Welty's Golden Imagination

Abstract

One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. By Suzanne Marrs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. xix + 280 pp. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Suzanne Marrs's publications, following her dissertation, have all been devoted to Eudora Welty and her work. Consequently, her latest book on Welty, One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, illustrates the benefits and drawbacks of focusing a career's work on a single author. Marrs can provide us with a sensitive and thoroughly researched view of the artist's imagination through her mastery of biographical and archival materials, but loses that authority when she strays beyond Welty's strengths and her own. There is little attempt in this book to place Welty's work in the contexts of literary theory and American literary history. Although Chapter 3 concerns history and memory in The Robber Bridegroom and The Wide Net, there are no references to theoretical works on historical fiction, from Lukacs on down, which would actually support Marrs's argument that Welty uses her historical fiction to comment on the present as well as the past. Marrs claims that "We still have no generic name for the closely linked book of stories that Welty produced," The Golden Apples, when such works are generally called short story sequences or cycles, and, again, there are books devoted to this topic, particularly American short story sequences, which are not referenced. More seriously, there are no references to Henry James and The Art of Fiction when Marrs describes the way Welty transformed a seemingly trivial anecdote she had heard into a meaningful and significant work of fiction, as in "the Death of a Traveling Salesman." This process is remarkably similar to James's accounts of how a "germ" from reality acted upon his imagination until it became fiction. Again, there is a body of scholarship here that could help illuminate Welty's imaginative process. [End Page 141] Like any other artist, Welty had her favored themes and topics and had the sense to work from these strengths. Marrs, however, does not seem to be willing to concede Welty her areas of imaginative expertise, but repeatedly tries to assert her interest in politics and world events and the ways these matters appear in her fiction as if Welty were under some obligation to treat these topics. While it would be difficult for most readers to believe that these were central topics for Welty, Marrs succeeds when she discusses the two stories, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators" that are explicitly about the violence and hatred of the civil rights era in Mississippi. She is also illuminating when she discusses the portrait of Aaron Burr in "First Love" as Welty's exploration of fascist leaders in World War II or comments on the "dramatic irony" in Delta Wedding since the Fairchilds are oblivious to the fact that they would have "to face a severe economic depression and a world war" and leave "the relatively secure world of 1923." Often though, the discussion seems forced, as if Marrs were dutifully bowing to race, class, and gender. For example, the discussions of race at the end of the chapters on and The Optimist's Daughter seem anticlimactic and irrelevant after the excellent analyses of Welty's imaginative process which precede them. Marrs's strengths, and they are formidable, lie in her use of biographical knowledge of Welty and of the Welty archives, and here she uses her knowledge of Welty's life to argue against fashionable trends in scholarship and focus on what worked for Welty. While many might assert that Welty's choice to live in Mississippi with her widowed and later ailing mother limited her autonomy as a woman and experience as a writer, Marrs shows how much Welty benefited from these apparent constrictions. She proves through her account of Chestina Welty's life that she was not interested in conforming to a conventional woman's role herself, nor did she...