Although they serve a common end, written and spoken language complement and compete with each other in Eudora Welty's Losing Battles. Teaching, writing, and books are province of Julia Mortimer, who dies on morning of Granny Vaughn's reunion. Lexie Renfro had presumed to be Julia's successor, she fell down on Virgil and could not finish her training Normal. Gloria Short, Julia's chosen heir, also denies that role when she marries Jack Renfro, her pupil. Julia's opposite, Granny Vaughn, commands a different province, spoken language and its transmission of family history. These feminine modes of expression differ in that written language (books, letters) conceptualizes, moves toward abstractions; whereas oral language deals with concrete, experiential.(1) In a process marked by both modes pulpit oratory of late Grandpa Vaughn diminishes into that of Brother Bethune speaking (to Granny's disparagement) from family reunion pulpit. When Grandpa Vaughn's patriarchal voice is replaced by Brother Bethune's, his Baptist conception of authority (infant baptism can't save souls from sin) is reduced to local mythology, a shift from oracular to anecdotal. Both feminine voice modes thus mark a decline in male authority. Beulah rules her family, not her husband Ralph; and their idolized son Jack's impulsiveness gives rise to demonstrable instances of male folly. Rather than looking inside Curly Stovall's open safe for missing gold ring, for example, Jack carries away whole safe: but he's a man! Done it man's way, Aunt Nanny says.(2) Even account of Grandpa Vaughn's daddy, builder of Damascus Church, implies criticism: he'd preach in church on Sunday and rest of week we could stand on his own front porch and have it to look at (p. 181) - six days, not one, to admire his creation. Whether through Julia's language (meant to lead Banner beyond parochialism) or Granny Vaughn's oral history (to perpetuate family values), male authority is questioned: not out of malice or subversion, rather in an undercurrent of irony, sometimes funny, sometimes, sad. Battles and banners are seminal images in Losing Battles; they mark main conflict of novel between local and absolute. Thus Curly Stovall's store and Gloria's Banner School face each other across road that runs through town as if in course of continuing battle (p. 410). Jack's noisy fight with Curly in store over missing gold ring disrupts Gloria's effort across road to teach her class poem about Columbus and gray Azores. She teaches an ideal of outreach; Jack and Curly's rivalry becomes a comic brawl. Other contenders are two ancient, discolored sawdust poles [left from Dearman's sawmill business] ... like Monitor and Merrimack in history book (p. 410). Aside from its pictures, conceptualizes Civil War issues in abstraction of printed words, whereas actual sawdust piles not only look like ironcla ships, are debilitated physical remnants of Reconstruction itself. The issues of War become localized in concrete images. Written words rather than images signifying combat appear in letter from Julia that Judge Moody reads to reunion (to family's displeasure, who want it told to them); Julia wrote, I've fought a hard war with ignorance. Except in those cases that you can count on your fingers, I lost every battle (p. 298). Moody himself is one success who stayed in Boone County, he never forgave Julia for compelling him to stay there. As a judge he remains her judgment on Banner's ignorance - the very pocket (p. 304). Lexie, Ralph Renfro's old maid sister who wanted to teach school and who dampens spirit of reunion, likewise remarks to Ralph: these children of yours are least prepared to be corrected of any I ever ran up against. How they'll conduct themselves on Day of Judgment I find hard to imagine (p. …
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