"That's me": Ruby Fisher from "A Piece of News" as Eudora Welty's Selfie

Abstract

This article re-examines Eudora Welty's "A Piece of News" by building on previous readings that have foregrounded either the protagonist Ruby Fisher's victimhood or her sexual self-possession in order to propose two points: first, that this story is not just about Ruby Fisher's powers of ideation but about the idea of imaginative formation; second, Ruby Fisher is best understood as Welty's literary double, a somewhat satirical self-portrait of the author at the beginning of her craft. In this story, Ruby Fisher imagines herself as the female victim, and these imaginings recycle male-controlled myths of femininity popularized by mass media, including newspapers and the pulp magazines prevalent at the time of Welty's writing and which she embeds in other stories from A Curtain of Green. In this vein, Ruby's performance, staged only for herself, anticipates later twentieth-century female visual artists who also interrogate the act and artifice of self-representation, artists such as Cindy Sherman.