"Stand still": Delta Wedding and the Perils of Perception

Abstract

"Stand still":Delta Wedding and the Perils of Perception Ryan Sinni [A]s soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world. —Welty, "Place in Fiction" 787 [H]e had seen the bird most purely at its moment of death. —Welty, "A Still Moment" 239 You couldn't stop me. —Welty, Delta Wedding 159 Eudora Welty's One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression contains an unassuming photo entitled "Town in a store window" (56). At first glance, this photo might seem to offer a simple depiction of items, such as clocks and lanterns, that are for sale in a local store. Upon closer examination, however, "Welty's diminutive silhouette can be seen slightly hunched over in the act of snapping the picture" (Wright 65). This image is a reminder that every photo, no matter how objective it may seem, is the product of a human perceiver. Although Welty may have been alerted to this reality through her photography, she explores it in detail in her fiction. The role of the human perceiver is an especially prominent theme in Welty's 1946 novel Delta Wedding. In this work, Welty's engagement with the theme of human perception is funneled through the concept of stillness. This concept is especially important to one of the story's most important characters, Ellen Fairchild, for whom the phrase "stand still" is a habitual command (158). Despite its prominence in Delta Wedding, the theme of stillness has not received sustained treatment in the scholarship on the novel, although some critics have addressed related themes. Louise Hutchings Westling and Allison Deming Goeller both read Delta Wedding as working with the pastoral genre; Kelly Cannon comes closest to focusing on stillness in her [End Page 243] article "The Power of Silence in Delta Wedding." But none of these critics offer a detailed analysis of the way Welty engages with the concept of stillness. In this essay, I will provide such an analysis by reading Welty's novel in light of her essay "Place in Fiction" and her short story "A Still Moment." Each of these works reveals a different angle on Welty's use of the phrase "stand still." In "Place in Fiction," standing still is the posture in which one perceives mystery. "A Still Moment" does not contradict this claim but rather complicates it. Like "Place in Fiction," "A Still Moment" portrays stillness as an appropriate posture for the perceiving subject, but it also warns against imposing such a posture on the perceived object. I argue that the ambivalence toward stillness that characterizes "A Still Moment" also characterizes Delta Wedding. In both of these fictions, a receptive posture allows one to perceive an object of perception, whereas an active posture allows the object of perception to slip through one's grasp. In "Place in Fiction," Welty points to primeval religious experience to illustrate the connection between place and feeling: "From the dawn of man's imagination, place has enshrined the spirit: as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke" (787). What is important to note here is the relationship between standing still and perceiving the supernatural. The phrase "as soon as" indicates that this perception immediately followed upon standing still. The god is portrayed as already present, simply waiting for an attentive human perceiver to arrive. A few paragraphs later, Welty links standing still with the perception of the "extraordinary" ("Place" 787). Welty wonders about the connection between place and perception: "It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to a point" (787). Welty defines this "focus" as "awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight" (787). She then claims that focusing has both intrinsic and extrinsic value: "The act of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the act that, continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry" (787). In the context of this "act of focusing," Welty again employs our key phrase: "Indeed, as...