Welty’s Affirmations

Abstract

Eudora Welty’s long career has brought her respect, affection and, in recent years, more public regard than most writers achieve. But she has not yet been accorded the serious attention of the academic community outside the American South, because the comic, affirmative mode in which she writes and the grounding of her work in women’s experience has led many critics to dismiss it as sentimental, merely charming or trivial. Elizabeth Bowen’s 1947 praise for the ‘heart-breaking sweetness’ in Delta Wedding and its ‘sense of the momentum, joy, pain and mystery of life’ defines qualities of affirmation which mark most of Welty’s fiction but which are unfashionable in the ‘Postmodern Age’. Women writers have commonly been charged with sentimentality and triviality for concentrating on domestic relationships and female experience, but the feminist revolution in literary criticism is gradually shifting the criteria for determining literary value. The same kind of attention that moved Virginia Woolf to the forefront of twentieth-century English fiction is beginning to be applied to Eudora Welty.