Seeing Self Otherwise: Orphaned Otherness and the Power of Narrative in Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake"

Abstract

Seeing Self Otherwise:Orphaned Otherness and the Power of Narrative in Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake" Mackenzie Balken (bio) One of the most frequently explored features of Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples is its representation of otherness in the early twentieth-century American South. Numerous critics have considered specifically issues of gender and otherness in the text, identifying how female characters figure as other and find a voice in a male-dominant society.1 While Welty's treatment of the other has received much attention, there is one type of otherness in the stories that has been broadly overlooked as such: namely, that of the orphaned child. Throughout The Golden Apples, orphans are unmistakably othered by both narrators and characters, to the point that even Louella, the Morrison's African-American house help, uses "orphan" as a pejorative when the improperly dressed Cassie and Loch come in through the back door in "June Recital": "What orphan-lookin' children is these here? . . . Where yawl orphan come from? Yawl don't live here, yawl live at County Orphan. Gwan back."2 The story in the collection that most explicitly deals with orphaned characters is "Moon Lake," in which the "flock" of girls from County Orphan plays a significant role. While critics have to varying degrees considered the orphaned characters,3 and while Susan V. Donaldson and Suzan Harrison go so far as to discuss the character Easter as other because she is orphaned, no one has yet fully explored the orphans as other or considered how their otherness affects our reading of the text. In order to address this gap in the criticism, I will argue that the orphaned girls in "Moon Lake" function as other in a way that allows the Morgana girls to recognize "[t]he other way to live" (138)—to grasp the possibility of living otherwise—and so to understand the tenuousness of selfhood—to see self otherwise. More specifically, the orphans are othered through the trauma that they experience in growing up outside of the care and comfort of family. In order to cope with that trauma and to gain a sense of self in a strongly familial society, Easter, the most prominent orphaned character, creates personal narrative, bearing witness to the trauma she has experienced and recreating herself through the act of narration. In this act, Easter suggests the possibility of living outside the familial norms of childhood to the Morgana girls, allowing them as they enter the [End Page 1] liminal space between childhood and adulthood to face the changes to their understanding of self that occur through increasing maturation and independence. In dealing with these topics, the story explores the way that witnessing trauma allows both orphaned characters and empathetic listeners to gain an understanding of life apart from familial norms and so to comprehend the possibility of living and of seeing self otherwise. Before exploring the othered and traumatized orphans in "Moon Lake" itself, it will be helpful to identify what trauma theorists suggest about the nature of trauma and its relation to narration. In the introduction to the collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth describes trauma as "an overwhelming event or events" which often leads to the delayed response of "repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors" known as post-traumatic stress disorder.4 Caruth explains that PTSD stems from an inability to assimilate a traumatic event into one's experience, and suggests that it is only after a period of forgetting or latency that one can remember, relive, and depart from the trauma. This process of departure is realized through the act of narration, particularly of narrating the trauma to another individual, for, she explains, "the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another."5 It is thus the act of narration that enables those who have experienced trauma to depart from that trauma. While none of the orphaned characters is Welty's "Moon Lake" exhibit symptoms explicitly associated with PTSD, the fact that they have experienced trauma is itself indisputable. Caruth defines trauma as "an overwhelming event or events,"6 a definition that certainly applies to the loss...