Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction

Abstract

Readers of Eudora Welty's stories often encounter a protective and domelike night-time sky, moon and constellations beckoning a character to venture beyond familiar, visible world. This striking metaphor for human need to seek out unknown serves as an anchoring image in Daughter of Swan, Gail L. Mortimer's study of Welty's lifelong inquiry into nature and contexts of knowledge. Mortimer argues that Welty's views on epistemiology and elusiveness of certainty lie at heart of this writer's subtle and revelatory work. Employing psychoanalytic object-relations theories of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, she reveals how Welty uses assumptions about relationships to shape her character's consciousnesses. Mortimer also contrasts Welty's world with William Faulkner's; each elucidates other's remarkably different ways of perceiving humanity, relationships and approaches to unknown. author then turns to Welty's childhood to consider her evolving sense of what - and how - things can be known. Her childhood reading and, in particular, her relationships with adults created impressions of a benign, wondrous, orderly world. As Mortimer observes, Welty eventually replaced these impressions with realisation that adults frequently distort and withhold truth. Welty's own family's conception of love as a kind of shield, and her resistance to this protection, finds its way into much of her fiction. For many Welty characters, this protective love becomes an obstacle to fuller understanding. Mortimer invokes two of writer's most beguiling images, circle and labyrinth, to demonstrate that the perceiver who is both an insider and an outsider is best able to recognise and assimilate new knowledge. In The Golden Apples Welty contemplates difficulty and fascination implicit in this quest for knowledge, given ambiguous nature of what we know - and given our use of language's surfaces, and of masks, myths and falsities to create benevolent illusions. Ultimately, Mortimer concludes, Welty comes to see concept of protective love as a limited one and, in The Optimist's Daughter, for instance, she advocates instead courage to face even harshest realities. Recognising richness of Welty's artistry, Mortimer views her through lens of various literary traditions, incuding that of Shelley and Yeats. latter's poem Among School Children, from which title of Mortimer's study is borrowed, summons image of swan to reflect solitary human soul in search of knowledge. In that same spirit of wonder and curiosity, Eudora Welty's fiction illuminates conditions of that search.