On Welty and Ecology

Abstract

On Welty and Ecology Sarah Gilbreath Ford (bio) Welty's love of nature probably manifests most directly in her love of gardening. A letter to Diarmuid Russell in 1942 contains a snapshot of this passion as Welty writes, "I have lots of energy and full days working, but on flowers, not stories—there is so much to do outside that I may never get through and never get to stories. I only think about the kind of day and the feel of the earth that day, and the planting and transplanting and spading and digging and weeding and watering, and then I am asleep and doing the same thing in my sleep" (Tell 55). Welty may have joked that she was just her mother's yard boy, but her love of gardening evident in this letter translates into a lifelong appreciation for the natural world, which, as Julia Eichelberger explains, was to Welty, "both a physical and a spiritual phenomenon" (xv). Welty's fiction consequently abounds with intricate descriptions of the environment, such as when Laura McRaven in Delta Wedding looks out of a train window and sees that the "land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it" (92), or when the couple heading south of New Orleans in "No Place for You, My Love" faces "[m]ore and more crayfish and other shell creatures litter[ing] their path, scuttling, or dragging" (565). Critics have, of course, discussed Welty's use of nature, from her careful delineation of place to her accurate placing of the moon in the right part of the sky. The current body of ecocritical theory now gives us new lenses to see how Welty crafts environments in her prose. The four essays in this Welty and Ecology cluster reveal how varied these tools can be. Jill Goad uses a framework of the anti-pastoral to read bodies of water and trees in The Golden Apples. Grace McCright uses ecogothic theory to posit that "Moon Lake" thwarts the human/nonhuman boundary. Nicole Salama uses a theory of the environment to read home as referring to landscape instead of a house in The Optimist's Daughter. And I read the vibrancy of the watery [End Page 59] world in Delta Wedding as enabling a new coming-of-age narrative. Using different theoretical contexts and analyzing different works, these four essays indicate that Welty's rapt attention to the natural world speaks perfectly to contemporary conversations about ecocriticism. Together, these four essays further reveal how reading the natural world in Welty's fiction allows insight into human character. We chose the word "ecology" for this cluster rather than "nature" or "environment" to highlight the relationship of the human to the natural world, the very thread Welty traces in all her works. When characters, such as Laura traveling to the Delta or the couple headed south, think about the land or the creatures around them, their descriptions reveal something of themselves. Laura finds the landscape magical because it connects her to her lost mother, while the couple notices the swarms of crayfish as a signal of their desire to adventure into an environment markedly different from their normal lives. We hope that these essays will spark more critics to try out ecocritical, ecofeminist, or ecogothic tools to see what other discoveries about nature, humans, and humans in nature may be in store. Sarah Gilbreath Ford Baylor University Sarah Gilbreath Ford SARAH GILBREATH FORD is professor of American literature at Baylor University and serves as the director of Baylor's Beall Poetry Festival. She is the author of Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White (2014) and Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (2020). She serves as an associate editor of the Eudora Welty Review and as web editor of the Eudora Welty Society's website. In 2018 she won the Eudora Welty Society's Phoenix Award for scholarship and service. In 2019 she was named a Baylor Centennial Professor. WORKS CITED Eichelberger, Julia. "Introduction: Gardener, Friend, and Artist." Tell about Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters, 1940...