Eudora Welty’s View On Gender Discourse

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) is one of the most famous women writers in the20th century. As one of the prominent writers of Southern Renaissance, Welty has created many works, among which short stories are more reputed. Her short stories, as the excellent works of the Southern literature, not only inherit the tradition of the Southern literature and write about the similar themes as those of the old generation in the similar techniques, but also have its own unique insight into the fast-changing society and the relationship between men and women.The Golden Apples is Welty’s favorite and most outstanding short story collection, which fuses the Classical Greco-Roman myth with the reality in the American South in the20th century and is often noted for its modern and unique writing techniques and narrative strategies. The Golden Apples differs from Welty’s other stories collection of loose structure; it is made up of seven short stories united by place, time, characters and theme. The stories in The Golden Apples are set in a small town named Morgana of Mississippi, all characters in the book have a relationship with each other, and the time spans over forty years. Like a series of TV play reflecting life in small towns, we can read each story of The Golden Apples independently. Nevertheless, if it has been read as a whole, it would reflect every aspect of small-town life and a larger theme.Guided by Luce Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference and Parler-femme, this thesis tries to explore Welty’s view on gender discourse implied in The Golden Apples by analyzing the fate of male characters and female characters living under female discourse. This paper is divided into three chapters:Chapter One mainly explores three male images:King MacLain, the emblem of masculinity; Eugene MacLain and Ran MacLain, heirs to distorted masculinity and men in Pre-Oedipal state. By examining the fates of three male images who blindly keep away from anything feminine in The Golden Apples, this chapter tries to figure out Welty’s view on construction of harmonic gender discourse on male’s part, that is, men are also victimized by distorted values of society dominated by male discourse.Chapter Two focuses on three female images:Miss Eckhart, outsider of community, and Cassie Morrison, heiress to community and Virgie Rainey, self-exile from community. Among them, Miss Eckhart’s life experience showed that extremely pursuing personal ideal and giving up the chance to have a harmonic relationship with patriarchal genealogy would result in tragic fate; Cassie Morrison’s ending implied that women, without recognizing the need to build her special identity as an adult, would continue the vicious recycle of patriarchal discourse while internalizing patriarchal values; Virgie Rainey, self-exile from patriarchal and matriarchal genealogies, has to go to her unknown future. Based on Irigaray’s view on "sexual difference", this part explores women’s wrong doing in constructing their gender discourse.Chapter Three analyzes the causes for tragedies of male and female characters in The Golden Apples from three aspects:social order, economic oppression and personal defects. In The Golden Apples, though Eudora Welty does not give any solution to male and female characters to deal with their problem, her gender politics do not stop at the criticism of male-discourse-dominated society. In fact, Welty’s view on harmonic gender discourse actually bears resemblance with Luce Irigrary’s, that is "an alternative discourse to the ’dry desolation of reason’, a place where ’subject’ and ’Other’ mingle and embrace, where jouissance flourishes, and where language and subjectivity are interrogated, annihilated and reconfigured"(Irigaray, Speculum191).Based on the above analysis, it is not difficult for us to find that male-dominated discourse and a kind of female discourse in opposition to the male one are not the best choices for constructing harmonic gender discourse. For Welty, her view on gender discourse implied in The Golden Apples is that men and women should construct their own discourse based on the respect for sexual difference, where "subject" and "Other" mingle and embrace.