American Women writers after World War II

2.2 The analysis of the works of Eudora Welty “The Golden Apples” and “Delta Wedding”


As anyone working in a darkroom knows, there are many levels of exposure, and the rightness of a print’s saturation depends upon the viewer. For me, Welty’s vision burns in perfectly in her collection of interlocking short stories, The Golden Apples. Neither short fiction nor novel, strictly speaking, this book brings to fruition the subject Welty meditated upon in her previous collections of stories. As works depicting the sheltered individual within a closed community, both A Curtain of Green and A Wide Net augur the subject matter of The Golden Apples. Set in the community of Morgana, the individual stories focus on different members of the community. This technique offers a prismatic view of Welty’s experimenting with her subject of relationships, the relation of self to family and community. Just as the longer stories of A Wide Net represent a deepening of Welty’s concerns with the drama of the isolated life that she initiated in A Curtain of Green, the interconnected stories of The Golden Apples show Welty broadening these concerns. No longer are we in a singular situation, seeing only one brief span of a life from a single point of view; these stories allow us, and the characters, breathing space. We begin to see how different individuals may cope with isolation both over a span of time, and within a slightly larger community. As in the stories of her previous two collections, some individuals in Morgana fare better under the protective umbrella of a close family or community than do others. Welty lists the “main families” of Morgana as a preface to the book, inviting us to consider individuals within families, and families within communities. We read first about the MacLains and the Raineys, in “A Shower of Gold”; then “June Recital” features the Raineys, the Morrisons, and Miss Eckhart and her mother. When we look back at the list after reading these two stories, to situate ourselves more securely in Morgana, we see that Miss Eckhart and her mother are not on the list. Miss Eckhart is not “from” Morgana, nor would she and her mother be considered a proper family by native Morganans, much less one of the “main families.” In other words, even before we read a word of The Golden Apples, we can discern from this list the clannish nature of the town, and the provincial way that it views family and community. We may also discern from this list and its omissions an indication of narrative distance in The Golden Apples. By omitting Miss Eckhart, arguably the central character in the work, from the list of Morgana’s “main” families, the narrator indicates a slightly ironic stance that will last throughout the book. The narrator may represent something that is “true” within the framework of Morgana, but then she may also step back, and show us another “truth,” one that lies outside the framework of Morgana. Miss Eckhart is not “main,” from the point of view of the characters enclosed within the narrow world of Morgana, though she certainly is a central figure if we look at Morgana from the position that the narrator gives us. Once again, we see Welty’s emphasis on visual framing, the technique she introduces in “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” Merely by her singular existence, Miss Eckhart challenges the prevailing ways that Morganans live. But whether or not Miss Eckhart’s way of living is an alternative model to the potential for claustrophobia within family and community, Welty leaves open. On one hand, Miss Eckhart’s life seems ideal. She is free to follow her own passion and art, and as the town’s piano teacher she shepherds most of the children through their beginning and intermediate keyboard repertoire. Thus as a music teacher, she has the pleasure of her music and the added pleasure of being with children. On the other hand, Miss Eckhart does not seem happy or at peace with her life. When one of her pupils, Cassie Morrison, reflects in “June Recital” upon Miss Eckhart and her legacy, she reports various rumors about Miss Eckhart’s failed relationships. It is rumored that “She had been sweet on Mr. Hal Sissum, who clerked in the shoe department of Spights’ store” (CS 296). As far as Cassie knows, the two never even dated. When Mr. Sissum drowns, Miss Eckhart “would have gone headlong into the red clay hole” (CS 299) of his grave if the minister hadn’t grabbed her. This silent but powerful outpouring of grief suggests that Miss Eckhart harbors an equally powerful feeling for Mr. Sissum; she may, after all, wish to have a family, to “fit it” into Morgana. Mr. Sissum’s death slams the door on this possibility.
Miss Eckhart lives alone with her mother. After the funeral, we begin to realize what an unhappy life Miss Eckhart leads, from the devastating sadness of the narrator’s comment that Miss Eckhart is “a poor unwanted teacher and unmarried.... Of course her only associates from first to last were children; not counting Miss Snowdie” (her landlord; CS 306-07). Cassie reports seeing her slap her mother viciously, and “Then stories began to be told of what Miss Eckhart had really done to her old mother.... Some people said Miss Eckhart killed her mother with opium” (CS 307). Whether or not these rumors are true, they offer a glimpse into the kind of atmosphere in which Miss Eckhart exists in Morgana. The community is not kind to her, and Cassie concludes that “Her love never did anybody any good” (CS 307). What seems on the surface to be a potentially enriching life of following one’s artistic passion and passing that passion on to the young, becomes in the fishbowl of Morgana just as devastating an experience for Miss Eckhart as for any other Welty character caught within a closely-guarded family. Miss Eckhart dies alone in a mental institution in Jackson, which reminds us of Lily Daw, en route to a mental institution until her suspect husband-to-be arrives at the train station and plucks her off the train. If we look only to Miss Eckhart, Lily Daw, and characters like them, the choice for a life within a sheltering community—the very life that Welty herself led—seems to be no choice at all: either marriage or a mental ward.
Other individuals in The Golden Apples seem to survive the rigors of the intensely sheltered, myopic community better than Miss Eckhart, and give us a different view of community. Yet these are all members of the youngest generation of Morganans, and we are not shown in The Golden Apples how their lives will play out. Both Loch and Cassie Morrison early on thrive on their Morgana upbringing. As we see them in “June Recital” and in “Moon Lake,” each exudes in youth a level-headedness and balance of spirit that is rare in a Welty character. As a young adult, Loch leaves Morgana for New York, presumably for a contented life: “He likes it there,” Cassie says. Loch’s sister, however, stays in Morgana, teaching piano and obsessing over the suicide of her mother, (she plants hyacinth bulbs in a pattern that spells out her mother’s name), not as “happy” as her brother.
Unlike Loch and Cassie, Cassie’s friend Virgie Rainey has struggled under the scrutiny of Morgana. Her family is so poor that her mother dyes shoe strings with pokeberry juice to fashion for her a laced up collar like the one on the latest store-bought sailor blouse. All the town girls make fun of her poverty. Virgie also struggles within her family; her independent spirit allows her musical ability to shine—she is Miss Eckhart’s star pupil—yet music and the arts are totally beyond her family’s grasp. The goats are allowed into the parlor in the Rainey house, where they snack on Virgie’s old practice piano. ⁷
The final story in The Golden Apples finds Virgie confronting her mother’s death, and with this death, Virgie breaks all ties to family and community. At her mother’s funerary viewing, Morgana tries to reach out to Virgie, but “They were all people who had never touched her before who tried now to struggle with her, their faces hurt. She was hurting them all, shocking them” (CS 435). She packs up her mother’s house, sells the cattle, and readies to leave Morgana. Cassie connects Virgie with Loch: “‘You’ll go away like Loch ... A life of your own, away—I’m so glad for people like you and Loch, I am really’“ (CS 457). For Cassie, the focus of Loch and Virgie’s future is on the individual’s ability to control or “own” her own life, and to lead that life “away.” These are things, it seems, that Cassie cannot now do in Morgana. With Virgie, Welty suggests for the first time in her stories, that something unmitigatingly “bright” can come out of isolation for one who understands the narrowness of small town life, and who suffers its shackles. Welty leaves open the possibility for Virgie and for Loch that the sheltered, isolated life they have known in Morgana, with its magnified attention to the individual, has prepared them to go out in the world. Perhaps there can be, after all, some redemption from the insular life; the scrutiny that the small town places on the individual can, it seems, give one an impression of one’s own importance and the confidence that accompanies such importance.
With Virgie, Welty shows us that it is possible that the kind of life Morgana offers can also foster a rich and perceptive inner life. The pressures that townspeople and family have placed upon Virgie Rainey seem in the end to act on her as pressure and heat act upon coal: they form a diamondWith the stories of The Golden Apples, Welty is not only able to suggest a bright light at the end of Virgie Rainey’s insular life, but she is also able to intensify her scrutiny of the sheltered individual, if for no other reason than the interlocking stories allow a revisitation of characters at various stages in their lives. In all three books, protection of the individual can result in harm, or at least in a static condition in which certain personalities—Livvie, Cassie Morrison, Lily Daw, for instance—can move only from one circumstance of protection to another. Jenny, the victim of gang rape in “At the Landing,” is certainly Welty’s most memorable character of this type, though The Golden Apples presents several characters who try to leave Morgana, or try to exist outside of the social system, but cannot. The MacLain twins, Ran and Eugene, each flee Morgana—Ran leaves his wife and tries to live alone; Eugene moves to San Francisco where he, too, is in a troubled marriage—but in the end, both return to home base, in states of defeat. Ran goes back to his wife, even though she does not love him; Eugene leaves San Francisco and his wife to return to his family in Morgana, where he dies. The sustained quality of The Golden Apples allows Welty to show the effects of a sheltered life over the course of a lifetime; significantly, she chooses to explore the “dark” side. Nevertheless, Virgie Rainey, the most convincing example of the “bright” side, the one who seems to profit from her experience, is left at the end of The Golden Apples on the brink of her life. Welty’s emphasis here is upon Virgie’s victory over her experience, rather than upon Virgie’s experience in Morgana.