Space,History,and The Politics Of Identity In Eudora Welty's Early Works

Eudora Welty(1909-2001)is famed for her panoramic representation of the local life in her hometown in Mississippi.A maestro adept at absorbing delineations of local dialect,customs and folklores,she has captured numerous awards in her writing career,including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.Domestic Welty scholarship only converges on a few of her more celebrated prize-winning works,and centers upon such traditional themes as subversive female image,mythology and grotesqueness.The Western academia has explored Welty's writings from a much broader spectrum of perspectives,ranging from feminism,psychoanalysis,gender and masculinity to home and her sense of place.Welty's aesthetics of place has aroused fierce controversies within the academia.One school of critics maintain it is an aesthetic of antidevelopment that perpetuates a neo-Agrarian sense of the traditional South;that Welty is conceptually and ideologically resistant to confronting various grave transformations in the South.Such view is directly countered by others who insist that the author is poised to embrace change,seeing change not as loss but as opportunity to bring about vital meanings and truths to the South.Behind this debate on Welty's attitude towards change stands a significant but largely neglected landscape in her early works(1930s-1950s),the Southern modernity.The modernity in the U.S.South inspires the writer's critical reflection on the Southern society,probing into the myths in both its history and reality.This dissertation demonstrates how variegated spaces unmask the significant verities and meanings in her reflection triggered by Southern modernity.Among others,Welty registers the experiential impoverishment and alienation,gradual disintegration in community and family,as well as deterioration in traditional ethics in the South that arise from what Walter Benjamin terms "the shock of modernity." That her hero/heroines constantly return for spatial perception of history and heritages serves to rekindle collective memories and cultivate a "historical sensibility"(Friedrich Nietzsche),which is to inspire and instruct life.Yet,as Welty idealizes this historical sensibility,she also appears cognizant of the futility of the South clinging to its history and memories to maintain its traditional,intact society.The first chapter concludes by advancing that the obsession with or even superstition of history and heritages,with a mythologized Southern past,consolidates the various social,gender and racial hierarchies in the region.Welty's half-suppressed skepticism about the mythologizing of the past,of place,and of a "distinctive" Southern community constitutes the central focus of the second chapter.Closely investigated herein are those defining values and features of the South that turn out more oppressive than nourishing.This is testified not only by the author's modern female Gothic but also by the Foucauldian carceralism in marriage,kinship and community.Welty takes pains to repeatedly highlight the conflicts between the transgressive individuals(for independence,sexuality,knowledge)and social confinement.The movements in and across all sorts of spaces,physical,imaginary as well as narratorial,is as fundamental for breaking down imprisonment for freedom and knowledge as for effecting a self-liberation and transformation.Such an aesthetic of movement in search of self-knowledge,change,and liberation is in essence a "reactionary" modernist aesthetic,which bears testimony to Welty's implicit critique of the mythologized genius loci,home and Southern community in particular,and the mystification in Southern literature and culture in general.The third chapter puts forth that Welty's reactionary modernism embodies her acquired modernity,which is developed in the author's long exposure to the modernist literature,discourses of the New Woman,and movies in the South.It revolts against the social hierarchies and the established authorities of tradition and reality,deconstructing the mythologizing of community and realities by the patriarchal authority.This modernism goes further to question the monopolistic narration of a shared,monolithic community and identity by patriarchy like the Agrarians throughout history,for such narration serves to maintain an exceptionalist,isolated white supremacist society.Welty's profound rumination over Southern community and the politics of identity strongly resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy's meditation on the presuppositionless "inoperative community." Nancy's philosophical inquiry on community throws light on Welty's writing motives:to challenge all politics and ideologies behind the expressions of identity and allegiance,while calling upon readers to constantly reflect upon the cultural and social norms behind the exclusionary allegiance of identity.Such critical reflection attests to a Southern cosmopolitanism that envisages a conscious self-dissociation from any avowed(parochial)identity,along with an active exposition(Nancy)to the strange otherness within and outside of the self.For only when the strangeness within and outside the selfhood is actively encountered,engaged and recognized,can the defensive construction against the alien other be deactivated and dismantled,either for an individual,a community or a nation.The conclusion reverts to the debate on Welty's posture on change in the academia and points out that the grave transformations unleashed by Southern modernity have always stood as an implicit motif in the writer's early works,that her reflection on history and the politics of identity is closely connected with modernity.On the one hand,Welty betrays partial inheritance of the Agrarian thought as she resorts to Southern history,heritages,as well as collective memories to assuage the unprecedented shocks of modernity.On the other,modernity in the South,especially her acquired modernity,brings the writer to recognize the social,gender and racial hierarchies behind the Agrarianism and the mythologizing of Southern history and heritages.Welty's singularity resides not only in her subversion of the patriarchal myths of the Southern community and identity,but also in her transcending the shackles of time and space to unmask the normative exclusionism underneath the politics of any unitarized identity.The writer's close scrutiny of Southern history and the politics of identity strongly echoes Judith Butler's rethinking of the other and the politics of recognition in community imagination in the wake of the "9/11." Their surprising similarity bears out the contemporary relevance of this dissertation.