The optimist of Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter is a Mississippi judge named McKelva, and his optimism is hearty enough, foolish enough, generous enough, to lead him to marry in his old age a young wife, a woman from Texas whom he had met at a Bar Association convention. Wanda Fay Chisom is her name. Had she come to the attention of Faulkner, her name would be Snopes, and if Flannery O'Connor had created her, she would be named Shiflet. She is, in the pecking order of the South, white trash.

Miss Welty has been fascinated before by these rapacious, weak-witted, pathologically selfish daughters of the dispossessed, and likes to bring them into sharp contrast (as in The Ponder Heart) with the decrepit chivalry and good manners of the Mississippi gentry. The result, however complex and sensitive Miss Welty's handling of the misalliance, is always a wail of grief that an older generation is being replaced by barbarians.

Miss Welty's art modulates finely between satire and tragedy. She relishes the absurd and the incongruous, and has the canny gift of being able to translate them into tragic understanding. The power behind this rare ability is a firm moral sense of human conduct. Miss Welty's values might seem at first inspection to be Christian and Humanist, but they are yet broader in a curious sense. They are archaic. They are as old as civilization itself.

The brilliant, meticulously rendered surfaces of Miss Welty's fiction are always transparencies through which we can see the ancient stories told and retold thousands of times. In Laurel, the Judge's daughter, we can see the figure of Psyche (her husband-to-be was named Phil, that is, philos, Love) and thus the one-dimensional Wanda Fay becomes a concentrate of Psyche's nasty, hateful sister. There is nothing mechanical (or simple-minded) in these symbolic gestures of Miss Welty. Myths must be retold to stay fresh. Miss Welty has told the myth of Cupid and Psyche many times, blending it mysteriously with kindred myths of loss and redemption, evoking its details with charm and wit. (Cupid, for instance, appears in the story "June Recital" as a half-naked sailor running with his shirt—his wings—flying from his shoulders.)

Miss Welty keeps returning to one central myth, that of Persephone, whose regenerate virginity formed the old Greek understanding of the death and growth of perennial nature. Persephone alive is the natural order, or cosmos; Persephone in Hades, or dead, is raw matter (rock, dirt, spiritless disorder). Thus Laurel (matter shaped by light as a tree) is the living Persephone in this brilliant little novel, and Wanda Fay (wand, a dead stick; fay, a spirit from underground) is the dead Persephone. How do we say this otherwise? That the spirit is dying in our time? That we live in a spiritual hell rather than a natural order?

Miss Welty is a deep (and unexplored) writer. Her masterpiece is the long novel Losing Battles (an Orpheus and Eurydice so intricately retold that it seems upside down: Eurydice reclaims Orpheus!) which befuddled the critics, some of whom made the awful mistake of thinking Miss Welty a regional writer, a local colorist. If she is, so was Ovid.

In The Optimist's Daughter Miss Welty returns to her early (and well-known) story, "Petrified Man." Here she wrote her severest vision of conduct without morals or values, which have been replaced by greed in all its forms (vanity, pride, selfishness, the full devastation of the sins). The moral condemnation in that powerful story grows from a concern for life as archaic as the myths which it alludes to.

The Optimist's Daughter must therefore be read with imagination and open eyes. Note how carefully it flows against a frieze of flowers, as if all the action were a ritual of spring. The people are all rootless (the Texas Chisoms live in cars instead of houses) or withering. The vision is chilling and tragic, and yet it implies a cyclical pattern, and redemption is always a miracle. (p. 697)