Warming Reveries: A Mosaic Approach to Reading Eudora Welty’s “The Whistle”

Abstract

TREVOR CUNNINGTON Independent Scholar Warming Reveries: A Mosaic Approach to Reading Eudora Welty’s “The Whistle” And so he was quiet & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack, Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black. And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he open’d the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon the clouds and sport in the wind; And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father & never want joy And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm So if all do their duty they need not fear harm. —From William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper” Introduction HAVING WON MANY AWARDS FOR LITERATURE, INCLUDING THE Pulitzer Prize; having had her home in Jackson, Mississippi turned into a museum; and having had one of the early e-mail programs, developed in 1990 by Steve Dorner and consisting of over 50,000 lines of code, named after her,1 Eudora Welty looms large as a giant of American literature. Famous for her depictions of life in small towns and rural areas in the South and for her mobilization of the idioms of the South for humorous effect, she resembles another giant (at least in these respects): William Faulkner. Not all of her stories, however, were funny. “The 1 “Working on e-mail day and night, [Dorner] said, ‘I felt like I lived at the post office,’ so he named his program Eudora” in reference to the short story ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’” (Thomas). 626 Trevor Cunnington Whistle” is a grim story characterized by silence more than by dialogue, a silence penetrated by an audible signal of danger that serves as a painful reminder of the two protagonists’ destitution. The story in some respects functions as consciousness-raising with regards to the plight of poor whites in the South, who inherited a legacy of exploitation because slave labor rendered their ancestors’ labor nearly superfluous. Although in the racial politics of post-emancipation America their white skin functioned as a “pscyhological wage” (Roediger 12), their poverty and often their relative powerlessness made this wage scarcely more than a pittance. Theprotagonistsof“TheWhistle”strikethereaderasfamiliarbecause they conform in many ways to a “stigmatype”—to use a neologism invented by sociologist Matt Wray to describe the way epithets such as “whitetrash”buttressboundariesinthesocialhierarchy—ofpoorwhites in the South. To analyze this story, I use several different methodologies inliteraryanalysisandcommunications,includingnewhistoricism,new criticism,rhetoricalanalysis,contentanalysis,andideologycritique.This mosaicmethodologicalapproachhastheadvantageofopeningadialogue between methods; one method can fill a gap another one leaves. For example, while quantitative content analysis can produce relatively objective information about texts, it can entirely miss the point of texts that rely heavily on irony, parody, or satire. On the other hand, some deconstructive readings ignore textual evidence that contradicts their approach, despite their creativity. Furthermore, such a mosaic approach is more productive in the sense that each implementation remains incomplete, and therefore invites participation and further research. In the conclusion, I interrogate the purposes and effectiveness of ideology critique in the examination of literature. The affective economy of sympathy and pity used by Welty in this story becomes part of a broader social process whereby poor whites are systematically denied access to self-representation, crucial to upward social mobility.2 However, a straightforward attack on this affective economy is riddled with pitfalls and potholes. 2 John Hartigan has argued that poor whites are obtaining “limited access” to selfrepresentation , in part via the decentralization of cultural production heralded by the internet. While this is true, we cannot ignore other social trends that neutralize this limitedformofempowerment,suchasclassventriloquisminfashion.Thisventriloquism allows the upper classes to poach the authenticity of poor white existence without acquiring any of the attached stigma. 627 Warming Reveries Pity and Empathy as Affective Tools of Poor White Representation: Literary Context In a...