Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”: Overcoming Melancholia through Writing

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“A Curtain of Green,” the title story of Eudora Welty’s first collection, may not be one of Welty’s best known short stories, and readers may easily overlook it due to the other more memorable works in Welty’s 1941 collection. Welty admits that the reason the short story was chosen as the title for the book was because it “was the only story that there wasn’t a strong feeling about from everybody” (“Fiction” 18). Yet the story is equally as complex and well written as the others. Welty sets the majority of the stories in A Curtain of Green in the late nineteen-twenties to early nineteenforties South, and the title story is no exception. Scholars who have analyzed the link between Welty and the time period in which she was writing contribute greatly to Welty studies and to the interpretation of “A Curtain of Green.” 1 However, using a different approach and viewing Welty from a feminist perspective, the reader can gain new insight into the actions of Mrs. Larkin, the main character in the story. Mrs. Larkin’s garden-work exemplifies what Helene Cixous calls ecriture feminine. 2 It is through her gardening as ecriture feminine that Mrs. Larkin is able to break through the state of melancholia that has plagued her for over a year. Cixous calls women to writing when she states: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into history—by her own movement” (“Laugh” 2039). The writing that Cixous demands of women should not be limited only to the confines of pen and paper—those are the demands of writing as defined by the patriarchy. Women must find additional ways to write their bodies. Cixous explains, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2046). Since there is no defined feminine writing, women are able to think outside the restrictions of paper and pen and are free to write creatively through other means. Alice Walker writes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens of her mother as an artist; she explains that her mother