The Beauty Parlor as Comic Cauldron in "Petrified Man" and Steel Magnolias

Abstract

The Beauty Parlor as Comic Cauldron in "Petrified Man" and Steel Magnolias John Wharton Lowe No doubt many readers immediately thought of Eudora Welty's classic "Petrified Man" when Robert Harling's hilarious Steel Magnolias debuted off-Broadway in 1987. Both are set in beauty parlors, and with the exception of little Billy, who has the famous last lines in the short story, there are no men present in either text (although the 1989 Steel Magnolias movie, which I will not discuss here, "opened up" Harling's tale to include men). Both writers clearly understand the benefits of employing a dialogue-centered text in a beauty parlor, and thus join others who have used this setting and barber shops to generate narrative (Ring Lardner, William Faulkner, and most recently, Ernest Gaines in The Tragedy of Brady Sims). It is also a setting for many films. In the 2005 Queen Latifah movie Beauty Shop, the central figure intones, "What makes a woman beautiful? Is it her eyes? Is it her skin? Her hair? Or, is it her sass? It's all that. And we make it all happen here, at the beauty shop … we share everything. Nothing's off limits: family, gossip, money, and especially men. Trust me. We got ways of making you talk" (qtd. in Scanlon 308). "Petrified Man" and Steel Magnolias both confine the action entirely to a salon, but in different eras, and the dominant tone in both is comic. Welty's humor, however, has a defiantly macabre aspect and often targets male-female relationships. Harling's wisecracking women ultimately take us to a melodramatic ending, while Welty maintains a kind of feminine noir take on the women she depicts, but the aggressive humor in both works often underlines the ways in which violence can be masked by humor. When I teach Welty in my southern literature classes, she's cheek by jowl on the syllabus with Flannery O'Connor, whose work she greatly admired. I often remark in class that Welty opened her window, looked at the world, and was filled with wonder; O'Connor opened her window, looked out, and was filled with horror. Very often, in life, when we are filled with wonder, we laugh. Welty and her characters seem, like the loveable character Ed Wynn plays in the film of Mary Poppins, to laugh, "loud and strong and clear; I love to laugh—and it's getting worse every year!" Indeed, the inscription to Welty's invaluable One Writer's Beginnings describes her father, [End Page 87] who is shaving upstairs, and her mother, frying bacon downstairs, whistling a duet from The Merry Widow, "their song almost float[ing] with laughter: how different from the record," indicating Welty's sense of the link between laughter, love, and connection (837). She would come to see, however, that the comic could also be subversive, corrective, combative, cruel, and linked to violence. From her father's library she selected the vernacular comedy of Lardner and Mark Twain, surely two major influences on her literary humor. Anyone who reads Suzanne Marrs's indispensable biography, or interviews that Welty granted, or who was lucky enough to know her personally can testify to her bodacious sense of humor, which could be sly, subversive, self-reflexive, grotesque, rebellious, wicked, or some combination of the above. She started using this gift at the precocious age of eleven, when she wrote a book to amuse her ill brother Edward (Black 8–9). "The Glorious Apology," as Patti Carr Black has shown, demonstrates a sense of fun, a satiric outlook, and an emerging sense of parody; Welty illustrated it with cutouts from magazines and comics and her own illustrations (Early Escapades 45–59).1 Welty thought in images, and eventually became a gifted and published photographer. Her love for the camera was coupled with her sense of fun, and she delighted in creating comic poses with her friends. A photo of Welty draped across railroad tracks cracks viewers up because she is creating the basic unit of comedy, the forced juxtaposition of opposites (Marrs 300 and following). On the one hand, the beauty on the railroad tracks was a staple of silent films...