Charles Dickens's Sairey Gamp in Eudora Welty's "Petrified Man"

Abstract

Charles Dickens's Sairey Gamp in Eudora Welty's "Petrified Man" Allison Scheidegger Despite the attested influence of Charles Dickens's novels on Eudora Welty's mother and consequently on Welty herself, nothing has been written on the echoes of Dickens's character Sairey Gamp in Welty's "Petrified Man."1 While in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Gamp is one of many characters, "Petrified Man" focuses exclusively on multiple extended dialogues with a Gamp-like character: Leota, the garrulous beautician. In a series of beauty parlor appointments, Leota tells her client Mrs. Fletcher about the unfolding effects of a recent visit to the traveling freak show with a friend, Mrs. Pike. The freak show visit becomes the center of the story, enabling self-congratulatory comparison, discussions of childbirth and abortion, and moments of startling recognition—elements also present in Gamp's tales, including a similar freak show plot. Welty's update heightens the themes of self-enhancement and recognition present in Gamp's speeches, using the Gampian grotesque to unsettle contemporary issues surrounding self-representation, particularly for middle-class women. As one of Dickens's most memorable and beloved minor characters, the alcoholic midwife-undertaker Sairey Gamp would have been a familiar figure in Welty's childhood home. In One Writer's Beginnings, Welty recalls that her mother "read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him" and emphasizes the lingering influence of his novels on her mother's imagination (842). Welty's mother demonstrated her love by saving her Dickens novels from a house fire; as Welty tells it, "she went back into the burning house, although she was on crutches at the time, and began throwing that set of Dickens out the window to save it" ("An Interview" 213). This action became a family legend, passed down to Welty along with the very same dilapidated Dickens novels "lined up … waiting for" her in the family bookcase (OWB 846).2 Even if she never read Dickens herself, Welty must have grown up steeped in the imaginative atmosphere of the Dickensian grotesque, with its humorous appreciation for the oddities of human character. Welty explores these oddities by bringing the freak show to the beauty parlor in "Petrified Man." [End Page 309] Leota and Gamp share decidedly lower-middle-class pretentions to gentility and bolster their self-image by repeatedly referencing their friendship with an idealized and absent friend. In "Petrified Man," Leota's conversations with her client Mrs. Fletcher are filled with the hovering specter of Leota's friend and fellow beautician, Mrs. Pike. Leota holds forth to the more or less patient Mrs. Fletcher about the excellencies of Mrs. Pike, thereby using Mrs. Pike to validate her own actions and attitudes. Her repeated tales of Mrs. Pike's beauty and success annoy Mrs. Fletcher: when Leota announces that she has promised Mrs. Pike a facial, Mrs. Fletcher retorts, "I bet she needs one" (30). In much the same way that Leota uses her friendship with Mrs. Pike to elevate her own status, at the memorable alcoholic "tea" in Martin Chuzzlewit, Gamp tells her friend Betsey Prig of imagined conversations with Mrs. Harris (a fellow midwife) in order to pay herself indirect compliments. These restaged dialogues between Gamp and Mrs. Harris affirm the personal refinements and professional value of Gamp herself: "'Oh, Mrs Harris, ma'am! your countenance is quite a angel's!' Which, but for Pimples, it would be. 'No, Sairey Gamp,' says she, 'you best of hard-working and industrious creeturs as ever was underpaid at any price, which underpaid you are, quite diff'rent'" (701). Gamp and Leota are aware of the same thing: that the approval of a witness who is conveniently not present for questioning can become a way to strengthen one's own reputation. In repeated self-reflexive references to this absent friend, then, each woman rhetorically enhances herself. The macabre elements of Leota's and Gamp's respective professions underscore their shared interest in self-representation and enhancement. Gamp is a midwife-undertaker and Leota is a beautician: both present their clients in ways that conceal natural bodily processes. Dickens tells us that Gamp "went to a lying-in...