SOURCE: "Death and the Mountains in The Optimist's Daughter," in Essays in Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 77-85.

[In the following essay, Watkins discusses the importance of mountains in Welty's life and in her novel The Optimist's Daughter.]

The pervasive relationship between character and place in fiction is especially important and subtle in the fiction of Eudora Welty. Place derives not only from natural geographical characteristics but also from human history and the events that have happened there. In one of several lectures and essays on the subject, Weky comments on the endurance of life in place, which transcends time, locality, and changes in the terrain:

Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things—regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads, and other vagrancies.

It follows that the old life, then, goes into the place and emerges in a new life of new personages, who in turn become a part of the complexity of the place which continues to grow along with the addition of new events to old.

Central to the understanding of Welty's fiction is this union of place and person; her works, therefore, must be interpreted according to the way the psyche or the soul is affected by place and the events and culture of a place. Most of Welty's works have been set in her own state of Mississippi, which seems generally and perhaps erroneously to be regarded politically and culturally as one of the most homogeneous states in the country. Welty's fiction, however, is certainly not homogeneous. the people and the culture differ greatly from one book to another. There are stories about the Mississippi Delta in Delta Wedding; about the hill country of northern Mississippi in "A Piece of News" and Losing Battles; about the early American history and culture of Natchez in The Robber Bridegroom and some of the short stories; about the black Mississippians in such stories as "Powerhouse," "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," and "A Worn Path"; and about the life of many small towns around Jackson and in southern Mississippi in The Golden Apples, The Ponder Heart, and other works.

Welty has not turned often and significantly to settings outside Mississippi except in one novel The Optimist's Daughter—which is also her only fiction based extensively on her own life and that of her family. This novel is so personal to her that she has restricted the use of the manuscript even by scholars. It is the only story of the visits of Welty and her mother during the summers of Welty's childhood to the ancestral home on Blue Knob, the mountain above the Elk River in Clay, West Virginia.

The West Virginia mountains are different from the flatlands of Mississippi, and out of that difference grows much of the style and the meaning of The Optimist's Daughter. Chestina (or Chessy) Andrews Welty (Eudora's mother) refused ever to be convinced that Mississippi was not flat, and similarly Becky McKelva asks in the novel where the mountain is in Mount Salus. Becky, Welty says in an interview, "has her deepest roots in another place, that's the thing that most changed her life—a feeling of being out of place, in a place to which she has never really resigned herself…." Further, Welty admits, "I did draw on some of the childhood and early married experiences of my own mother. That's the only thing that is 'factual'; and the character of Becky, the mother, is not the character of my mother, but it draws upon it." Usually Welty is an author of humor and subtle high comedy rather than the creator of dark tragedies like those written by her fellow Mississippian from the northern part of the state. The sickness and death of Judge McKelva in New Orleans, the wake over him with the serious mourning of his daughter (Laurel) and the antic buffoonery of his younger wife (Fay), and the actions of the community of Mount Salus during his funeral maintain a comic view of life in the larger sense of the term until after the funeral. When the wife, Fay, leaves to visit her home in Texas, and Laurel goes into her mother's sewing room to ponder her life and the lives of her parents, the novel turns to recollections of life in West Virginia, to darker memories, and to contemplations of the tragic moments of those who are dying and those who must stand by and watch the agonies and loneliness of the deathbed.

Becky's strong will, strength, and independence are admirable qualities, but they are also responsible for her tragic flaw: she uses that strength to fight inevitable death and to accuse all those who surround her in her moment of death. Whatever temperament and character she derived from the mountains intensifies her resentment, her hostility, her accusations, her anger at mortality and at herself and at those who cannot enable her to avoid death and who cannot go with her into that dark night. In One Writer's Beginnings Welty reveals how she herself gained from the mountains particular virtues like her mother's. In explaining her indebtedness to the mountains, she provides a strong clue to the meaning of the novel. When Welty visited her mother's childhood home, she, like Becky, gained particular virtues attributable to the West Virginia heights:

It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I'd discovered something I'd never tested before my short life. Or rediscovered it—for I associated it with the taste of the water that came out of the well, accompanied with the ring of that long metal sleeve against the sides of the living mountain, as from deep down it was wound up to view brimming and streaming long drops behind it like bright stars on a ribbon…. The coldness, the far, unseen, unheard springs of what was in my mouth now, the iron strength of its flavor that drew my cheeks in, its fern-laced smell, all said mountain mountain mountain as I swallowed. Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place.

Both Eudora Welty and Becky McKelva derive strength from the West Virginia mountains of their mothers' younger years. Laurel enters the past through her memories as they are stimulated when she goes through the twenty-six pigeonholes of her mother's desk after her death. Here she had stored all things "according to their time and place" except for the letters from the Judge. This is the process of discovery, not only of her mother but also of herself. The inner sanctum, the little sewing room where Laurel had "slept in infancy," is a source for whatever understandings she will ever attain. Here at the desk Laurel looks through the mementos of her mother and father's courtship and marriage. These items transport her back to the familial past, and she contemplates that time of family life which is so often a void in the mind of a child and the stories told to a child. Perhaps more than anything else the account of Laurel's memories of her mother's past helps us to arrive at the ultimate theme of the novel. Welty's return to her own childhood and then to her own mother's home and even her mother's childhood in a faraway country is an indication of continuity and, paradoxically, also of change:

Laurel had been taken "up home" to West Virginia since a summer before she remembered. The house was built on top of what might as well have been already the highest roof in the world…. From a rocking chair could be seen the river where it rounded the foot of the mountain…. This point of the river was called Queen's Shoals.

In The Optimist's Daughter Welty conveys the remoteness and isolation of the family and of the imagination by stressing the altitude. She removes the novel and Becky from the ordinary world and emphasizes the arduousness of their ordeals when it is necessary for them to enter the outer world.

As a child Laurel herself heard the solitary sounds of the mountain wilderness primeval in West Virginia and asked her grandmother about their mysteries. Early in the morning a sound traveled from one stillness to another, "a blow, then … its echo, then another blow, then the echo, then a shouting." The boys, her uncles, interpret literally: "It's just an old man chopping wood." The mother is mysterious and religious: "He's praying." The grandmother, perhaps with the loneliness of older age, says that it is "an old hermit … without a soul in the world." Decades later after the mother's death, Laurel, alone in her mother's sewing room, is still contemplating the possibilities of various meanings.

The image of the old man chopping wood and of the distinct sound on the mountain is further developed by the image of the bell on the mountain. "In sight of the door there was an iron bell mounted on a post. If anything were ever to happen, Grandma only needed to ring this bell." Its sound conveys isolation and need from the lonely one to those who are being summoned. This image recalls Laurel's first arrival in West Virginia. She and her mother descended from the train, which left them "by themselves on a steep rock … and its own iron bell on a post with its rope hanging down." There is a "mist," which mysteriously obstructs vision but not sound. A pull on the bell, "and close to them appeared a gray boat with two of the boys at the oars. At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that." Not only is it a sudden and (to Laurel) surprising appearance; it is almost a manifestation. Becky and Laurel's having only a large rock for a railroad station and then crossing the river in fog creates great mystery in the mind of a small child.

Becky's mountain home is described with a style appropriate to the pastoral mountains. The beauty comes from images, such as "bird dogs … streaking the upslanted pasture through the sweet long grass," the blue valley beneath the mountain, and pigeons which "came down to her feet and walked on the mountain." Again, especially for the child, there is the suggestion of a visitation. The pigeons are both beautiful and repulsive, puzzling and ugly in their relationships with each other, "sticking their beaks down each other's throats, gagging each other, eating out of each other's craws, swallowing down all over again what had been swallowed before." Their community may suggest love, but it also ambivalently suggests a repulsive and excessive dependence: "they could not escape each other." Their feeding and digestion is fearful and ugly to the child, but the grandmother explains simply that it is just hunger.

Life in the mountains may occasionally be beautiful and even awesome, but it is also fraught with labors and trials, especially in the time before the new methods of rapid transportation. The greatest trial of Becky's days, certainly those before marriage, came with the illness and then the death of her father.

Becky had gone with her father, who was suffering pain, on a raft propelled by a neighbor, down the river at night when it was filled with ice, to reach a railroad, to wave a lantern at a snow train that would stop and take them on, to reach a hospital.

In Baltimore, she tells the doctors (her father was delirious) what he had said: "If you let them tie me down, I'll die." She can do no more, go no farther. "Baltimore was as far a place as you could go with those you loved, and it was where they left you."

Eudora Welty has taken this story directly from the pages of her family history. The only printed account I have been able to find of the death of Edward (Ned) Raboteau Andrews (the grandfather of Eudora Welty) was recorded on the second page of the Clay County Star of March 30, 1899. Most of the story in the fiction appears in only one sentence in the newspaper: "His daughter, Miss Chessie, accompanied him."

After recalling Becky's strength on the journey, Laurel remembers the deathbed conversation between her mother and her father, and then she again recollects West Virginia. She recalls how Becky asked for "spiritual guidance." The young Presbyterian minister, Dr. Bolt, was called to her side, and she rejected him and his attempts to offer solace. She told him, apparently as an indication of his ignorance of her needs and his inability to comfort her or counsel her, "I'd like better than anything you can tell me just to see the mountain one more time." The crowning glory of the mountain which she describes to him is the white strawberry, an actual kind of wild plant, an image, and a beautiful if eerie symbol. It

grows completely in the wild,… very likely … in only one spot in the world…. I doubt if you'd see them growing after you got there…. You could line your hat with leaves and try to walk off with a hateful: that would be how little you knew about those berries. Once you've let them so much as touch each other, you've already done enough to finish 'em…. Nothing you ever ate in your life was anything like as delicate, as fragrant, as those wild white strawberries.

The strawberries are the last image in the passage about the glories and the meanings of the mountains. They are the ultimate in beauty, in physical taste, in rarity, in delicacy. Metaphorically, they are the incarnation of the wonders of the mountain and the beauties and the strengths of Becky the child. They are also a gift of God, a greater gift than anything said to Becky by the young preacher.

Strawberries like those Becky describes actually grew at what is called the Point, the hill which starts the rise to the Andrews farm above the junction of what is now West Virginia Route 4 and Route 16. Mrs. Lois Andrews Cleland, daughter of Carl (one of the Andrews "boys" and later Mayor of Charleston, West Virginia), is the only person I have talked to who has actually seen these strawberries. Carl Andrews took his children to see them some time before Miss Welty wrote about them in The Optimist's Daughter. Mrs. Cleland quotes him as saying that just to smell the white strawberries is much more delightful than eating the usual red ones. As the climactic image about the Andrews farm and the mountains of Clay, West Virginia, the strawberries are a supreme beauty with profound meanings. They constitute the final part of the narrative about Becky's West Virginia childhood.

Becky fails to overcome time and death. But the strawberries represent false hopes for long life and at least near-immortality. Welty suggests theological and religious implications by having Becky tell her story on her deathbed to a minister who cannot overcome his insensitivity or understand such wonder. The basic crux of the emotional conditions and the harsh conflicts of the novel are revealed in Laurel's contemplations of the deathbed scene of her mother. Child of the mountains, Becky McKelva was not tolerant of the lowlands. After all the years in Mississippi, at crucial moments her spirit sought strength in the mountains. The desperate accusations and imprecations she hurls at her daughter and her husband on her deathbed are anticipated throughout her life; she never lost her soul's citizenship in the mountains and became naturalized in the place of her home after marriage.

The Optimist's Daughter is conspicuous among Welty's works for its symbolic use of high place. "The high place," Leonard Lutwack says in The Role of Place in Literature, "inspires feelings of elation, domination, transcendence; it is the traditional home of poetry." Mountains or high places, furthermore, do not exist without low places between them or on which they stand. There are no mountains without valleys. Mountain literature, then, is the scene of changes, contrast, variety. Level places without mountains or valleys, produce monotony, even weakness. Lutwack's study of place in literature provides insight into the West Virginia scenes of The Optimist's Daughter: "Scaling heights," he writes, "is a test of character, and the conflict of adversaries is accentuated when it occurs in a high place." On the other hand, "The promise of greatness in a high place … may turn into disaster, for under Mount Etna yawns the volcano." The specific and important truth must be slightly rephrased for The Optimist's Daughter. Coming out of the mountains by necessity (the trip to Baltimore) or by choice (the chance for a happy marriage in Jackson) signifies risk, hope, danger, and even death. The crossings of a desert or of prairies surrounded by hostile Indians or peoples have the same omens. But the forebodings and dangers are not the same in mountains as on flat crosscountry trips. The twists and turns and rises and falls, the very surprises of the mountains in the many forms which they may take, add great complexities even if they do not increase substantially the risks. Dangers in the mountains and valleys tend to be sudden; in the prairies, they are prolonged, as they intensify in suffering and simultaneously in monotony. Flat places are not, as Lutwack says, necessarily "safe, restful, reassuring." They may be too dry, too rocky, and too far to cross without water. The beauties of the mountains of the Andrews farm, known as Blue Knob, are striking, but perils and trials also come along with the beauty.

The mother, Becky, does not have a prominent role in the novel until the account of her dying. The ultimate fact of life for all, death, is the great change, the moving into oblivion or another world depending on religion and beliefs. The most inescapable and normal thing in the world, it seems the most horrible. It is the ultimate experience not only in terms of the final disposition of body and soul, but also in terms of the definition of character as it is confronted in the drawing of the last breath.

Becky's trip to Baltimore with her father to his death was a foreshadowing of her own dying. She says as her father had before her, "Don't let them tie me down…. If they try to hold me, I'll die." Baltimore was an ultimate test of Becky's strength. She had known no one there, but she "had known herself." She trusts no one at the time of her dying, and with great anger and independence she turns from her husband into herself. Because the Judge can do no more than she herself has done, she calls him a coward, a Lucifer, and a Liar. When the Judge dies years later, his daughter, Laurel, stands by his bedside as his main companion if not comforter. He asks no questions; he listens to Laurel's reading "without much comment." His silence is puzzling and difficult to interpret. He dies without uttering a word, asking no quarter from death.

Mysteriously, in the last moments the Judge has "the smile of a child who is hiding in the dark while the others hunt him, waiting to be found." Whether he goes into that dark night passively or with quiet strength is not clearly apparent. He dies alone with no relative by his bedside. Dr. Courtland says, "The renegade! I believe he's just plain sneaked out on us." The silence of his deathbed is entirely different from the five-year illness of Becky and her defiant accusations while the Judge attempts to promise, placate, comfort, reassure her.

When the Judge died, Laurel meditates among the mysteries of the sewing room, she had not saved him as she had not saved her mother. She was not by his bedside but on the way to the hospital room. Neither had Becky saved her father. "But Becky was the brave one," Laurel remembers, suggesting that no mortal can save another from death. Because of her courage she was most irascible and accusatory when her own time came to die. One characteristic—and only one—is the same in the deaths of the Judge and his wife. He dies in silence, and she, after first blaming herself and others, suffers a stroke and also becomes silent: ("She had died without speaking a word, keeping everything to herself, in exile and humiliation."). Becky had blamed herself for not saving her father, the Judge, for his promises at her deathbed, and Laurel for not saving her: "You could have saved your mother's life. But you stood by and wouldn't intervene. [How could she?] I despair for you."

Another complexity of human experience is represented by the Judge's taking his wife's death as a matter of natural process. "He seemed to give the changes his same, kind recognition—to accept them because they had to be only of the time being." Becky had reacted to news of her mother's death in an altogether different way. It is unexpected, and "uncontrollably" Becky cries: "I wasn't there! I wasn't there!" Despite her strength and genuine sentiment, she could have done nothing if she had been there, just as the trip to Baltimore had been a heroic but futile confrontation with death. She assumes blame for the death of her mother, because of her own absence at the time of that death. The Judge tells her that she is not to blame, but she anticipates her deathbed accusations of him by bringing up the question of lying. As she will accuse him of being a liar just before she dies, she now says, "You can't make me lie to myself, Clinton!" Becky is strongest at the time of the death of another character, her father; but in her encounter with her own death, strength and independence turn into anger at her own mortality and into the inability of her kin to help her overcome her death or endure it with her. Indeed, the greater the strength of the dying, Miss Welty seems to suggest, the greater the suggestion of weakness of character in the last moments of life.

The Judge's strength and optimism are not good companions by the bedside of the dying; they are, instead, an annoyance. Death often causes conflicts between loved ones. Becky blames the Judge for sufferings imposed by others: "Why do you persist in letting them hurt me?" No well person can respond to a question like that. Within the father and the Judge there are conflicts between an optimistic belief that "all his wife's troubles would turn out all right," and "horror of any sort of private clash," and "his good hope, trust in one another." Conflict seldom, perhaps never, reaches greater depths than when Becky angrily and futilely questions why she married a coward, or greater ambiguity than when she takes "his hand to help him bear it." Bear what? The fact that he is a coward in the face of death, or that his wife thinks he is and calls him one? It is not a pretty picture for either of them.

After Becky calls him a coward, the Judge promises to take her back to the mountains, almost seeming to hope that there is or will be no death. But knowing that there is death and that it is coming to her and that her husband's promises are false optimism or lies, she calls him "Lucifer!… Liar!" When he refuses "to consider that she was desperate," his attitude is summed up—apparently in Laurel's memories of her mother's anger at his "betrayal on betrayal." Becky's attitude toward death and toward the death-watcher at her bedside establishes the conditions for the deathbed scenes throughout the novel. Her comments are mysterious if not altogether inexplicable, and they do seem to be the climactic statements of the relationships between characters and of the meanings of all the novel. The ultimate interpretations of these mysteries, as nearly as I can understand them, are that the dying hate the privilege that their survivors have of living after the death, that they are angry that it is impossible for the living to accompany the dying into death, that the living may betray the memory and life of the dead after they have died.

Baltimore and Mount Salus are both utterly mortal, and no one can go beyond that. The living and dying must unclasp hands and go their separate ways. It is not logical or theological or indeed even sensible and sane for the dying to expect the living to go along with them. Death, as Emily Dickinson writes, stops kindly for some who do not have time to stop for him, but he is not kindly to others, certainly not kindly to Becky, who struggles mightily against him. The final statements by Becky are not lucid and rational. but that does not make those statements any less real to her or to those who helplessly watch her die. At the ultimate moment death has its sting and its victory even if no one acknowledges its finality.

The strength of place and mountains may be used for defiance as well as for comfort, may increase anger, may add to the intensity of despair. A strong soul may struggle to reject death itself, as Milton's Satan rejects God and even his own fall. Becky herself rather than the Judge may resemble the rebellious Lucifer. Her body comes to death while her strong soul is not ready to stop for it, and she casts about in accusation of others. Ultimately the tragedy of The Optimist's Daughter is that the great strength derived from a childhood home in the mountains increases the last despair.

The deaths of the Judge and of Becky have prepared for Laurel's memories of the death of her husband, Phil, and her speculations about what it means to survive the one you love:

The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

The precise choice of the world guilt is fraught with implications. Guilt results from something the survivor does to the dying. Becky believed that. But it is a feeling of guilt, not a moral wrong, not a moral choice. Here is, indeed, the mystery and the culmination of the novel, and it seems to me that it is inexplicable, a statement that defies interpretation. It is as mysterious as the ultimate theological mysteries: how evil came to be, for example, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni bene volens. Death is the father of mysteries. How can Laurel be guilty? How can the well-wishing and loving Judge be a coward, a betrayer, a Lucifer? What is death that we are mindful of it and guilty because of it without action and decision? No one knows. Yet, Laurel and Becky accuse, we the living are guilty.