The Feminine and Feminist Texts of Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter"

Abstract

Eudora Welty has never been seen as a feminist; yet her work is strongly feminocentric, and is just as much the locus of commonplace about woman's identity and woman's as Nancy Miller has shown the novels of the eighteenth century to be. The dangers to Welty's twentiethcentury female protagonists are somewhat different, but the logic of the faux pasl is still there, as Welty's women balance precariously between solidarity and difference. Yet in The Optimist's Daughter, Welty creates a woman's world in which woman is creator and controller, in which there is a gap between the sexual worlds, and in which patriarchal myths are devalorized even as they are affirmed to operate. Welty depicts the primacy of matriarchy by means of the funeral as a female ritual and by means of the matrilineal storytelling tradition. Her protagonist assumes the stance of the artist, solitary yet inextricably linked with her audience, as teller influenced by the oral tradition in which truth is found somewhere in the gap between narratives. The Optimist's Daughter abounds with female tellers. The ritual, the family, and the narratology develop as tropes, both in the sense of rhetorical devices and also as places of human confrontation and reaction, especially ideological conflicts of romantic optimism versus realistic pessimism. In this novel Welty evidences a particularly female literary imagination that foregrounds woman's place in and response to her circumstances, that expresses itself in metaphoric structures which reflect the female's connection and/or disjunction with her world: the nurturing, confining, shaping circle (womb, mouth, family); the phallic penetration by the outsider (unthinking, frightening, catalytic); the non-linear issue (escape) of the seminal force (the word, the artist). These are the interlocking and interacting impulses in The Optimist's Daughter.2 In this, her last published and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, all of her vast thematic resources concerning memory and myth, ritual and order, converge in the dual axes of the provocative but static image of a dead male as the center of a female ritual and the invisible but dynamic sense of a dead female, the true center of meaning in the novel. Such a focus is, admittedly, not crusading per se,3 but these are images of sexual politics that strike a chord in the feminist breast. Further, the resolution