Synopses & Reviews
Faced with Eudora Weltyandrsquo;s preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Weltyandrsquo;s handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness.
Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimistandrsquo;s Daughter, and her memoir, One Writerandrsquo;s Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play.
Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness.
Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.
Review
andldquo;The jury is no longer out. After decades of scholarly debate about where Eudora Welty stands on race, the twelve contributors to this superb collection have finally settled the matter. By focusing on Weltyandrsquo;s oblique style and technical intricacy, they convincingly illuminate how race, the color line, and white blindness function in her photography and her fiction.andrdquo;andmdash;Suzanne W. Jones, author of Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties
Review
andldquo;This collection makes an impressive, substantive addition to Welty scholarship. Developing fresh, provocative readings likely to revise, perhaps even upend, earlier views of Weltyandrsquo;s approaches to African American themes and characterization, the essayists read anew Weltyandrsquo;s fiction, photographs, and memoir.andrdquo;andmdash;Peggy Prenshaw, author of Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography
About the Author
Harriet Pollack is a professor of English at Bucknell University. Her previous books include Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination and Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade?
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Reading Welty on Whiteness and Race 1
Harriet Pollack
Welty, Race, and the Patterns of a Life 23
Suzanne Marrs
Parting the Veil: Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and the Crying Wounds of Jim Crow 48
Susan V. Donaldson
Eudora Weltyandrsquo;s Making a Date, Grenada, Mississippi: One Photograph, Five Performances 73
Keri Watson
andldquo;The Little Storeandrdquo; in the Segregated South: Race and Consumer Culture in Eudora Weltyandrsquo;s Writing and Photography 95
Mae Miller Claxton
Secret Agents: Weltyandrsquo;s African Americans 114
David Mcwhirter
Laughing in the Dark: Race and Humor in Delta Wedding 131
Sarah Ford
andldquo;I Knowed Him Then Like I Know Me Nowandrdquo;: Whiteness, Violence, and Interracial Male Intimacy in Delta Wedding and andldquo;Where Is the Voice Coming From?andrdquo; 148
Jean C. Griffith
Bodies on the Brink: Vision, Violence, and Self- Destruction in Delta Wedding 165
Donnie Mcmahand
andldquo;Black Men Dressed in Goldandrdquo;: Racial Violence in Eudora Weltyandrsquo;s andldquo;The Burningandrdquo; 185
Patricia Yaeger
Ice Picks, Guinea Pigs, and Dead Birds: Dramatic Weltian Possibilities in andldquo;The Demonstratorsandrdquo; 199
Rebecca Mark
Rethinking the Unthinkable: Tracing Weltyandrsquo;s Changing View of the Color Line in Her Letters, Essays, and The Optimistandrsquo;s Daughter 224
Julia Eichelberger
Contributors 253
Index 257