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Images of Memory in Eudora Welty's the Optimist's Daughter

Flannery O'Connor once commented on the difference between her way of writing and Eudora Welty's way. She said, "I am not one of the subtle sensitive writers like Eudora Welty. I see only what is outside and what sticks out a mile, such things as the sun that nobody has to uncover or be bright to see." (1) It is precisely those respective qualities identified by O'Connor that render her own meanings so starkly difficult and Eudora Welty's so elusive. It may not have occurred to O'Connor that things sticking out a mile can be harder to see than things hidden behind doors, but she was aware of something in Welty's mental, sidedoor approach to life and fiction that allows her to slip through our fingers. This characteristic of Welty's work is especially apparent in the final section of The Optimist's Daughter, published some sixteen years after O'Connor's remark. (2) The book is about the struggle of a widow in her middle forties to make sense out of the past, to understand her mother's and then her father's dying, to comprehend why her father took for a second wife a crass, lowbred woman younger than his daughter, and to interpret her own brief marriage ended suddenly by war and death. Although the novel's overt action centers around the death of Judge McKelva following eye surgery in New Orleans, and his funeral and burial at home in Mount Salus, Mississippi, its meanings are realized through conflicting motions in the mind of Laurel McKelva Hand, daughter of Judge Clinton McKelva and Becky McKelva. Welty's several themes are death, human relationship, and the effects of memory on the past, but through the use of image, symbol, ritual, and parable she weaves them together into one thematic whole. Death, Welty says, plunges the dead into the past by snapping the present shut, and what becomes important then is what living memory does with the past. Laurel must now ponder the nature of her parent's love; she must reconsider the brief perfection of the love she and Philip Hand had shared; and she must recognize that it is not the dead but the living who, in their loneliness and uncertainty, are in danger. Imagery and symbol are especially important in conveying the elusive character of Welty's idea. The book's most pervasive system of symbolic imagery centers around birds, with the first reference coming in the very beginning of the book when the Judge associates his initial awareness of vision problems with the flashing of bright tin reflectors in his fig tree. The reflectors are remnants of Becky's efforts to protect the fruit from the bold appetites of birds. They are ineffectual, of course, as evidenced later when an irreverent band of cardinals is seen zooming playfully at their own reflections in the shiny round tins. The futility of trying to protect anything precious from outside incursions is one of the painful lessons Laurel learns from her father's dying. She grows increasingly disturbed as friends and townspeople invent an heroic past for Judge McKelva while he lies helpless in his coffin. Foiled in her wish to close the coffin lid against the eyes of the townspeople, Laurel feels that her father has "reached at this moment the danger point of his life," for it seems almost "as though he were in the process of being put on trial here instead of being viewed in his casket" (pp. 100-101)and she were being forced to testify in his behalf. Laurel can provide no more protection to her father against this joyous, irresponsible myth-making than the reflectors can provide to the fig tree. Miss Adele Courtland's comment about the undaunted cardinals, and, by implication, about the neighbors' gossip on a day following the funeral, could well apply to the storytelling ritual acted out in the presence of the corpse: "Oh, it's a game, isn't it, nothing but a game" (p. 138)! Laurel was even less able to provide protection for her father while he lived. She could not save him from Becky's scorn, and she was too far away in Chicago to save him from marrying Fay. …