The Upended Pastoral in Welty's The Golden Apples

Abstract

Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples exemplifies the upended pastoral through subversive symbolism of natural elements and uses dynamic natural settings to reveal individual characters' resistance to oppressive community ideologies and awareness of the often-inescapable nature of those ideologies. Two natural elements that figure strongly in The Golden Apples are bodies of water and trees. Through the short story cycle, Welty manipulates the traditional trope of water as purifying and epiphanic. Instead, bodies of water frequently highlight class divisions and represent the impossibility of being part of the community once ejected from it. Often sites of death, near death, and faked death, Welty's bodies of water are deceptively placid but are portals to dissolved relationships. Additionally, The Golden Apples' woods and trees are settings for Morgana's boys and men to behave in aggressively masculine ways. These locations portray masculine performance as comical and expose male characters' insecurities about their reputations. For Morgana's women, trees are associated with sorrow, anger, resignation, unachieved dreams, and barriers that exist between the individual and the community.