A Worn Path, Eudora Welty - Elaine Orr (essay date 1992)
Elaine Orr (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: '"Unsettling Every Definition of Otherness': Another Reading of Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path'," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 57, No. 2, May, 1992, pp. 57-72.
[In the following essay, Orr perceives Welty's implicit examination of the writing process itself in the text of "A Worn Path," and argues that the reader is challenged "both to unlearn and to relearn, that is, to enter the process of creation. " She further notes that "the story plays upon our 'knowledge ' of 'others ' to resist the 'wornness' of old scripts."]
Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," first published in 1941, is one of her most widely read stories. But to date, it has not received a critical reading that questions the interpretation of Phoenix Jackson offered by the white attendant at the end of the story. Phoenix is "a charity case." Given the story's "thick" rendering of Phoenix and the textual evidence that the attendant is an...
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