"The Continuous Thread of Revelation": Eudora Welty Reconsidered

Abstract

"The Continuous Thread of Revelation":Eudora Welty Reconsidered Adrienne Akins Warfield and Sarah Gilbreath Ford In her memoir One Writer's Beginnings, Welty concludes the section on "Learning to See" with the observation that "the events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation" (914). Deriving its title from Welty's reflections here, the 2019 international conference of the Eudora Welty Society explored current threads of revelation as scholars learn to see Welty's work in new ways. Directed by Harriet Pollack and Julia Eichelberger and sponsored by the College of Charleston's Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Southern Studies Program, and Women's and Gender Studies Program, the conference took place from February 21–23, 2019, at the College of Charleston. More than fifty participants presented papers on thirteen different panels. The conference also included several special events. Charleston writers Marcus Amaker, Harlan Greene, Josephine Humphreys, and Michele Moore discussed their work, reflecting on their own beginnings as writers in response to Welty's memoir. Mississippi Department of Archives and History librarians Forrest Galey and Betty Uzman led a roundtable discussion of research methods and resources in the Welty collection in dialogue with Julia Eichelberger and College of Charleston students who have utilized the archives. And a large group of Welty scholars participated in an engaging and unforgettable staged reading of "Moon Lake," adapted and directed by Brenda Currin. Conference participants came from across and outside the United States and were a mix of established and emerging Welty scholars, graduate students new to academia, scholars from adjacent fields, new and retired high school teachers, and emeritus faculty with distinguished careers of pioneering scholarship on Welty's work. The presentations coalesced around the conference's theme of reconsidering Eudora Welty's work, a deliberation occurring at an apt time for Welty studies given several recent publications: [End Page 13] a teaching volume on Welty's work edited by Eichelberger and Mae Miller Claxton, monographs by Pollack, Sally Wolff, and Stephen Fuller, and the publication of the letters between Welty and Ross Macdonald edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan. Scholars at the conference were also looking forward to the publication of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race, edited by Pollack (a sequel to the 2013 collection Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race), as well as the promise of a steady stream of new monographs from the series Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty just established at the University Press of Mississippi, also under the leadership of Pollack. The recent publications along with the blending of participants from different backgrounds led to productive conversations and, indeed, new revelations about Welty's work. We appreciate the scholars who agreed to expand their conference presentations into essays for this issue; these nine essays reflect the wide range of ideas and approaches presented at the conference. One thread of reconsideration of Welty's work at the conference came from innovative interpretive frameworks that enabled scholars to see her work in novel ways. Four essays in this volume reflect the current literary interest in material culture and read Welty's works using variants of that theoretical lens. Laura Sloan Patterson's essay, "'A lady couldn't expect to travel without a hat': Cultural Capital, Gender, and Sexuality in Welty's Short Fiction," examines hats in several of Welty's stories and in Delta Wedding. By examining "something so seemingly trivial," Patterson finds that a hat is much more than a mere accessory (19). As an artifact of material culture, a hat can communicate a character's identity or sexuality. As hats move from place to place and from character to character, they reflect social norms and divisions. Patterson's analysis of a specific material object thus provides an innovative path toward investigating the power dynamics at play between characters in Welty's work. Monica Carol Miller's essay, "Women!! Make Husband in Own Home!: Welty's Use of...