Astonishing Stories: Eudora Welty and the Weird Tale

Abstract

In this essay, I want to explore the regional implications of Eudora Welty's critical appraisal and creative appropriation of a particular fantastic genre: the early-twentieth-century tale. In the alienating style of weird fic- tion, its mythological roots, and its social awareness, Welty seems to have found a mode of storytelling oddly compatible with her own approach to the craft. unsettling plots of her early tales and the sensational narra- tive strategies of her later civil rights stories suggest that Welty sometimes sought to shock the sensibilities of her southern readers, to make them question the racist and sexist societal norms historically associated with the region. In this respect, Welty shared the general goals of the social reformist weird fiction writers she read on occasion. Given Welty's prominent and somewhat staid role in the southern literary canon, this is a topic that might seem strange were it not for a rising interest in various forms of and genre in new southern studies. In Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature, Jennifer Rae Greeson posits, The South that we hold collectively in our minds is not—could not possibly be—a fixed or real place. It both exceeds and flattens place; it is a term of the imagination, a site of national fantasy (1). Similarly, Thadious M. Davis argues in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature that intersections of race and space in the Deep South occur in an imaginary landscape of broad geographical-social contexts and mediated symbolic structures (2). These are useful studies for exploring how empirical space is deformed in literary discourses that address the South through calculated caricature: representation via misrepresentation or anti-representation. Though at present their critical terminology stages the discussion in Edward Said's language of unreal cartographies, scholars like Greeson, Davis, and others are more and more evincing a general appreciation for traces of the fantastic in the southern. More to the point, a 2009 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies focuses exclusively on the topic of regional modernism, with many of the contributors encouraging new critics to reevaluate the influential role that syndicated popular media and fantastic genres played in shaping local literatures. Thus, a number of scholars in