Eudora Welty and the House of Fiction

Abstract

Eudora Welty and the House of Fiction Michael Pickard More than thirty thousand visitors have toured the Eudora Welty House and Garden at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi, since it opened as a literary house museum in 2006 (Rhoades). Among that number are many—one suspects most—of the leading Welty scholars of these years. On the rare occasions when scholars refer to the Welty House in their writings, however, most of them do so chiefly to support the broader biographical characterizations that they wish to make. Few have shown interest in the house museum itself, as a construction of Welty's authorship by curators from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, scholars, gardeners, members of her family, and—to some extent—Welty herself. This lack of interest is both understandable and regrettable. In response to a 1970 questionnaire reprinted in Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's first volume of Conversations with Eudora Welty, Welty called her decision "to live at home to do my writing in a familiar world" her "most significant choice" ("Eudora" 36). Scholars have done much to make her world familiar to her readers. They have summoned unfinished works from her archive, explored her interest in everything from gardening to music and politics, published volumes of correspondence, and brought a comprehensive view of the ninety-two years of her life into focus. Moreover, they have interpreted with great skill what Ann Romines calls the "domestic rituals" that play out in so many of her fictions. In general, however, Welty scholars have not studied the Welty House for what it suggests about the author's lifelong efforts to negotiate these rituals and the "domestic mythologies" that they inscribe (Romines 267). Nor have they discussed the house as, in a sense, a text that Welty produced across several decades, a lived environment she helped design, a curatorial representation of her life, and, in these respects, a companion to her late autobiographical works, The Optimist's Daughter and One Writer's Beginnings. For many academic readers, literary house museums like the Welty House still invoke the discredited interpretive protocols of belletrism and literary tourism. In her 2016 book Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries, Alison Booth encapsulates the relevant disciplinary history in a pair of sentences: [End Page 53] In the later twentieth century, mainstream higher education saw no role for literary tourism as research into the environmental sources of literature. Successive critical theories cordoned off the author, demoted attachment to authorial origin, and sublimated everyday domestic life as a context for literary production, while separating popular reception from academic expertise. (25) Even though Welty studies has challenged many of the later twentieth century's orthodoxies, on the topic of authorial house museums the older view still prevails. Scholars who come to Jackson to conduct research on Welty may tour the Welty House, but they do their work downtown at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building, which holds Welty's papers. Practically, this arrangement is necessary, of course. The State of Mississippi has not equipped the Welty House to support archival research. Even so, that it has seemed natural to remove Welty's papers from the site where she produced them reflects the broader separation of "popular reception from academic expertise" that Booth describes. Welty, who slept on one side and wrote on the other side of her upstairs bedroom, did not typically observe this kind of demarcation of life from work. To the contrary, home life shaped Welty's writings, and not only in the way one thinks of first—as raw material that she transformed into fiction. An observation she made about Willa Cather applies equally well to her own case: "The shift from one home to another, the shift of feeling, must have become in itself the source of a distinctive fictional pattern which was to fall into place for her; it is the kaleidoscopic wrench to the heart that exposes the deeper feeling there" ("House" 47). Welty lived through many such shifts of home and (one imagines) concomitant shifts of feeling: not just the move from North Congress Street to Pinehurst Street, but also the changes in the Pinehurst house over...