Image and Myth in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter

Abstract

ONE of the striking characteristics of Eudora Welty's fictiontaken as a whole-is the remarkable diversity of styles she summons from story to story.' Welty herself has said that when she begins a new story nothing she has written before is of much help to her, that each new story teaches her how to write itself.2 Yet when we turn to a novel such as The Optimist's Daughter (1972) directly after reading The Golden Apples (I949) or Losing Battles (1970), for example, the shift in stylistic intensity is nevertheless surprising. The complex allusions and linguistic sensuousness of The Golden Apples and the garrulous charm of Losing Battles leave us quite unprepared for the spareness and apparent simplicity of the later text. Two additional factors have contributed to critical readings of The Optimist's Daughter that are far different from those we find for works such as The Golden Apples.3 The numerous biographical correspondences between Welty's life and the details of her story and her explicit articulation of her theme at the novel's end-having to do with the fragility of memory and its role in understanding-have led to explications of the novel that nearly