Queer disorientation in The Optimist’s Daughter

Abstract

This essay investigates the embedding of queerness into the visual/spatial/temporal aesthetics and quotidian objects in Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), under the overarching theme of ‘disorientation’. The novel revolves around the return of the childless middle‐aged widow Laurel McKelva to her provincial home town, Mount Salus, for her father’s funeral. After multiple agitated encounters with a myriad of small‐town characters, Laurel grapples with her complicated family history and comes to a changed understanding of herself and the world. Filtered through Laurel’s intensely disorienting point of view, the story ends with the collapse and disintegration of her once persistent heteronormative vision. Disorientation in this novel is often subjective, internal and static, rather than being invoked by fantastical spatial settings. Through strenuous close reading, I show how the slipping‐away of elusive everyday objects—such as misarranged furniture, disused utensils and forgotten family heirlooms—imbricates queer traces into the texture of the narrative by evoking minoritarian sexual and temporal existences. While my conceptual framework is based on Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, I eclectically reference theorists ranging from Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton to Judith Butler. My central claim postulates disorientation as Welty’s queer politics to critique and renegotiate boundaries of heteronormativity.