitably hovers perilously close at hand.

Welty’s short stories often present characters in search of love of one kind or another. The traveling salesmen, Bowman and Harris; Leota, the garrulous but chronically bored and unhappy hairdresser; the artist in “A Memory”; and others reach in vain toward their dream of ideal love—or even a sustaining relationship. Others anticipate sexual awakening and find but then lose it. Some secure permanent attachments, while others miss the opportunity to love or even experience it vicariously.

Stories in these volumes share other compelling characteristics. “A Piece of News,” “The Wide Net,” and “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” among others, center on couples who live out in the country—sometimes deep in the woods—in cabins and dogtrot or shotgun houses. In these relationships Welty explores both the joys and hardships of country life. Her works are often contextually accurate, and autobiographical representations of the author emerge in them as well. She develops subjects and characters from the people she knew or observed, but often, too, depictions of herself emerge in her fiction.

Welty focuses on rural life, and she found good people there during her travels around her home state. During the Depression Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and this experience influenced both the themes and locales of her early works. For the WPA, she drove by car around the state of Mississippi, county by county, to evaluate programs and write reports. She observed and learned from the people she met during these times: “I learned a great deal about Mississippi when I worked for the W.P.A. and traveled around the State. For the first time I saw that Mississippi was a rural world. [The country is] easier to write about than a town. It’s a simpler society to describe. It was a different world if you went outside the city. I got to know it pretty well with my journalistic jobs and work with the W.P.A. . . . What I discovered were the people in their rural setting. Their lives didn’t change with the times. They were poor. Their conditions didn’t change and were really terrible. It was all so much worse than I could have imagined. . . . A friend of mine also had to go into rural areas to buy land for the roads, and oh! the tales he told me of poverty he saw” (Wolff, “Domestic Thread” 20).

Welty saw some rays of light in the attitudes of the people she met, even within the context of deep poverty: “These people were the opposite of what they easily might be—pinched and bitter.” When she attended Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW), she came in contact with students from “poor homes.” They, too, she thought, found some happiness even amid what some might call adverse conditions. She saw them as “good country people”: “I discovered still more by visiting all the county seats. It was an education that I had again when I attended M.S.C.W. It was the first state college for women in the country. At the time, everybody could come to school there, and it was cheap to go there. Some students were ill-educated. The teachers were the best educated people around. The school had a cross-section of girls from the rest of the state and many from poor homes. But their families were happy. Their mothers sent them baskets of fried chicken on Sunday from home. They had happy lives despite terrible conditions. They were good country people.¹ It was a poor, poor time in history, when I look back” (Wolff, “Domestic Thread” 20–21).

Rural landscapes contrast with cityscapes and illustrate Welty’s observations about the goodness in the country people around her. She found the human spirit thriving even in rural and impoverished conditions. Her stories of the rural South illustrate that families can survive and even prosper, emotionally and spiritually, even in what may seem to others stark and difficult circumstances. Unlike the more sophisticated and sometimes rootless counterparts, accustomed to spiritually barren conditions in city life, the country life, in a Welty story, sometimes can be sustaining even given harsh conditions.

Biographer Suzanne Marrs notes that the converse is also true, however—that Welty’s photographs and stories “document” and “characterize” the consistent and often devastating poverty that she encountered when she worked for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s: “Welty’s photographs of this period document the tattered clothing, shabby housing, hard work, and unbroken spirits that characterize rural Mississippi in the thirties. Her stories, like ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman,’ ‘The Hitch-Hikers,’ ‘Clytie,’ ‘A Worn Path,’ ‘A Piece of News,’ and ‘The Whistle’ tell us of the primitive roads, ramshackle hotels, dogtrot houses, oil lamps, open hearths for cooking and heating, and desperation that were often typical of rural and small-town Mississippi life” (One Writer’s Imagination 12).

Welty’s stories about rural love often follow the traditional narrative form: couples encounter a crisis, work to resolve it, then succeed or fail as the denouement and the resolution occur. By means of a test or an absence, forced, accidental, or intentional—a lovers’ quarrel, for example—the crises elicit emotional reevaluation and increased potential for communication, intimacy, and understanding. In some cases, however, the darker portraits emerge, and poverty takes its inevitable and “terrible” toll.

Violence and Love in “A Piece of News”

One of Welty’s rural couples, Ruby and Clyde Fisher of “A Piece of News,” live in what may seem like strained circumstances: a small cabin within walking distance of Clyde’s whiskey still deep in the Mississippi woods. Their lives, however, fall into the category of those who make a life for themselves without much money or worldly goods, and their relationship, in the main, prospers—out in the country.

Welty stated in an interview that this story emerged in her mind as a result of her reading county newspapers: “[These] stories are all part of the same rural setting. You have to set the stage for a story. You have to have something to identify it. I decided to take all the county newspapers, and I read them all. That’s what got me interested in what went on in the State of Mississippi. Just the naked news.” The newspapers provided Welty with a good understanding of the local people around her and their settings as well as, in this case, the central idea and some particular language for her story “A Piece of News,” in which a character “became shot”: “The newspapers back then would have letters from little towns in the paper, by the family of the reporter or the correspondent. What Ruby Fisher reads in the newspaper was the kind of thing that would be in these newspapers: ‘So and So became shot’ and ‘The Sunday visitors in town were. . . .’ That gave me a picture of what life was like, much as I think it did for Faulkner. I did know people like that. . . . Jackson was not typical of Mississippi at the time because of its size” (Wolff, “Domestic Thread” 21).²

The county newspapers gave Welty a “picture of what life was like,” and she found a rich source for her rural stories. Typically, the inspiration for Welty’s stories came from a phrase she heard or a particular image she saw, such as the eight bubble-haired ladies she noticed who were seated together at lunch. In “A Piece of News” the county newspaper articles enlivened the muse and provide a narrative tale. Her recollection from the county newspaper—“So and So became shot”—offers the author a premise for her story in which the psychological action focuses on Ruby Fisher, a country wife, who in her partial literacy struggles to understand why her name appears in the newspaper as someone shot by her husband. Although she does not realize that this article refers to another Ruby in another town and in another state—Tennessee—she apprehends the news as applicable to her and imaginatively embraces its implications for her life.

Although the tone of this work seems predominantly light, a shadow of violence hovers ominously, as might be expected in a story in which the hero is a large man with a whiskey still, the heroine an unfaithful wife, and the main symbol a shotgun. A marital eruption does indeed occur, but in this case resolution and reconciliation eventuate for Ruby and Clyde Fisher. After the provocation initiated by the news story, they find a return to marital accord, peace, coexistence, and love, even though they are situated in rural circumstances. Ruby and Clyde are close to the natural world and as such reflect the values of Romanticism. The couple is of meager means but not, as they might easily have been, violent, or “pinched and bitter” (Wolff, “Domestic Thread” 20).

In “A Piece of News” Welty describes Ruby and Clyde Fisher, the people in one isolated house in the country, and she depicts their marital relationship. Ruby is a plain woman who seems physically idle too much of the time, and her bootlegger husband, Clyde, is frequently away at his whiskey still in the woods. Carol Hollenbaugh, Michael Kreyling, and others have noted Ruby’s vital, sensual nature. Peter Schmidt sees “Ruby’s imagination as associated with the ‘natural’ powers of ‘rain and fire’” (34). The action rises when Ruby, lazing about by the fire, almost illiterate, haltingly reads in the newspaper about a woman with her name, Ruby Fisher, who was shot in the leg by her husband. Unaware that this news article describes another Ruby in another, nearby state, she panics, imagining that Clyde may have shot her. Her emotions rise, in contrast to those of Clyde, who usually seems unemotional.

Previously, Ruby has had time during the lazy days to fantasize sexually about her husband and to infuse him, at least imaginatively, with a passion that this couple, no longer young, seems to have lost: “the fire might have been a mirror in the cabin, into which she could look deeper and deeper as she pulled her fingers through her hair, trying to see herself and Clyde coming up behind her” (24). Suzanne Marrs points out that “the newspapers story reaches her imagination, as Cleanth Brooks has noted, just as Welty’s story reaches ours” (One Writer’s Imagination 31). Now home alone with her desire and news of the violent shooting, Ruby dramatically imagines sex and death as she considers that having been shot by Clyde, she will appear to him “beautiful, desirable, and dead” (25).³ Her death, she envisions, would elicit in Clyde passion, longing, and regret: he would be “wild, shouting, and all distracted, to think he could never touch her one more time” (26). In her mind’s eye his emotional outpouring at her death exemplifies his passionate love for his departed wife.

Although Clyde is now bald, Ruby remembers him with his “wild black hair hanging to his shoulders,” a look, and a time in life, she longs to recover. Marrs sees Clyde as an “unromantic man” who is “scarcely the man Ruby sees in her imagination” (One Writer’s Imagination 33), and while that may be true now, through memory Ruby recovers their sexual past. Although she seems slow-witted and almost illiterate, Ruby’s recollections here flare as brightly as the cabin fire. She recalls Clyde “as he once looked” in former days (25), before his baldness began and with it a possible loss of virility or at least a loss of passion in their relationship. The older Clyde is sluggish. Mostly, he is interested in when his dinner will be ready. Ruby wants the old Clyde back. That feeling is not unusual in a marriage, especially as partners age. Her clear memory of his “wild black hair” implies her longing for the vitality that once must have kindled their lives—with a brightness that seems diminished.

Ruby’s apparent afternoons of adultery with the coffee salesman are a somewhat unexpected component of the story: “When Clyde would make her blue, she would go out onto the road, some car would slow down, and if it had a Tennessee license, the lucky kind, the chances were that she would spend the afternoon in the shed of the empty gin” (24). Perhaps even more surprising is that her infidelity does not seem particularly problematic for her marriage. When Clyde returns home from a day at the still, initially he seems aware of her afternoon’s activity. A Mississippi man, he does notice that the coffee can Ruby obtains is wrapped in a Tennessee newspaper. Clyde wants to know how Ruby came by this out-of-state newspaper. His response is not angry, abusive, or wild, however, when he realizes that a coffee salesman must have given her a tin of coffee wrapped in newspaper—apparently in return for favors. Ruby also seems to know instinctively that Clyde might slap her playfully and call her “Hussy” but that he would never shoot her (28). She and Clyde talk about her illicit afternoon, but then the moment dissipates without incident. Daniel Curley sees their silence as “a force” in itself: “Miss Welty uses silence merely as a device for eliminating one major source of error in communication, that is, speech. With speech out of the way, she lays open the approaches to communication through a simple vocabulary of gesture” (210). Clyde has not, in a tirade or fit of jealousy, shot Ruby, and she is not “dead at his hand.”

Clyde’s casual attitude about his wife’s infidelity may reflect his personality, his values, or perhaps even his own diminished vitality or caring. The couple lives in relative isolation in the country. In what may be a rural custom, she defers to him at dinner: she serves his meal, waits while he eats it, and goes to her dinner later. Clyde spends whole days at his whiskey still—shotgun by his side—and he simply may not pay attention to his wife’s activities because he is busy watching for unwanted visitors. He may regard her mental state as too simple to impose upon her a standard of marital fidelity. He may be older and tired.

Although some see Clyde as violent, the textual evidence does not support that claim. In the kitchen with her husband at home, Ruby is “filled with happiness” to be in Clyde’s presence, and she makes “many unnecessary trips back and forth across the floor, circling Clyde,” while serving his dinner (27). Clyde is playful in return, and he “almost chuckles” at her activities. He swats at her but does not strike her: she dodges “mechanically”—these maneuvers between them are familiar and friendly. Later he spanks her “good-humoredly across her backside” (29), not an act of violent abuse. He shows little emotion, even after he questions her about her afternoon encounter with a coffee salesman from Tennessee.

Ruby’s fantasy of her own death reemerges and intensifies, however, after she haltingly reads and erroneously interprets the newspaper article describing a woman named Ruby who was shot in the leg by her husband. The newspaper story startles Ruby into a momentary shift of reality—a ruthless version of her own life. In her fantasy Clyde fully exhibits latent but violent potentiality and makes her ask the question: could Clyde do this to Ruby? Scholars have focused intently on this narrative question. “For an instant,” writes Ruth Vande Kieft “they have had a vision of each other in alien fantasy roles—an experience which is pleasing, exciting, and rather frightening” (Eudora Welty 45). Schmidt calls Ruby’s mistake “superb comedy” and a “case of mistaken identity” (32). Marrs’s assessment is that “the power of the imagination, the power that was Eudora’s lifeblood, had become the subject of the story” (Eudora Welty 55).

One dependable hallmark of a Welty love story is the weather, which typically mirrors the emotional states of her characters. In “A Piece of News” the weather reflects the tension in the story that Welty is developing. In an interview she described this pathetic fallacy, in which the weather functions in two ways, both that “the crisis is coming out of the weather” and “the crisis is the cause of the weather”: “I plan a story by its dramatic sense, not by a particular pattern. That’s the dramatic end of writing. . . . [In my love stories] the weather depends on the [emotional crisis of the characters]—the crisis is coming out of the weather—the crisis is the cause of the weather” (Wolff, “Domestic Thread” 24).

Welty achieves the “dramatic sense” when she gives full theatrical play to the psychological action of the story: the marital crisis both generates and reflects the weather, which escalates throughout the story from an initial, quiet, soft falling rain to a violent, thunderous storm that scares Clyde, even though he otherwise seems fearless. While the quiet rain initially dampens Ruby’s mood, her emotional crisis builds with the developing thunderstorm outside. At first she sings to herself a simple song, “The pouring-down rain, the pouring-down rain,” as she calmly dries her hair by the fire. The more she ponders—and misconstrues—the import of the news article that she has read, however, the more the storm intensifies. As Welty noted, the crisis both causes and reflects the weather. Images of sex and death dramatically commingle in Ruby’s mind like the fierce tangle in her hair.

As Ruby contemplates whether Clyde might indeed shoot her, the storm generates increasing intensity outside. She screamed for him and “ran straight to the door. . . . There was a flash of lightning, and she stood waiting, as if she half thought that would bring him in, a gun leveled in his hand” (24). The human world empowers the natural one, and vice versa, as the lovers’ gathering emotional storm increases. W. U. McDonald, Suzanne Marrs, and others have interpreted the storm as well. McDonald sees it as representing the “tumult of Ruby’s emotions” (245), and Marrs sees it as reinforcing the “tremendous imaginative reaction Ruby has to the newspaper story (Marrs, One Writer’s Imagination 32). The lightning and the imagined, leveled gun, taken together, suggest Ruby’s sexual desire and dramatic expectation. Her realized question of whether her husband might really shoot her is now the crux of the story: “Ruby might have been dead at his hand” (28). That someone else named Ruby Fisher is indeed shot in Tennessee fulfills the abusive and violent apprehension of the story and is the doppelganger to the more fortunate tale of this Ruby from Mississippi.

The storm adversely affects Clyde, too, even before he returns home. Unlike his violent counterpart in Tennessee, Clyde is an almost silent man. His verbal expressions are monosyllabic. He is a passive, skittish man who stays at his whiskey still with its “thick brushwood roof” during the storm because he is “mortally afraid of lightning like this, and would never go out in it for anything” (24). Only in Ruby’s imagination does Clyde become the man in the news story—the potent and violent male, wielder of deadly weapons and abuser of women. Pitched at a high crescendo now, the action of the story heightens even further as Clyde dramatically appears, like a mythical figure, swathed in mist and steam. The weather outside—and Ruby’s emotional storm—reach their concomitant height as the lightning suggests the power of the male: “A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled. . . . Then Clyde was standing there, with dark streams flowing over the floor where he had walked. . . . From the long shadow of his steamy presence she spoke to him glibly and lighted the lamp” (26). For this and other Welty love stories, the simple lighting of a lamp is a profound indication of awakening sight. Clyde and Ruby will soon see each other more clearly.

The fury of the storm simultaneously evokes contrapuntal images of Clyde’s passivity and his sexuality. Although he carries a gun, he is not deadly; he does not level this weapon at Ruby. As rain “drips down the barrel of his gun” and “streams began to flow” from him, however, the sexual metaphors for Clyde’s diminished capability become clear: his gun points downward. He is unemotional but nonviolent: “[His] enormous hands seemed weighted with the rain that fell from him and dripped down the barrel of the gun. Presently he sat down with dignity in the chair at the table, making a little tumult of his rightful wetness and hunger. Small streams began to flow from him everywhere” (26). Welty’s gun imagery is asexual here, but Clyde seems more interested in dinner. He is simply a big, hungry man.

The denouement must reconcile memory, fantasy, and the dramatic news story that has infiltrated the otherwise quiet and uneventful lives of this country couple. Ruby demands to know Clyde’s position: would he ever shoot her? “They looked at each other. . . . It was as though Clyde might really have killed Ruby, and as though Ruby might really have been dead at his hand” (28). Ruby wonders “how it would be if Clyde shot her in the leg. . . . If he were truly angry, might he shoot her through the heart?” (25–26). The expected sound of a gunshot—which might have pierced the silence—occurs in the news but in another state and to another couple. That Mississippi Ruby is safe—but her wounded counterpart in Tennessee is unsafe—is the dark heart of “A Piece of News.”

As Clyde protests his innocence, he reminds Ruby of his fundamentally mild-mannered personality. “It’s a lie,” Clyde says. “I’d just like to see the pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Fruitful Marriage. That Simple Thing”: Early Stories of Rural Love
• 2. “The Quiet Arcade of Identity”: Grief and Aloneness
• 3. “Like a Rose Forced into Premature Bloom”: Dreaming and Telling in “A Memory”
• 4. “Gossamer and Roses”: Fantasy and Responsibility in The Robber Bridegroom
• 5. “Got Thorns”: The Complex Loves of Delta Wedding
• 6. A “Little Sweetheart Rose in His Lapel”: The Heart of the Ponders
• 7. “With Rosettes”: The Golden Apples
• 8. “Roses as Headlights”: The Bride of the Innisfallen
• 9. “Like the Stamens in a Dainty Bess Rose”: The Love Story in Losing Battles
• 10. “It Was the Old Wood That Did the Blooming”: The Optimist’s Daughter and One Writer’s Beginnings
• 11. “A Dark Rose”: Eudora Welty’s Love Stories
• Notes
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Index