Photographic Convention and Story Composition: Eudora Welty's Uses of Detail, Plot, Genre, and Expectation from "A Worn Path" through "The Bride of the Innisfallen"

Abstract

throughout. Readers have at times objected to Welty's plotlessness as obstructive of meaning and found her use of detail inundating rather than illuminating. Diana Trilling's early remarks in Nation (1943) faulted Welty's for developing technical virtuosity rather than conventionally meaningful narrative. She accused Welty of writing book of ballets, not of stories and read as staying their narrative no more than a dance, say, stays with its argument.' Trilling's remarks are representative of a particular reaction to finding Welty's fiction not what was expected. John Fleischauer's responses in Focus of Mystery: Eudora Welty's Prose Style (1973) are similar; he speaks of vagueness contrasting with or containing delightful and colloquial concentrations of detail, arguing that the vagueness, or sketchiness, or selection of detail is so pronounced . .. as to lead to complaints while readers look for a steady progress of action.2 Teachers of Welty's fiction sometimes find similar responses in classrooms of new Welty readers. Of all Welty's collections, The Bride of The Innisfallen receives most criticism