Migrations and Transformations: Human and Nonhuman Nature in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”

Abstract

Migrations and Transformations:Human and Nonhuman Nature in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” Mae Miller Claxton (bio) Works by southern female writers have often been categorized as “regional,” suggesting that their subject matter is limited, circumscribed, “domestic.” In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty characterizes the term “regional” as “careless” and “condescending” (Stories 796). She argues instead that most writing could be called “regional” because the writer writes from the place he or she knows (796). In 2015, more than sixty years after Welty’s essay was written, our views of “place” and “region” have changed dramatically, influenced by issues ranging from local food production to the global environmental and human devastation of war. Karen Halttunen, in her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, mentioned Welty’s discussion of place in fiction in her call for more attention to fields of inquiry such as bioregionalism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. Halttunen believes that “space and place have never been more analytically important than they have recently become in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating that globalization—with its acceleration of border crossings—has actually made place more important, not less” (2). She concludes, “In literature, the new [End Page 73] regionalism and the booming field of ecocriticism foreground what had been considered mere background or setting, taking seriously Eudora Welty’s affirmation that ‘fiction depends for its life on place,’ and exploring new relationships between natural places and human culture” (2). In “A Worn Path,” one of her best-known stories, Welty creates a transformative space through which her main character moves. As Phoenix journeys through the forest to Natchez, her path takes her from a nonhuman natural world into a space impacted by human issues of race, gender, and class. The contrast between human and nonhuman introduces layers of complexity into the seemingly simple story of an old African American woman seeking medicine for her sick grandson. In “A Worn Path,” Welty creates a story that contrasts the cruelties and injustices of human nature with the balance and order of nonhuman nature. Readers are left to wonder what kind of medicine can provide healing to the world Phoenix journeys through. Throughout her fiction, Welty displays a complex awareness of the relationships between place and the human and nonhuman communities that inhabit these spaces. The repeated emphasis in Welty’s fiction on the human community intersecting with the nonhuman community rather than the human community dominating the nonhuman community displays her awareness of the differences between what Patrick D. Murphy calls “things-in-themselves” as opposed to “things-for-us” (4). Scholars have long associated Phoenix Jackson, the main character in “A Worn Path,” with the natural world instead of the large town she travels toward. In her discussion of Welty’s photographs in The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Suzanne Marrs argues that “setting does far more than lend credibility to the story’s action. The natural world of the Trace is Phoenix’s home, and its qualities are to some extent her own. Her life has been relatively untouched by ‘progress.’ She is not removed from nature but lives naturally” (84). Ruth Vande Kieft discusses Phoenix’s “sense of familiarity with nature—the ease with which she talks to the birds and animals” (29). She concludes that Phoenix is, “like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, a completely and beautifully harmonious person—something one does not often find in the fiction of either Eudora Welty or Faulkner” (29). These scholars are correct in their assessments of Phoenix, but connecting women, especially African American women, with nature can lead to dismissive stereotyping. In fact, even with the challenges she faces as an elderly African American woman, [End Page 74] Phoenix successfully achieves her goal in the story, negotiating both nonhuman and human communities. Ecofeminist scholars have debated at length about the problematic association of women with nature, especially African American women, who often provide a connection to nature, or magic, or God in films and books. Noël Sturgeon explains, “A constant and ongoing focus of ecofeminist theorizing, as well as...