Gender and History in Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding"

Abstract

Eudora Welty's 1946 novel Delta Wedding is famously, ostensibly a story in which nothing momentous, nothing of large historical portent, happens.' Contemporary reviewers complained of the absence of plot, and Welty herself told an interviewer in 1972 that she had made a careful investigation to find the year in which nothing very terrible had happened in the Delta by way of floods or fires or wars which would have taken the men away. Finally, she adds, settled it by the almanac.2 But Welty has also been quick to agree with readers who see the seemingly charmed world of the Fairchilds as doomed. Their Delta enclave was, she told Charles Bunting, all such a fragile, temporary thing. More pointedly, she noted, At least I hope it was. That's why I searched so hard to find the year in which that could be most evident.3 That last comment is particularly telling because it brings attention to the difficult epistemological questions of history that the novel does indeed address-in particular, what is history and what is not, how we record history's narratives, and how we can tell whether or not history is happening to us. Far from being ahistorical, Delta Wedding, I would argue, can be read not just as an ironic portrayal of a society on the verge of drastic historical change but something very like a feminist interrogation of history and historical perspective. Welty's seemingly innocuous, domestic story of a white Mississippi Delta family's preparations for a wedding is also one that problematizes the divide between public event and private sphere, male historical agents and private female backdrop, and the very making of historical narrative itself. The result, I think, is an unsettling and disorienting narrative, one that questions the way histories and stories in general are constructed as readily as it questions the charmed life of the Fairchilds. If Delta Wedding is a novel deeply engaged with history, it is at least partly because of the book's peculiar relationship with the century's two world wars. Set in 1923, the novel looks back obliquely at World War I and its impact on the Fairchilds' two most cherished members, Denis and George, and beyond that to the Civil War, which destroyed an entire generation of Fairchild men and their brothers-in-law. Not incidentally, Delta Wedding, as