Eudora Welty’s Use of Southern Dialect in “Why I Live at the P. O."

Abstract

Having lived and worked in Mississippi for most of her life, Eudora Welty is recognized worldwide as a writer primarily from her rich use of sensory detail expressed in the vivid, colorful language of her charac- ters. Welty has been praised by readers as well as by language experts for her ability to capture the idiom, yet her talent for capturing language is so universally praised that critics often take it for granted, assuming that readers can identify her works' features readily. Focusing on Why I Live at the P. O. with close readings of lexical, grammatical, and sociolinguistic features found in this story, we can identify patterns that clearly place the text in the American South and also strongly suggest Welty's opinions of her speakers. In a collection of interviews titled Mississippi Writers Talking, John Griffin Jones asks Welty whether she was in a different frame of mind—a Southern frame of mind—as she created humor in stories like Why I Live at the P. O. Welty responds, Those are early stories. I don't know why I wrote them except to show how people talked. I love to write dialogue but it's very hard to prune it and make it sharp and make it advance the plot and reveal the characters—both characters—the one listening and the one talking. You can use it to do all kinds of things. I like to do it because it's hard, I guess. I really like it. I laugh when I write those things. (22) The comic monologue Why I Live at the P. O. is perhaps one of the best showcases of Welty's gift for narrative voice and dialogue. The narrator named Sister explains the absurd events that drive her to leave her home in China Grove, Mississippi, to live at the local post office. The conflict arises from Sister's jealousy of her younger sister, Stella-Rondo—who, Sister claims, stole and married Sister's boyfriend, Mr. Whitaker. On the Fourth of July when the action occurs, some time in the mid-1900s, Stella-Rondo has just returned to China Grove after separating from Mr. Whitaker, and she has brought her two-year-old daughter, Shirley-T., whom Stella-Rondo