SOURCE: "The Languages of Losing Battles," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 67-82.

[In the following essay, Bass analyzes the female characters' use of written and spoken language in Welty's Losing Battles and states "Though the feminine language modes of Losing Battles are 'opposites,' they serve a common goal: querying and challenging male-authored decrees."]

Although they serve a common end, written and spoken language complement and compete with each other in Eudora Welty's Losing Battles. Teaching, writing, and books are the province of Julia Mortimer, who dies on the morning of Granny Vaughn's reunion. Lexie Renfro had presumed to be Julia's successor, but she "fell down on Virgil" and could not finish her training at Normal. Gloria Short, Julia's chosen heir, also denies that role when she marries Jack Renfro, her pupil. Julia's opposite, Granny Vaughn, commands a different province, spoken language and its transmission of family history. Thése two feminine modes of expression differ in that written language (books, letters) conceptualizes, moves toward abstractions; whereas oral language deals with the concrete, the experiential. In a process marked by both modes, the pulpit oratory of the late Grandpa Vaughn diminishes into that of Brother Bethune speaking (to Granny's disparagement) from the family reunion pulpit.

When Grandpa Vaughn's patriarchal voice is replaced by Brother Bethune's, his Baptist conception of authority (infant baptism can't save souls from sin) is reduced to local mythology, a shift from the oracular to the anecdotal. Both feminine voice modes thus mark a decline in male authority. Beulah rules her family, not her husband Ralph; and their idolized son Jack's impulsiveness gives rise to demonstrable instances of male folly. Rather than looking inside Curly Stovall's open safe for the missing gold ring, for example, Jack carries away the whole safe: "but he's a man! Done it the man's way," as Aunt Nanny says. Even the account of Grandpa Vaughn's daddy, builder of Damascus Church, implies criticism: "he'd preach in the church on Sunday and the rest of the week he could stand on his own front porch and have it to look at"—six days, not one, to admire his creation. Whether through Julia's book language (meant to lead Banner beyond parochialism) or Granny Vaughn's oral history (to perpetuate family values), male authority is questioned: not out of malice or subversion, but rather in an undercurrent of irony, sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

Battles and banners are seminal images in Losing Battles; they mark the main conflict of the novel between local and absolute. Thus Curly Stovall's store and Gloria's Banner School face each other across the road that runs through town "as if in the course of continuing battle." Jack's noisy fight with Curly in the store over the missing gold ring disrupts Gloria's efforts across the road to teach her class the poem about Columbus and the gray Azores. She teaches an ideal of outreach; Jack and Curly's rivalry becomes a comic brawl. Other contenders are "two ancient, discolored sawdust piles [left from Dearman's sawmill business] … like the Monitor and the Merrimack in the history book." Aside from its pictures, the book conceptualizes Civil War issues in the abstraction of printed words, whereas the actual sawdust piles not only look like the ironclad ships, but are the debilitated physical remnants of the Reconstruction itself. The issues of the War become localized in concrete images.

Written words rather than images signifying combat appear in the letter from Julia that Judge Moody reads to the reunion (to the family's displeasure, who want it "told" to them); Julia wrote, "I've fought a hard war with ignorance. Except in those cases that you can count on your fingers, I lost every battle." Moody himself is one "success" who stayed in Boone County, but he never forgave Julia for compelling him to stay there. As a judge he remains her judgment on Banner's ignorance—"the very pocket." Lexie, Ralph Renfro's old maid sister who wanted to teach school and who dampens the spirit of the reunion, likewise remarks to Ralph: "these children of yours are the least prepared to be corrected of any I ever ran up against. How they'll conduct themselves on the Day of Judgment I find hard to imagine." Thus written language is broadly judgmental, whereas oral tradition fosters impulse and concern for localism.

Both battle and banner converge in the emblem of Jack's "torn sleeve that flowed free from his shoulder like some old flag carried home from far-off battle." The sleeve marks Jack's arrival at the reunion; like the sawdust piles that image the ironclad vessels, it too speaks of the South's history of lost battles. And from the beam in Curly's store hang local "shirt-tails of every description … like so many fading banners of welcome." To these trophies of Curly's other victories in battle, Jack's shirttail is added after Curly knocks him senseless in the fight at the end of the novel. The shirt-tails are like feudal banners captured from claimants to Curly's male fiefdom, his store, which indeed once belonged to Jack's father. But the contending oral and written languages, which are female-dominated, underlie the novel, the surface of which deals with matters like Jack's and Curly's rival claims to a ramshackle truck and a horse: prizes in a male world. Gloria, the short-time teacher, sees the truck for its real worth, a man's "play-pretty" that really wouldn't take her and Jack anywhere.

Granny Vaughn's full name, mentioned but once in Losing Battles, relates to the oral consciousness of her family; as proclaimed by Brother Bethune in his reunion speech, "Miss Thurzah Elvira Jordan … [was] known far and wide in the realms of the Baptists for the reach of her voice as a young lady." Her name comes from "Tirzah" in Canticles: "thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners." Granny's sermon-bred family know about Thurzah and Banner as these are epitomized by their spirited vocal matriarch and by the name of their community.

Though married, with a child, and reunited with Jack, Gloria yet assumes the role of a school teacher when she orders the rest of the men at the reunion not to join her and Jack for his vengeful encounter with Judge Moody. She, Jack and Lady May will do it alone, she says, as she "lifted her old teacher's satchel … and hung the strap over her shoulder." To complete Gloria's role, Beulah praises her daughter-in-law's self-containment and assurance in terms of written language: "once you've hidden her Bible … and wished her writing tablet out of sight, you wouldn't find a trace of her…. You can't reach her." Although Julia wanted people to open their minds and hearts to others "so they could be read like books," Gloria finally rejects Julia's council and decides, "people don't want to be read like books."

As much as he loves Gloria, Jack still senses a missing part: "you know all the books. But about what's at home, there's still a little bit left for you to find out." He means her sense of family, or lack of it: she is an orphan, and much of the talk at the reunion deals with who her parents were. Mistrusting books and writing and favoring oral history instead, the Beechams and Renfros never write letters, whereas "I'm not afraid of pencil and paper," says Gloria. While Jack served time in Parchman, she wrote to tell him that they had become parents, but he never wrote back—remiss, "like a man," as the women folk would say. Earlier, when he was her student, Gloria sent Jack home as punishment for fighting Curly, and she demanded a written excuse from his mother, but Beulah characteristically refused to write anything. Forceful and articulate at the reunion, however, Beulah tells much about the fight with Curly which ended in Jack's sentence to the pen.

Vaughn, Jack's put-upon younger brother (now twelve, the age when Jack had to quit school) nevertheless is the "best speller"; his toehold on literacy recalls Julia's triumph when Gloria "spelled down" the legislature. Humorously related to the family's conflicts over written language is the name of the youngest surviving uncle, Noah Webster (of the dictionary) Beecham; a sad instance is Julia's spelling book, where she lettered her will in pin pricks, her pencil having been taken away from her by Lexie. Despite its initial promise, literacy would appear to be a lost cause, though there are occasional cycles of hope—if marked by nothing more than spelling skills.

Spoken words in Losing Battles contend with the enemy just as do those written or read from a book by school teachers. Granny Vaughn was famous for her voice when she was young: "talked back to General Grant. Remembers the conversation," says Aunt Beck. When Grant shot a cannon ball into Captain Jordan's five-foot-square chimney, Granny, then a child, ran out and scolded him for it to his face. Grant is not only the enemy Northerner, but also the male aggressor, who is put down by a young girl.

The family uses spoken language as a way of sharing. Aunt Beck complains about the newest sister-in-law: "can't she [Cleo] wait till Brother Bethune gets here for dinner and tells it [the family history] to us all at the table?" Though his dictionary name belies him, Noah Webster, speaking to Gloria, describes the spoken tradition best: "long after you're an old lady without much further stretch to go, sitting back in the same rocking chair Granny's got her little self in now, you'll be hearing it told to Lady May and all her hovering brood. How we brought Jack Renfro back safe from the pen!" As if by folk magic, an act of will, the family perpetuates its values in oral tradition with Jack as its central figure. Thus when he is about to lower the Buick into place, Beulah says that her son will show better judgment than Samson did, but that is more her expectation than her conviction. For all his heroics, Jack is bedeviled by bad luck and his own likeable folly; beneath the admiration of his mother and his young wife lies the question of his right reasoning.

Whereas Julia forbade Gloria to marry Jack (she thought they were first cousins), Gloria defied her and did so anyway. Julia said any child born of the marriage would be deaf and dumb—symbolic affronts to oral history—but to prove her mentor wrong, Gloria planned to take Lady May to see Julia as soon as the little girl could talk. During the night after the reunion a heavy rain falls on the Renfro house: "then the new roof resounded with all the noise of battle," in the course of which Lady May "put her voice into the fray, and spoke to it the first sentence of her life: 'What you huntin', man?'" As if by nature the child vocalizes the matriarchal battle-challenge inherited from Granny Vaughn, who shamed General Grant.

In contrast, Judge Moody, the first of Julia's proteges (as Gloria is the last), has little use for spoken language. He has come at Julia's written request, to affirm the law forbidding marriage of cousins, a law Julia was instrumental in getting passed. At Banner Top he scolds the family for talking to death the dilemma of the Buick perched above the roadside. Amusingly, though, his court sessions have to be held in the cramped quarters of a Sunday school room because the court house and its written records were burned (by varmints, as Granny says) after Jack's trial. And in his comic predicament at Granny's reunion, Moody sits like a pupil in the school chair, to be lessoned in the reunion's oral history.

Writing takes another comic form in the character of Miss Ora Stovall, Banner correspondent for the Vindicator. "Watch out, Freewill! Banner's going to beat you this week!" she says, planning her account of the reunion, the Buick's misfortunes, and Julia's funeral. Though written, Miss Ora's newspaper column will have much the flavor of spoken language: gossip, "human interest," provincialism, a "story" told like a folk tale. Even her name is almost "Oral," just as Lexie, who wanted to but couldn't be a school teacher, is a diminished "lexicon."

After the reunion, with everyone else in the Renfro house asleep, Vaughn, wearing Grandpa Vaughn's old hat, rides Bet the mule and hears "loud night talking to itself…. No matter how good at hollering back a boy might grow up to be, hollering back would never make the wheel [of the sky] stop." Earlier, when Jack and Gloria prepare to sleep on the bare porch, "Jack in his gown came running out … and before she [Gloria] could get her hand over his mouth he had given his holler." These vocal outbursts come from the old tradition of the travelers' holler to signal others as they made their way through the Mississippi wildemess. Willy Trimble also has a network of "hollers" whereby aged, infirm people can let each other know that they are still alive every morning, but Julia refused to take part in it; instead, she wrote desperate letters which jaded Lexie might or might not post in the mail box.

Gloria's Bible, as expected, functions pedagogically as a book; other Bibles, though on printed pages, give rise to spoken folk myth. When Brother Bethune climbs up Banner Top and stumbles next to Jack and Gloria, he drops his tuning fork and his Bible. "Bound in thin black leather skinned to the red of a school eraser, [it] looked as if it had come to his door every Sunday by being thrown at it, rolled up like the Ludlow Sunday newspaper." In the pulpit, however, Bethune orally transposes a printed book (his Bible is worn almost to an abstraction) into local legend and experience.

Because he doesn't measure up to her late husband, Granny Vaughn doesn't want Brother Bethune to preach at the reunion, and as matriarch she forbids his use of the Vaughn Bible. It is her repository for sacred family emblems, a closed book on the past containing Grandpa's eyeglasses, a lock of her daughter Ellen's hair, Ellen's wedding ring, the post card from Sam Dale. Out of respect for her mother, Beulah orders the Renfro Bible fetched instead, but Bethune doesn't really read from it either: "he threw open the Bible … as if to show he could start on any page it wanted him to." His funny, inept applications show how local, oral history has its own way with things, but to the ears of the reunion, especially those of the women, his sayings are absurd. Grandpa's patriarchal authority has been replaced by a poor diminished thing.

For an ungainly starter to Granny's reunion, Brother Bethune praises the old home, the happy family and "what exactly in the Book it looks like to me this minute [is] Belshazzar's Feast. Miss Beulah may have even out-provided it!" Beulah, offended by Bethune's foolishness, says Grandpa Vaughn would have said the blessing, given the family history, and its lesson, before even looking at the table. Much of Bethune's message, in fact, is interspersed with women's voices correcting his lapses, the worst being his forgetting that Grandpa Vaughn is dead.

Inept as it seems to Beulah, however, the Belshazzar trope says more than what appears on its comic surface. The biblical narrative in which none of Belshazzar's court is able to interpret the writing on the palace wall dwindles in Losing Battles to the family's aversion to written language. To be sure, there are Uncle Nathan's signs (painted lefthanded), which speak to minimum literacy; but they do not require reading by a prophet, can be read by all. They are practically oral-visual in the sense of a cartoon caption or a speaker's ballooned words in a comic strip, the modicum of Banner literacy. Also, "the part of the hand" seen writing on Belshazzar's wall presages the ghost of Nathan Beecham's missing right hand (and oddly connects with the heaven-pointing, bodiless hand seen at the top of Dearman's monument in the cemetery).

The most pervasive biblical emblem in Losing Battles (and one with oral force) comes from God's order to the prophet Nathan (the name of one of Beulah's brothers) to "build me a house to dwell in" because, ever since the Israelites came up out of Egypt, God's house has been a tent and a tabernacle; the permanent house must be built of cedar as a sign that the Israelites will no longer be wanderers. Therefore Great Grandfather Vaughn, newly arrived in the wilderness, "raised that house out of his own oaks, pines, and cedars, and then he raised the church"; also, he "hewed them pews out of solid cedar, and the pulpit is all one tree." Thus the one-tree pulpit makes patriarchal declamation the center of Damascus Church. Lying in the Renfro yard is the trunk of an old cedar tree where on the morning of the reunion Gloria patiently waits for Jack. Later, after his arrival, they sit on the log together. They were married in Damascus Church by Grandpa Vaughn, in front of the cedar pulpit.

Cedar takes on a comic role in the "tall old cedar tree [that] was stubbornly growing out of the end and standing over" Banner Top. Because of Lady May and Gloria's absurd confrontation in the road with Judge Moody, his car veers up the embankment. "The Buick had skinned past the trunk, the tree had creaked back into place," so that "now the old cedar stood guard just behind the left rear fender."

But since its staying power seems an impediment, with comic male ineptness Mr. Renfro blasts away the cedar so that the Buick can be pulled back down to the road. His dynamiting is noisy enough for the Last Judgment, mingling with the thunder of the night storm following the reunion. By just a few roots, the tree hangs upside down over the edge of Banner Top. A delayed, unintended second explosion (Mr. Renfro used old dynamite) dislodges the last of the cedar's roots; it falls down the bank. When the rope breaks that holds the Buick over the edge, Jack and Gloria fall into the cedar tree (it still has some staying power), then land safely on their feet next to the Buick, which stands on its nose.

Cedar is also the intended lining for the rough pine coffin Willy Trimble carries in his wagon. When Mrs. Moody sees this receptacle, she refuses to ride with it to get to the reunion. Willy planned to get cedar boards "from Dearman's time" to put within the coffin; he hoped it would be used for Julia. Since he couldn't master books, she taught him woodworking when he was her student at Banner School, but the coffin doesn't suit the literate mourners at Julia's wake. And at Julia's burial owls fly out of the old cedar tree behind her grave, suggesting the flight of literacy and knowledge.

The emblem sequence thus forms a paradigm of decline: the cedar log in the Renfro yard, the old tree dislodged at Banner Top, the lining for the rejected coffin, and the ancient tree at the head of Julia's grave. In each instance, the cedar's biblical, patriarchal force diminishes from its original, the permanent house for God to dwell in, Damascus Church, where the Word is spoken from the one-tree pulpit. The dwindling of that male voice has been remarked by the Banner women's speaking, as it also has been by Julia, single-handed defender of books, whose "church" is the schoolhouse.

The most telling sign of female dominance in Losing Battles relates to the relationship between Beulah and her favorite brother Sam Dale, cemented by his emasculation as a child by a spark from the fireplace, and Beulah's failure to find a timely cure for the injury. Beulah holds herself to blame for this harm done to the best of her brothers, a pain made even worse by his dying in the World War. Her inwardly turned anger reinforces the power of her speech, which dominates the many voices of the reunion. She is Granny's vocal heir.

Less effectually, Brother Bethune adapts parable to local legend. When first meeting Jack, he "pivoted on his gun and fixed him with his loving gimlet eye. 'It's the Prodigal Son.'" Jack escaped from the penitentiary at Parchman one day before his release in order to be on time for Granny's birthday, but he was not away from home wasting his inheritance or eating pig fodder. As comic overtone, the Renfro pig will be fed leavings from the reunion, and it accompanies some wild pigs who gobble up Mrs. Moody's chocolate layer cake when the cake falls out of the Buick. To complete the parable, Beulah even calls their pig an "old sinner," as if to lay Jack the Prodigal's misalleged sins on the scapegoat animal.

In another skewed parable, Jack in his well-meaning folly is said to have become a Samaritan because he pushed Judge Moody's car out of the ditch, but when Mrs. Moody signals for help to get her car down from Banner Top, neither Uncle Homer driving his chicken van nor the "hungry Methodists headed home for dinner" stop as Samaritans to aid the distressed Moodys (who are, and indeed look like, Presbyterians). The Samaritan in Luke helped a victim despised and passed by by others, but the affluent Moodys are scarcely victims who have been robbed and beaten. The Bible parable is turned inside out; in addition to their hunger, the Methodists most likely "pass by on the other side" because they feel inferior to Presbyterians. Mrs. Moody's vocal distress dominates this whole sequence, during which she trades on her need for some male Samaritan help, but neither Homer Champion nor Rev. Dollarhide, consummate politician and hymn-prone preacher, offers any help.

Like the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays, old-time hymns also provide vocal irony for the events of Losing Battles. Before their church dismisses, the Baptist-rival Methodists sing "Shall We Gather at the River," a skewed appraisal of the political fish fry Curly plans for that very Sunday afternoon at the river's edge. A little later, the Methodists are heard singing "Throw Out the Life Line," to anticipate the absurd human chain begun by Jack to save the Buick on the rainy Monday after the reunion. The chain involves everyone except Miss Lexie and Miss Ora, who are parodies of the two language modes, oral and written; the others hang onto the rope from which the unfortunate car is suspended over the edge of Banner Top. Although no one is "sinking today" (in the hymn's phrase), everyone (Baptists and the rest) gets a thorough soaking in the steady rain.

Granny's reunion ends when Uncle Nathan, left-handed, plays a different hymn tune on his cornet: "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning"—"Some poor fainting, struggling seaman, You may rescue, you may save." A self-styled evangelist, Nathan "becomes" the old-time prophet as his way of repenting for his murder of Dearman, exploiter of timber and of people. After his solo, Nathan takes a coal tar torch and burns out the caterpillar nets in the trees around the Renfro house. "We've lost him, I know, to the Book of Revelation," says Beulah, the family's spokeswoman. Revelation mentions locusts and scorpions being emitted from the "bottomless pit," and Nahum says that the sinners of Nineveh will be devoured by fire as if they were cankerworms.

If one reads Welty's subtext, biblical Nathan finds his obverse in Nathan Beecham: whereas the former chastises King David for sending Uriah to certain death in battle so that David could possess his captain's beautiful wife Bathsheba, Nathan Beecham kills Dearman the timber exploiter and expropriator of the Renfro house and store. As hinted by Granny, Dearman had impregnated Rachel Sojourner, who was admired especially by Nathan, and whom Sam Dale later promised to marry. Thus Nathan felt justified in the revenge he took for his brother who was "sent into battle," who died, although not in action, and who was lost to his adulterous and pregnant wife-to-be. Biblical Nathan chastises the king with a parable; whereas his Beecham namesake kills Dearman, then cuts off his own right hand, to follow biblical injunction, and to follow the quirky mission of planting along the roadways his left-handed signs about repentance. Nathan's full story, finally revealed at the reunion, has been known and concealed by Granny and Beulah; his method of penance, as we shall see, was ordained by Julia. Thus his role is circumscribed by both female language modes.

Women's folk art in the form of patchwork quilts also adds biblical overtones to Losing Battles. "The Delectable Mountains" patterned quilt is Granny's favorite gift on the day of her reunion birthday. It displays the "called-for number of sheep," which would be ninety and nine. The parable search for the missing hundredth becomes the search for Gloria Short's mother, who by way of extended oral reminiscence turns out to be Rachel Sojourner (her name means "homeless ewe"). Rachel abandoned her baby and died shortly later of pneumonia; her grave, marked by a lamb no longer "very snowy," is about to slide into the Bywy River.

In a biblical allusion not spoken by a character, but in keeping with the characters' perceptions, Julia's funeral procession crosses Banner Bridge, which could at any moment collapse under the load. "Behind the hearse the line seemed to narrow itself, grow thinner and longer, as if now it had to pass through the eye of a needle." That line of Julia's admirers, people of rank, book knowledge, and substance, should indeed be concerned about "passing through the eye." Whether Julia herself will enter the Kingdom is problematic; the only churchman present at her grave site to aid that endeavor, a Catholic priest, speaks in Latin. Julia chose him for the role because he once learned algebra from her, but his speaking a strange tongue and wearing "skirts" elicits Miss Ora's critical "what does he call himself?" Brother Bethune, the only available Protestant clergyman, absentmindedly thought he was to perform a marriage at Damascus Church and did not appear for the grave ceremony at all. Thus Julia, sponsor of books and writing, is spared the gravesite oratory of Banner; by her choice, Latin, algebra, and the skirted priest become its foreign substitutes.

When Jack and Gloria arrive at the cemetery, barely in time for Julia's burial, "the original grasshopper [on Sam Dale's grave] was repeated here too, repeated everywhere and a hundred times over, grave-sitting or grave-hopping in the stubble." The army of graves that Jack and Gloria pass on their way to Julia's burial swarms with grasshoppers, numerous and apocalyptic as Nahum's prophecy to Nineveh. Though these Banner graves comprise "an army of tablets," the cemetery stands too close to the Bywy River, into which Rachel Sojourner's lamb will soon slide, the same river in which Ellen and Euclid Beecham drowned after the accident at Banner Bridge. As the narrator observes, a "long and colorless tree" submerged in the Bywy at Deepening Bend (seen as Jack and Gloria pause at Rachel's grave) looks like a fern pressed in a book. This is the very spot in the river where Ellen's drowned body was found. Welty's elegiac simile echoes Granny's use of her Bible as keeper of memento mori: the "fern" tree pressed in a figurative book, for Ellen's drowning, is like the lock of hair and wedding ring of Ellen, or the post card from Sam Dale, that are kept in the Vaughn Bible. A "book" is a closed receptacle, unlike spoken words, which are open and responsive. And the "army of tablets" in the graveyard are those surfaces on which are recorded brief, written words about the deceased, concealing more than they reveal: tablets as factual and abstract as Gloria the school teacher's writing tablet.

The tallest monument in Banner cemetery is for Dearman, "on its top the moss-ringed finger that pointed straight up from its hand in a chiseled cuff above the words 'At Rest,'" A monumental equivalent to Nathan's artificial hand, but with a difference; the index finger has a ring of moss, whereas Nathan's hand (a gift from his brother) has a seal ring on the ring finger, ironically echoing the gold wedding ring over which Jack and Curly fought. After a disembodied hand writes mysterious words on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, the king dies; Nathan killed Dearman and severed his own hand in repentance, his prosthesis mock-imitated by the hand on the monument.

One can tell where Nathan Beecham has traveled by the signs painted left-handed that he leaves behind. Just when Jack tries to be amorous with Gloria on Banner Top, she bumps her head on something hard, Nathan's sign "Destruction is at Hand." Thus one dimension of Nathan's warning relates to Banner Top's fame as a Lovers' Leap; another is to its being the legendary jumping-off place for Indians who didn't want to be repatriated. The same sign also plays its joke as a humiliating perch for the Buick. Another of Nathan's signs, freshly painted, appears in the ditch where Moody says he got stuck on Sunday: "Where Will YOU Spend Eternity?" Though these clumsy mottoes express abstract concepts, Welty puts them to humorous, concrete uses, much as she does with other folk emblems in the novel. Unlike the mysterious handwriting on Belshazzar's palace wall, Nathan's signs "speak" clearly to local experience. But curiously enough, Nathan's role as wandering evangelist began with Julia, who conceptualized or abstracted his role and in effect sent him away from his community. "Nathan, even when there's nothing left to hope for, you can start again from there, and go on your way and be good." Despite the signs' intent, however, in Julia's pedagogy they achieve bare literacy.

Though not very church-minded or good, Curly Stovall adds a further evangelical note to the dilemma of the Buick, perched as it is on Nathan's "Destruction" sign. "Who told you you could run that pleasure car up yonder and leave it, lady? That's a spot just waiting to give trouble. Full of temptations of all kinds." At her age, Mrs. Moody doesn't need to be warned about the amorous dangers of Lovers' Leap (indeed Jack's sister Etoyle mistakenly calls her the Judge's "mother"), but Welty keeps up the humorous byplay when in all innocence the younger sister Elvie approaches, singing, "yield not to temptation for yielding is sin."

Losing Battles features an amusing, non-ecumenical meeting of Protestant sects. Mrs. Moody (herself once a school teacher and now the Judge's judge) feels embarrassed about her husband's muddy knees; he appears, ill-kempt and unshaven, as one of Julia's pallbearers. "People from Ludlow, and Presbyterians from everywhere, will wonder what you've been doing down on your knees," she says. After all, Presbyterians don't kneel. They do, however, believe in Divine intervention. "Like it sprung right out of the ground! Providence sent that. My husband only had to turn his back," Mrs. Moody remarks when she sees Curly arriving in his truck, which she hopes will tow the Buick down to the road. Mrs. Moody also presumes Divine intention (predestination?) when she says, "if that car hasn't fallen to its destruction before much else happens, it wasn't intended to fall." "How much longer do you think Providence is prepared to go on operating on our behalf?" the Judge asks her. "Oscar, instead of tempting Providence, you'd better to head on down this road" to the store with a telephone, replies Mrs. Moody. But the store is closed on Sunday, and Miss Pet Hanks, the phone operator, won't be able to take the vocal distress call. Characteristically, the Judge fails to get "on line" in this oral community.

Before the Buick climbed to Banner Top on reunion day, Elvie's sister Etoyle sat in the cedar tree watching for the approach of Judge Moody. "A puff of dust showed along the next ridge over, as though a match had been laid to a string in Freewill whose other end was here at Banner Top. 'That's him. He's coming the long way round.'" Supposedly coming of his own free will, Moody is nevertheless compelled to do so by Julia's letter, a summons from a woman ten years older than he to whom he had other ties than romantic ones. She is still his teacher, he, her "pupil." So much for the dilemma of Calvinism, free will versus predestination. Culturally, Southern Presbyterians presumed to a higher social scale than did the evangelical sects; the fact that Gloria came from the Ludlow Presbyterian Orphan Asylum makes her think better of herself than of what is deemed to be her mother's family, the Sojourners, "lower than Aycock," who are nominally Methodists.

Further contention exists between the evangelical sects themselves. In the cyclone, the Methodist church was picked up bodily and set down next to the Baptist church, where-upon the Methodists took it apart piecemeal, put it back together "on the side of the road where it belonged…. A good many Baptists helped them." The banks of the road separating the two churches look, in the rain, like the parting of the Red Sea (the biblical "red" literally becoming the red banks of the road approaching Banner). And the funny procession of school bus, truck, Buick, and mules passing down Banner Road comprises the escaping "Israelites," with rival churches, singers versus orators, on opposite sides of the parted Sea. Welty even provides her vocalizing Baptists with total immersion in the rain, along with the Presbyterian Moodys and Methodist Stovalls—Curly and Ora—all equably immersed, "baptized."

As we learn from the oral history of the family, Euclid Beecham, a Methodist circuit rider, became husband to Ellen; parents of Granny Vaughn's many grandchildren, they died in the bridge accident. But before the marriage, Grandpa Vaughn had made Euclid into a Baptist. The couple were married by Grandpa in the Damascus church made of cedar. When Euclid and Ellen fled from the family by night in their buggy, Granny Vaughn rushed out and tried to stop them, but she was almost crushed between the buggy shaft and a tree, the remains of that tree being the cedar log which is Gloria's seat at the reunion. The log with its tragic story, its comic other self at Banner Top, and its sad counterpart at Julia's grave, thus hark back to the cedars of Damascus Baptist Church. Each has its staying power, though a lessening one: the cedar that once stopped Granny is now only a log; the Banner Top cedar stays the Buick (for a time) and even when uprooted, for the moment it eases Jack and Gloria's fall; the old cedar heading Julia's grave is the uncertain barrier between it and the fatal river.

Built of cedar, "Damascus was a firm-cornered, narrow church resting on four snowy limestone rocks." The church cornerstones recall the stone step to Banner School, under which Julia asked to be buried. But the male supervisors—"the bad boys of Banner School"—turned down her request. They said that the whole building would fall if the stone were moved: Grandfather Renfro began the schoolhouse with that stone, and "he meant it to stay. He didn't mean it to come out for anybody." Dr. Carruthers and Judge Moody are Julia's only successes who stayed in Boone County, the Judge even regretting having done so. Julia expected all her students to resist learning, but the treachery of the successes who don't return and the "bad boys'" refusal of her burial request show what she was up against with men. Remaining a mistrustful old maid was her form of protest.

After stating her burial instructions (which are ignored), Julia's will concludes, "and then, you fools—mourn me." But Brother Bethune, finally in key with the Bible (he does after all carry a tuning fork) says, "whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire!"—a corollary to the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Judge Moody, chief defender of Julia Mortimer, authority figure and defender of learning, is thus put down by Brother Bethune, inept and "foolish" though he is, when Bethune speaks "in the flat tones of inspiration. 'We're going to forgive you.'" Taking up that spirit, partly out of humor, partly out of tolerance for an intolerant man, the entire reunion (except for Jack) joins in the forgiveness. The dominating male authority figure gives in to the diminished one.

Bethune's vocal "inspiration" short-circuits from Julia's written inspiration in an unlikely juncture that links the two disparate parts of the novel. In her last testimony Julia wrote that when all else failed, she finally depended on inspiration. Also "inspired" is the busload of school teachers who decide to take Gloria with them to Julia's wake. Even Lexie said to Julia, "you used to be my inspiration."

Another unlikely juncture in Losing Battles connects gender to church affiliation and politics. Although snakes and politicians are said to be the only flourishing creatures in Boone County, the poorest in all Mississippi, both accommodate themselves to its mythological church heritage. Brother Bethune, childless and alone, is the champion snake killer who deals in his own way with the first creature. The second makes marriages of convenience. As candidate for the office of justice of the peace, Uncle Homer (by marriage to Mr. Renfro's sister) counts on Baptist votes from the Renfros and Beechams. The opposing candidate Curly Stovall, a Methodist, will nevertheless get the best of Jack his rival by marrying Jack's sister to end their contention over the gold ring and to take Renfro-Beecham votes away from Homer. Thus matriarchy lies behind male power politics.

Used for quite different causes, Homer's and Curly's political campaign posters contrast with Uncle Nathan's apocalyptic signs, but both function in similar ways: they "speak" like cartoon captions. Though abstract and conceptual so far as individual words go, the campaign posters (like Nathan's signs) have a visual/oral impact that denotes Banner's literacy level, poised as it is between speaking and writing. Uncle Homer's "qualifications were listed in indentation like a poem on a tombstone:"

     Experienced
                                             Courteous
     Lifelong Baptist
                                              Married
     Reliable
                              Just Leave It To Homer

"Poem on a tombstone" is an epitaph. More hopeful in a crude design that suggests sunrise and Resurrection, Curly's poster shows him wearing a hat, and "coming out from the crown on rays were the different words 'Courteous,' 'Banner-Born,' 'Methodist,' 'Deserving,' and 'Easy to Find,'" Other than place of birth, the claims are dubious, but as a radiant halo they speak confidently to Curly's winning the election. His victory will come about because of a marriage of contraries: Methodist to Baptist, Jack's enemy to Jack's sister Ella Fay—just as Jack's marriage to Gloria joins the written and oral traditions. Though the campaign posters contain words, the word arrangements speak as emblem-designs with specific, given meanings for Welty's narrative. Homer's epitaph will be no match for Curly's halo. An epitaph is a "closed book" on one's life that proposes to have "read" one to the end, just as the finality of being "read" by a school teacher causes Julia's former students their apprehension of being "ended" by her.

Thus the language of writing and print is a centrifugal force in Losing Battles, moving outward toward the abstract or conceptual (the summary epitaph) and away from the concrete center. Julia, the advocate of recorded language, sends forth her emissaries, but they fail to return to her until the time of her funeral. That is the tragedy of her message written to Judge Moody on the blank fly leaves torn from her Bible. Rather than choosing a Scriptural text, she writes her own Apocrypha, just as she asked to be buried under the schoolhouse step rather than among Christian families. (She ends up, however, in a borrowed grave in Banner Cemetery). In contrast, spoken language is the centripital force that gathers together the extended family of Granny Vaughn. Since writing and printed language move outward to the abstract, the words in Julia's letter are "too hard" for the listening reunion. Spoken language draws in close to make the emblematic concrete, familial, as in the humorously (mis)applied parables of the Samaritan and of the Prodigal, or in the diminished staying power of the cedar trees.

Judge Moody may say that Banner, the very pocket of ignorance in its oral history, is too self-forgiving; but for Beulah, Banner is "the very heart" of Boone County. Trained as a school teacher and emissary of books and writing, Gloria wants Jack to leave his closely-centered family, but he resists. Despite this year's spoiled hay crop, he ends up singing "Bringing in the Sheaves." Still, Gloria will probably demand a last word, just as Ella Fay will likely give Curly his comeuppance once they are married. After all, Gloria spelled down the (all-male) legislature, Granny defied General Grant, and Julia defied male-sanctioned burial customs. Gloria and Mrs. Moody, both former school teachers, exert their common sense against Jack and his father's hare-brained schemes for rescuing the Buick. Though the feminine language modes of Losing Battles are "opposites," they serve a common goal: querying and challenging male-authored decrees.