Feminism and Sexuality in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding Essay

Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding is a very complex novel, in spite of the apparent simplicity of the plot: at first sight, the story only describes the family life of the Fairchilds in the Mississippi Delta. The book only covers approximately one week of the year 1923 and revolves around the preparations for the wedding and the wedding itself of the prettiest daughter of the family, Dabney Fairchild to Troy Flavin. Although the plot is quite simple, the book is crammed with numerous characters and the intricate web of relations between them, and has a rich symbolism. First of all, the text reveals Welty’s ideas about knowledge and the perception of reality: the numerous voices in her fiction have different ways of looking at reality and of knowing, and the author emphasizes these differences. Ellen and George seem to be the characters that have a way of looking at the world which comes very close to that of Welty herself. Her fiction imitates the same pattern of knowing, by leaving out reason and systematic thought, and apprehending the surrounding universe in its wholeness, as when one contemplates a landscape without thinking of anything else, as nine year old Laura does, when she looks out of the window of the train: â€Å"Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it.†(Welty, 1946, p. 4) Thus, Welty’s fiction seems to borrow the technique of photography by capturing in a single shot both the apparent reality and the essence of this reality. As Welty notices in her essay, Writer’s Beginnings quoted by Carson (1992), the role of writing is to make one single picture of the inner and external aspect of every thing, or as Carson puts it, to put two pictures in a single frame: â€Å"A lamp I knew of was a view of London till it was lit; but then it was the Great Fire of London, and you could go beautifully to sleep by it. The lamp alight is the combination of internal and external, glowing at the imagination as one; and so is the good novel. Seeing that these inner and outer surfaces do lie so close together and so implicit in each other, the wonder is that human life so often separates them, or appears to, and it takes a good novel to put them back together.†(Carson, 1992, p.17) The world of the Fairchilds, as described in Delta Wedding, is rich and complex precisely because the reader constantly gets the impression he is looking at more pictures in a single frame at the same time, or at more layers of reality: the glimpses into the inner lives of all the characters which seem to appear on the scene all at once plus the picturesque descriptions of the Southern world, with its customs and traditions make up a very complex tableau, which perfectly imitates the impressions we may have when reviewing our day-to- day lives. The world of the Fairchilds which seems to be so particular and impermeable as to be a world in itself, with its own spirit, can be extended in fact as a picture of human societies in general. The world of the plantations is a world dominated by women, by their culture and femininity, which resemble that of Virginia Woolf. This is not to say however, that the women actually have the power in since their rule is limited to the life of the household and the family, while being completely separated from the rest of the world. Still, the limited universe of the household is like a matriarchy, in which motherhood, nursing and all the trivial affairs related to daily life, like cooking are the most potent symbols. It is very important to note thus that Welty’s feminism consists precisely of maintaining the traditional in her fiction and, at the same time opening the ways to freedom for the women, be that sexual or intellectual. There are many signs of the assertion of female sexuality, especially in Robbie’s relation to George for example, or in Shelley’s rejection of marriage and implicitly, of male domination. Sexuality, as the affirmation of the female body, best represents the idea of freedom and liberation of the woman, who no longer avoids her own identity. Robbie’s desire of finding her place in her own marriage through her sexuality is very significant for Welty’s presentation of the women. Thus, Welty represents a powerful feminine world, in which, although all the traditional patriarchal patterns are still preserved, the women impose their own modes of thinking and their own identity through the very traditions which are considered to be the reason for their enslavement. Thus, in many parts of the story the traditional way of thinking of the aunts imposes itself over and over again. For example, although the aunts know that Dabney is probably pregnant and is forced to rush into the marriage with Troy, they keep silent on the theme, not being willing to inquire further than the mere surface of facts, as Dabney complains:   Ã¢â‚¬Å"They don’t make me say if I love Troy or if I don’t, Dabney was thinking, clicking her heels in the pantry. But by the time she came back to the porch, the flowers in a Mason jar of water, she knew she would never say anything about love after all, if they didn’t want her to. Suppose they were afraid to ask her, little old aunts.† (Welty, 1946, p.48) As Carson comments, the aunts’ attitude is cause exactly by the way in which the Fairchilds are used to look at the world: they always stay on the surface of things and relations, seeing happiness and love everywhere, without really being aware of their or of the others’ identity as individuals: â€Å"One of the reasons the family fails to know each other as individuals [†¦] is that they are so conscious of each other as part of the family.†(Carson, 1992, p. 78) This way of knowing seems to be proper of the Fairchild spirit, and is the same as Carson (1992) describes as ‘tyrannical’, attempting at categorizing and dividing everything, instead of looking for the essence of reality:   Ã¢â‚¬Å"The knowledge that deals only with facts; the knowledge that aims at control and manipulation; the knowledge that puts things and people into boxes and bottles and categories–this is tyrannical knowledge, and it is the way of knowing that most people settle for. George’s knowing is different. He â€Å"could have lifted a finger and touched, held the butterfly, but he did not† (p. 37): without possessing the butterfly–and thus perhaps killing it–he makes it part of himself.† (Carson, 1992, p. 83) As Ellen perceives it, the essence of life consist of the repetitions and the cycles and even the monotony of everything: â€Å"The repeating fields, the repeating cycles of season and her own life–there was something in the monotony itself that was beautiful, rewarding–perhaps to what was womanly within her. No, she had never had time–much time at all, to contemplate [†¦] but she knew. (Welty, 1946, p. 240) This negation of reasoning, and the impressionist way of looking at reality are again a sign of the femininity that dominates the world Welty describes. It is clear then, that in this restricted social circle the women are powerful precisely because they dominate through their pattern of thinking as well as through their mastery of the household: â€Å"[†¦]the women of the Fairchilds who since the Civil War, or – who knew? – since the Indian times, ran the household and had everything at their fingertips – not the men.†(Welty, 1946, p.8) Ann Romines who discuses feminism in Delta Wedding emphasized the recurrence, among the other symbols for the household, of the cakes and recipes, which are somehow blended with the women’s thoughts: â€Å"To read Delta Wedding, one must follow the cues suggested by the Delta women’s culture: one must read the cakes. The novel’s women are practiced in such reading. Next day, when offered a slice of Ellen’s completed cake, Aunt Tempe takes one bite and exclaims, â€Å"Oh, Mashula’s coconut!† (Romines, 1997, p. 603)Thus, the recipes which blend with women’s thoughts in the text signal a strong female culture, which does not however deny the traditional role of the woman in society. The feminism of the novel is constructed thus without departing from tradition and Welty points thus to the fact that a feminine culture has always existed, even if it manifested itself differently from the male culture. Reference List: Carson, B. H. (1992). Eudora Welty: two pictures at once in her frame. Troy: Whitston. Romines, A.(1997). Reading the cakes: ‘Delta Wedding’ and the texts of Southern women’s culture. The   Ã‚  Ã‚  Mississippi Quarterly, 50 (4) 601-609 Welty, E. (1946). Delta wedding. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.