The American Century: Literature since 1945 589of the United States and her home state of Mississippi in particular. Some of her
short stories are set elsewhere, in London, Italy, or Greece. But most of those collected
in, for instance, A Curtain of Green (1941), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride
of Innisfallen (1955) are situated in and around the South. So, too, are such novels as
The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and
The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). The tone and tenor of her fiction are remarkably
various. So, The Robber Bridegroom, set in the Natchez Trace region of Mississippi in
the late eighteenth century, based loosely on a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, mixes the
actual and the extraordinary to the point where the line between the two becomes
virtually indistinguishable. Not “a historical historical novel,” as Welty points out, it
nevertheless captures what is called at one point in the narrative “the dream of time
passing.” It explores the ways in which we try to understand the past and accommodate
it to the present, to attach memory to locality. And it shows how, strictly speaking,
landscape and history are both fictions, spun out of certain given facts of space and
time; and in being so are simultaneously “out there” and “in here,” a function of
matter but also of mind. Delta Wedding, the novel that followed The Robber
Bridegroom, is a magical but also slyly mocking plantation novel. It is set on a
Mississippi plantation in 1923, a year Welty chose from an almanac as being one in
which there were no wars or natural disasters to disrupt the normal pattern of
domestic life. The narrative is uneventful in the conventional sense: the uneventfulness
allowing Welty, she has said, “to concentrate on the people without any undue
influences, to write a story that showed life that went on on a small scale of its own.”
Beneath the surface of events, however, or rather the lack of them, a very different
story is being told, of “many little lives lived privately”: people living alone, leading
lives of extraordinary solitude, and even mystery. “More different and further apart
than the stars” from each other in most ways, any communality they share is partial,
any order or ceremony they achieve seems fleeting, provisional. It is as if, for all
the warmth of family and company, they inhabit what the narrator calls at one point
“a nameless forest.”
What these two novels share, despite all their differences, is what they share with
all Welty’s fiction. There is, first, an understanding of place as fact and feeling:
“location pertains to feeling,” Welty has said, “feeling profoundly pertains to place.”
There is, second, a sense of the dialectics of living and notably of historical
experience as a matter of record and myth, memory and reinvention. There is,
third, a conviction that it is through language, especially, that the human animal
realizes identity and community. And there is, finally, an animating belief that, as
Welty herself put it once, “ambiguity is a fact of life.” “All things are double,” the
reader is told in The Robber Bridegroom: so what is needed, in writing as well as
living, is “the power to look both ways and to see a thing from all sides.” All these
habits of mind and imagination come together in all Welty’s best stories: whether
they are comic, like “Why I Live at the P.O.,” lyrical like “A Still Moment,” tragic like
“Death of a Traveling Salesman,” or Gothic and grotesque like “Petrified Man.” For
that matter, they come together in a novel very different from either The Robber
Bridegroom or Delta Wedding: Losing Battles, a comedy that, with sympathy andGGray_c05.indd 589ray_c 05 .indd 589 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM