SOURCE: Wall, Carey. “‘June Recital’: Virgie Rainey Saved.” In Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, edited by Dawn Trouard, pp. 14–31. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Wall argues against a normative interpretation of “June Recital,” positing instead that critics should follow Welty's example of eschewing moral and behavioral judgment of the characters and focus instead on the reasons for their actions.]

“They were the two of them
still linked together.”

“June Recital”'s action constructs the relations between the townspeople of Morgana, Mississippi; the music teacher, Miss Eckhart, who arrives without explanation to live and work there; and Virgie Rainey, the talented and free-spirited daughter of the town's “poor” family. Morgana holds itself apart from these “different” people—the German woman whose manners are alien and the Morgana girl who refuses to acknowledge the social supremacy the leading families assign themselves. Basically, the townspeople ostracize Miss Eckhart, and they express their jealousy of Virgie Rainey's talent by linking her with Miss Eckhart. Cassie Morrison, another of Miss Eckhart's pupils, is the insider through whose memory and reflections we learn the history of these social relationships. She informs us that the old relationship the town has constructed to deal with the woman and the girl who do not follow their rules is still—even two or three years after Virgie has quit taking piano lessons and Miss Eckhart has lost her studio and home—both unfinished and influential:

Perhaps nobody wanted Virgie Rainey to be anything in Morgana any more than they had wanted Miss Eckhart to be, and they were the two of them still linked together by people's saying that. How much might depend on people's being linked together? Even Miss Snowdie [Miss Eckhart's landlady] had a little harder time than she had had already with Ran and Scooter, her bad boys, by being linked with roomers and music lessons and Germans.

(CS [The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty] 306)

This linkage the Morgana people have constructed is the central pressure point in the story's present action.

Welty's narrative technique in this story is to wrap the past in the present. Loch Morrison, Cassie's young brother, watches activity in and around the empty MacLain house next door, where Miss Eckhart used to teach her piano pupils, while Cassie, after hearing the initial phrase of Virgie's signature piece, falls into a revery of memory evoking the years of the piano lessons. What Cassie remembers explains what Loch sees.

Without recognizing her, Loch watches poor old Miss Eckhart come back to the house where she taught Virgie and Cassie and the other, untalented daughters of the town. There she has tried to persuade Virgie to pursue a musical career such as the one she seems to have trained for in her youth. But Virgie has turned to using her musical knowledge to accompany the silent movies at the Bijou. To achieve some exorcism of her disappointed efforts and affections—for Miss Eckhart has given all her love to her most talented pupil—the old woman tries to burn the house down. Not only Loch, but the adults as well, abet her, letting her set the fire. After putting out the fire, however, Morgana, in the representative figures of the town marshal and a helper, leads Miss Eckhart off to be incarcerated in a mental institution. This present action ends the old relationship between Miss Eckhart and the town.

This ending seems to be characterized by further Morgana meanness and Virgie's ingratitude. Toward the end of the story, with Morgana adults watching and not intervening, Miss Eckhart and Virgie cross paths on the sidewalk in front of the house without speaking to one another. Virgie is on the scene because she is in the house when the old woman tries to burn it. Virgie has taken to coming to the empty house to sport with her sailor boy; and while Miss Eckhart, now mad, is making her incendiary efforts downstairs, Virgie is, unknown to Miss Eckhart, over her head in an upstairs bedroom, making love and romping with her juicy young lover. When Miss Eckhart has been brought out of the house by the town marshal, Virgie has been driven out by the smoke and her need to get to work. Cassie Morrison watches them pass one another without speaking and is appalled, frightened that a relationship once, and only recently, so intense, can be gone. She sees the world dissolving before her. She understands that the actions are not Miss Eckhart's and Virgie's alone, but the town's. She accuses her mother: “You knew it would be this way, you were with them!” (CS 326). Loch, on the other hand, has been fascinated by the metronome he images as dynamite. He is attracted to its energy and retrieves the intriguing thing that somehow condenses the day's action for him.

Those critics who have formulated the social cruelty in “June Recital”—Danièle Pitavy-Souques, Marilyn Arnold, and Neil Corcoran—have primarily adopted Cassie's view despite a difficulty the story poses for doing that. Cassie has sensitivity and insight but little daring. Daring in meeting and embracing life is Virgie's forte. That quality makes Cassie both hate and love Virgie; Cassie's secret hate and love authenticate Virgie and her joie de vivre. That quality indicates a closeness to living unobtainable by mere adherence to the best of society's rules: those that prescribe, for instance, gratitude. Cassie's reluctance to be touched, noted by many critics, is an indication of her limitations not only for living but for understanding what is happening among the people she is watching.

Critics presumably adopt Cassie's view despite the difficulty Welty plants in the way because Cassie's view is a familiar one—the normative view, the way human beings ought to behave. American literary criticism as a whole (and French, in the case of Pitavy-Souques), except where this orientation is disrupted by currently authoritative deconstructionist theories, emerges from a construction that allies literary value to normative prescriptions. Mid-twentieth-century literary criticism derives this orientation from Victorian authors' and critics' belief that literature should educate. Welty's fiction, however, does not lend itself thoroughly to normative readings. It makes them fine so far as they go, but limited to one side of double realities.

Welty herself clearly takes a non-Victorian perspective. She ends the preface to her Collected Stories by eschewing judgments and absolutes:

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.

(xi)

By her orientation, quite like that of anthropologists Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, then, Welty seeks to explicate behavior rather than judge it. She is looking not for what her characters have done wrong but rather for what they think they are doing and why they are doing it.

Welty allows the assumption, the axiom, upon which her fiction rests to become explicit in two places, especially. These are Clement Musgrove's speech to his daughter about the doubleness of everything in The Robber Bridegroom (126) and Virgie Rainey's contemplation of the closeness of opposites in “The Wanderers” (CS 452-53). In “June Recital” we get hints of doubleness, of another action going on besides the ostensible, familiar, social jostling, in two of Cassie Morrison's observations. One is about the now-empty MacLain house: “Yet in the shade of the vacant house, though all looked still, there was agitation. Some life stirred through. It may have been old life” (CS 286). The other passage is about activity obscured by namelessness and willful disbelief. Cassie learns this from her father's refusal to believe that Mr. Voight, a socially respectable salesman who rooms at the MacLain house, exhibits himself to Miss Eckhart's pupils during the piano lessons: “Some performances of people stayed partly untold for lack of a name, Cassie believed, as well as for lack of believers” (CS 296).

“… all the opposites on earth were
close together, love close to hate,
living to dying. …”

Doubleness in social action is explicated in the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner argues that people interrelate with one another in two modalities: social structure, which he shortens to “structure,” and “liminality.” Structure is all that divides people hierarchically in a society. It is the operative mode in which the ordinary work of the mundane world gets done. It is sustainable and authentic insofar as it reflects the axiomatic first principles that sustain life, usually hidden from the mind by everyday, superficial social consciousness. Communitas is the state of recognizing shared humanity; it is a society's people come together. When it does occur, it occurs in liminality, a state and time that occur when people set social structure temporarily aside. People set aside social structure to get back to the underlying axioms and to reexamine their social structure and its practices in light of those life-maintaining axioms.

Liminality, serving the need to respond to change, to realign social practice with authorizing definitions of reality and current facts which have outmoded old constructions, is characterized by imaginative, speculative and irreverent behavior. Turner says “it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is most characteristic of liminality” (Dramas 255). Such liminal activity is frequently partly spontaneous, but there are also ritual types, observed cross-culturally, that both ancient and contemporary people use on liminal occasions. The ritual types carry their own organizing and symbolizing procedures and thus serve as formats for the materials of the new occasion.

These ritual types seem to be our inheritance from the distant human past. They belong to a nonrational, symbolic vein of modern people's thought that Richard Shweder argues is in fact stronger than rationality in most twentieth-century people. Welty may well have found them central in all the mythology she read as a child. They are well known to Welty's Morgana townspeople.

One of the ritual types works by means of reversal to turn the “world upside down.” This ritual is explicated with many examples, factual as well as artistic, in Barbara Babcock's Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, a volume influenced by Turner's theories. This collection of essays identifies characteristics that place the Morganans' activity with Miss Eckhart and Virgie, in the old MacLain house on the present day of “June Recital,” as a world-upside-down ritual. That activity Cassie identifies without being able to name it, the “old life,” is liminal activity. It is a world-upside-down fumigation of Morgana social laws that have put the town into partly wrong relations with Miss Eckhart and largely wrong relations with Virgie Rainey.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one sees the Morganans conducting the action Loch Morrison obliquely reports to us as belonging to structure or to liminality. If it is structure, then the Morganans are provincial, narrow, ignorant, death-dealing. If, however, these are the events of liminality, then the Morganans are using their “deep knowledge” (Dramas 239, 258) to keep the two modalities of their interrelationships in balance.

Danièle Pitavy-Souques, most thoroughly, and Marilyn Arnold and Neil Corcoran along with her, have constructed the story's action with the underlying assumption that it all belongs to social structure. From this perspective, the Morganans reveal themselves as both very limited in their humanity and destructive. I paraphrase Pitavy-Souques's primary argument from her 1983 Southern Review essay: Prejudiced people who unjustly ostracize Miss Eckhart, the Morganans are tragic people. They give in to their prejudice, and in doing so they fail to encourage life. Rather, they discourage it. In shriveling Miss Eckhart's life (Pitavy-Souques implies or assumes what Turner states [just below] about people's need to experience communitas, shared humanity), they shrivel their own as well. Not very persuasively (because there is no solid evidence that Virgie is destroyed), Pitavy-Souques sees Virgie as merely one more of the mean Morgana people, denying Miss Eckhart's love for her and thereby destroying herself.

Marilyn Arnold makes roughly the same case. From the normative perspective, the law demanding that people meet one another's needs for recognition and fellow feeling is a social structural law, and an absolute, as Arnold clearly articulates it:

When the [individual's] quest counts for all, human relationship counts for nought; gratitude is obliterated and human beings are destroyed. The tragedy is that one human being who loved another is broken by the ingratitude of the beloved. And even one instance of destruction by ingratitude cracks the facade of the whole system of social order, undermines the premises we think we live by.

(71)

Arnold's statement is useful in that it demonstrates social structure taking too much to itself, usurping territory that is not its own. It is incredible that one crack destroys the whole fabric of the social system.

As for the events in and around the MacLain house that Loch observes, Pitavy-Souques and Neil Corcoran alike see nothing but waste and shamefulness in them. To both, they are a soulless farce.

Turner's explanations of liminality and communitas, however, put the present events of “June Recital” in a quite different light, a positive one. Communitas is alive in the unconscious of societies. Both social legitimacy and personal comfort in relations with others depend on periodically renewed recognition of and participation in communitas. Wrong social relations bring pressure on the people who perpetrate them. In a sense, all relations among people in social structure are wrong relations in that they divide people; communitas, as the mode of sharing both humanity and the construction of reality, is the source of both legitimacy and solace. Part of Turner's argument about communitas is that it is both frequently repressed and crucially necessary:

The basic and perennial human social problem is to discover what is the right relation between these modalities at a specific time and place. Since communitas has a strong affectual component, it appeals more directly to men; but since structure is the arena in which they pursue their material interests, communitas perhaps even more importantly than sex tends to get repressed into the unconscious. … People can go crazy because of communitas repression.

(Dramas 266)

Note that Turner speaks of repression here rather than deprivation. Communitas deprivation may certainly contribute to Miss Eckhart's going mad; communitas repression, however, pressures the Morganans.

The need for communitas puts pressure on those who have ostracized others to reverse that behavior and join with the people whom they have shut out. Social division has to be balanced with communitas. The Morganans are responding to this pressure with the action in and near the MacLain house. The apparently farcical action is ritual reversal. The Morganans are carrying out a collective action that they cannot know with the kind of superficial awareness we commonly call consciousness. The ritual knowledge is available to them through the collective of communitas. They are operating on intelligent knowledge of this type of ritual for constructing change.

Turner's account of liminality and communitas, then, puts a different construction on the Morganans' ending their relationship with Miss Eckhart. From a Turnerian perspective, the Morganans are beneficently unlinking Virgie Rainey from Miss Eckhart.

Structure and liminality can operate simultaneously in the same situation or scene, Turner reports. Furthermore, in liminality people are close to the matrix life-stuff, to the place where destruction and creation meet, close to Welty's closeness of opposites. The way the Morganans end their relationship with Miss Eckhart has the duality Welty attributes to all phases of living. The Morganans unlink Virgie by denying Miss Eckhart's identity, but as they do that, they give her a new identity. Seen structurally, this is cruel—for they make her a madwoman; seen liminally, their changing her identity allows them, after a fashion, at last, to take her into the community. And although they are further removing her with that identity by sending her to Jackson, before they send her off, they enter communitas with her once again. These aspects of doubleness in the action reveal intelligence and life in the Morganans. They reveal the Morganans coping well with life's doubleness, its kindness and cruelty.

Turner's anthropology serves Welty criticism by retrieving parts of human experience that twentieth-century modernist thought, with its heavily dominant rationalism, and the literary criticism that is part of it, have tended to lose sight of. Turner's analysis of social behavior in its double modalities retrieves society's unconscious much as Freud and Jung retrieved the personal, psychological unconscious. As in those psychologists' theories, the unconscious holds evil but also creative good.

“Let the story arise of itself.
Let it speak for itself. Let it
reveal itself as it goes along.”

—Conversations

“June Recital,” working out its full logic, turns up the Morganans' knowledge of and capacity for enacting communitas; it turns up as well the double of people's right to communitas. This is the right to get rid, kindly rid, of the spoiled. The Morgana people get rid of Miss Eckhart by keeping her at a distance during the years she is teaching. In the present action of the story they get permanently rid of her by denying her old identity and assigning her a new one. Their action is not merely cruel because the Morganans are faced with a real problem that normative prescription ignores as they live with and beside and at a careful remove from Miss Eckhart.

Miss Eckhart comes to Morgana with a clear background of trouble elsewhere. This small town is quite unlikely either to support concert performances by her or to produce numbers of music pupils worthy of her professional training. She must have come here primarily to detach herself from whatever places she has been in that once seemed promising but in which she has had no success: Pitavy-Souques makes this point. When Miss Eckhart arrives in Morgana, with her old mother, the Morganans send their daughters to her for piano lessons so that she can make a living and, in doing so, contribute to townswoman Snowdie MacLain's fiscal solvency by renting the downstairs of her house. Apart from this accommodation to Miss Eckhart's needs and Miss Snowdie's, the Morgana adults keep away from the German woman.

They cite these differences as reasons for staying away from Miss Eckhart: she is unmarried, she belongs to a religion no one has heard of—the Lutheran, she does not allow herself to be called by her first name, she is German and cooks food in strange ways—cabbage with wine. But these stated reasons are not to be taken at face value; they are, rather, the usual sorts of acceptable, speakable covers for other, unspeakable reasons. The stated reasons are to be taken as the type of relatively polite excuses for people's declining. In fact, “June Recital” pretty much validates the Morganans' only apparent ignorance. Below it, and unspoken, at least publicly, is a quite legitimate recognition of disorder in Miss Eckhart and an associated desire for self-preservation through distance.

Miss Eckhart is certainly to be pitied, as Cassie pities her, for being a suffering outcast whose one love, Virgie, does not return the passion. But that truth does not present the whole story. Another truth is that something is deeply wrong with Miss Eckhart. Welty's suggestive comment on Miss Eckhart, in one of her interviews, is this:

But Miss Eckhart was a very mysterious character. Julia Mortimer was much more straightforward and dedicated and thinking of the people as somebody she wanted to help. Miss Eckhart was a very strange person. … She herself was trapped, you know, with her terrible old mother. And then no telling what kind of strange Germanic background, which I didn't know anything about and could only indicate. I mean we don't know—they had tantrums in that house, and flaming quarrels.

(Conversations 339-40)

The Morganans have some present evidence of disorder in Miss Eckhart. The rumors they circulate about her late in her career as a piano teacher may be cruel, but they may also have some basis in fact. Cassie and Virgie witness Miss Eckhart slapping her mother, and Cassie also reports that one day the old mother deliberately broke the Biliken doll that Mr. Sissum, whom Miss Eckhart was sweet on, had given her. We do not know what derailed the concert career Miss Eckhart seems to have trained for. The causes must be multiple; among them, her relationship with her mother may have been a major one.

We do know that the result of Miss Eckhart's history is her living in Morgana unable to establish clear relations with other people. She does not know “how to do” about Mr. Sissum when he is alive (CS 296). She cries (they have to decide that that is what she was doing) very oddly at his funeral, moving herself like her metronome. She wars with her mother. She gives all her love to Virgie Rainey, which is not a good thing for a troubled adult to do to a child. (Perhaps this is at least part of what Cassie is looking at when she says Miss Eckhart's love never did anybody any good.) Kind Cassie Morrison realizes in the course of her meditation about Miss Eckhart that if there had been some small opening in Morgana for the piano teacher, she herself might have closed it. That she is sympathetic to the teacher and yet realizes she too would have excluded the woman if she had been close to getting into Morgana society tells us she is sensing something deeply amiss in the woman.

There is such a thing as too much relationship with one's community; we do not want Virgie, for instance, to accept the town's prescriptions. Yet there is also too little relationship, which can result in further emotional twisting, imbalance, distortion—what Welty gives us in Miss Eckhart. This, I think, is what the community shies away from.

The Morganans compensate themselves and Miss Eckhart for keeping at a distance, in the years when she is teaching in Snowdie MacLain's house, by participating in the annual June recitals she produces. In the recital preparations, performance, and party, the Morganans have had an annual exercise in shifting from social structure into communitas. They have thereby annually made right, balanced, their relations with Miss Eckhart. Pitavy-Souques argues that the mothers of Miss Eckhart's pupils comply with her recital orders only to celebrate themselves. No doubt social structure holds sway in the recitals as elsewhere, and the Morgana ladies do celebrate themselves. Nevertheless, they simultaneously acknowledge their communitas with Miss Eckhart.

Having kept away from the social person for eleven months, for the preparatory month of May and the day of the recital, the Morgana adults recognize that Miss Eckhart's greatest need, like their own, is for communitas. They also need to know themselves as gracious people. They accede to her recital directives to fulfill the joint need for communitas. Cassie knows that her mother made her keep taking piano lessons after Virgie had quit and the other mothers had withdrawn their daughters because Mrs. Morrison despised herself for despising Miss Eckhart. All the parents have that other dimension of feeling, as indicated by their participation in the recital. The mothers prepare the dresses, or get them prepared, and attend the performance and party. Only one father, Virgie's, attends the recital, but the other fathers are participants in the role of suppliers—of a second piano, programs, and flowers. With the parents' participation, Miss Eckhart is transformed again each year from outcast to member of the community—so much an insider that it is she who produces the hospitality, glowingly.

While social structure (excluding) and communitas (including) have thus both been served in those years, the situation at present is different. Having lost her pupils and home, Miss Eckhart has dropped out of sight and is presumed to be living at the country home. But, as Miss Eckhart's return to the MacLain house on the present day amply demonstrates, her losing her job does not put an end to her activity in or awareness of Morgana. Passionate dramas such as Miss Eckhart's attempt to compensate herself for her own lost career in music by setting aflame the passion that was once her own do not just drift away, whatever the superficial circumstances. They have to be ended. Both parties to the relationship between the Morganans and Miss Eckhart know that: she comes to construct one ending; and they, when they discover her doing that, construct another ending by denying any knowledge of her.

King MacLain appears, on one of his forays back into Morgana to take a peek at the family he has abandoned. Marshal Moody asks King if he can identify the old woman he has taken into custody. Cassie has remembered Miss Eckhart's and King's passing one another in the house in the old days, and Miss Eckhart speaks MacLain's name. But MacLain denies all knowledge of this old woman. The women coming back from the Rook party, crossing paths with the marshal and the old woman now, follow the same procedure. Mrs. Morrison simply comes on to her own home, while the marshal and his helper go in the other direction with the unidentified old woman.

Unidentified, Miss Eckhart becomes no longer that person but rather just a little old mad lady who belongs in Jackson. She is no longer a stranger, different, but now a type with whom the community is familiar. As a person of this type, she can be taken in peaceably, without outrage and hostility. The men who take her into custody rather enjoy her and treat her fairly nicely.

It is licentious creation, this act by which the Morganans alter Miss Eckhart's identity. The act takes account of combined losses and gains, inseparable from one another in Miss Eckhart's removal from social recognition in Morgana. First, in altering Miss Eckhart's identity, the Morganans subvert and prevent potential disaster. That disaster lies waiting, ticking with time, in Miss Eckhart, whose trouble has more depths than I have yet mentioned.

Perhaps she really did drug her mother, as town rumor says she did, first to keep her quiet and then to kill her. She may have done that out of animosity or out of desperation or with euthanasia as motive. The pupils, the money, and the food have been dwindling. Then there is Miss Eckhart's response to being attacked by the black man. That she does not evade the event by leaving, as her pupils' mothers wish she would, is all very well. To the extent that the Morganans consider her an accomplice with her attacker, as Pitavy-Souques charges, they are acting cruelly. But that is not the end of the matter. Miss Eckhart's treating the event as relatively negligible may reveal a tolerance, however come by, for violence, somewhere along a continuum with swatting flies when they alight on her students' playing hands. To borrow Cassie's phraseology, what may be implied, after all, in one's not perceiving one thing to be so much more terrifying than another? Miss Eckhart has come to do violence on this day.

Further, when Miss Eckhart once plays for her pupils during a storm, “Coming from Miss Eckhart, the music made all the pupils uneasy, almost alarmed; something had burst out, unwanted, exciting, from the wrong person's life” (CS 301). Patricia Yaeger finds this passage proof of Miss Eckhart's capacity for passion; she argues that “having given the daughters of Morgana's community a forbidden vision of passion, the genderless ecstasy available to the woman artist, Miss Eckhart is ostracized and incarcerated—punished more severely for her iconoclasm than are the men of Morgana” (574). (But isn't Miss Eckhart incarcerated on the same grounds Darl Bundren is, in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, for setting fire to other people's property?) From my perspective, Welty's passage suggests that more than great music, power, and the capacity for fine passion break out of Miss Eckhart. In her passionate but rough playing, there is denial as well as embrace of the music; there is trouble as well as transcendence. The little girls, finely attuned to the unspoken as children frequently are, react in a way that shows they are perceiving incongruity between Miss Eckhart and the music she plays. This is incongruity not of the sort that bridges the distance between human beings and gods, as we say, but the incongruity of which monsters are made—monsters indicating chaos. Neil Corcoran, getting into the doubling in the story, says, “The suggestions of sadism in her relationship with her mother confirm our sense of an inner hollowness that uses music, but will not be led into sympathy or generosity by it” (31).

A victim indeed, Miss Eckhart is also an aggressor. She, Virgie, all and each of the story's characters, are people inalienably in charge of their own lives, willingly or unwillingly, like George Fairchild in Delta Wedding standing in the path of the train, taking living's risks.

Second, the Morganans' altering of Miss Eckhart's identity is licentious creation because this act allows them to set right their relationship to Virgie Rainey, which has long been out of balance. By removing Miss Eckhart's old identity, they make her a stranger. They make her, therefore, a person Virgie Rainey can pass without speaking on the sidewalk. They thus unlink Virgie from the woman they have for years used the girl to control for them. For this is yet another aspect of the relationship the town has created—and is thus responsible for ending—between the teacher and the pupil.

Clever, intelligent Virgie has attracted the social job she has been assigned by her more timid elders: controlling dangerous Miss Eckhart. She has attracted the job by meeting the town's instructions in social humility with gay mockery. Virgie has even pushed the town's reigning lady's daughter—Jinny Love Stark, a brat—into her own lily pond. With such cool bravery and defense of her own position, Virgie can be trusted to put up a defense against Miss Eckhart. Virgie reliably does just that. In the studio she turns Miss Eckhart into something other than an absolute authority, a teacher; at the public speakings, where Miss Eckhart has sat in fragile companionship with the adults who largely ignore her, Virgie has mocked the unpopular, unwooed woman (who has a crush on a townsman, Mr. Sissum), with the clover-flower chains of popularity.

Morgana has never acknowledged Virgie's services. At the recitals, even while giving Miss Eckhart her due, they have given greatest applause not to Virgie's fine talent but to the daughters of socially prominent mothers, to Cassie Morrison and Jinny Love Stark. Just recently, one of the churches has given its music scholarship to Miss Eckhart's former second-best pupil, Cassie. Furthermore, as Cassie notes, the town maintains the old link between Virgie and Miss Eckhart. When she arrives in the Bijou to play to the silent films, Virgie is still mockingly saluted by her piano-pupil name, “Virgie Rainey Danke-schoen.” Despite her services, that is, or perhaps because they have somewhat shamefully assigned this talented and excluded child the role of social guardian, adult Morgana has never forgiven her for mocking their social proprieties. Perhaps they have felt that in mocking them, she was creating her own payment. But Virgie has never done the other Morganans any real harm. There remains, then, the pressure of their communitas with her to be acknowledged, in action. On the present summer day, with much the same indulgence Loch awards the invaders of “his” house next door, the Morganans indulge Virgie at last. They express their communitas with her by unlinking her from Miss Eckhart.

“June Recital” is about community and communitas. Readers who are thinking that Virgie simply frees herself from Miss Eckhart are ignoring the story's portrayal of the complexity of relationships in Morgana (or anywhere). There is no such thing as a simple, one-to-one relationship between Virgie and Miss Eckhart here. There is, rather, a web of relationships to which the community is a full party. Virgie cannot and does not free herself alone.

“… the opposites … unrecognizable
one from the other sometimes, making moments
double upon themselves and in the doubling,
double again, amending but never taking back.”

The unlinking achieved by denying Miss Eckhart's old piano-teacher identity is partly cruel to Miss Eckhart. Yet it is more dominantly creative and beneficent since the Morganans come to this result by means of deeper communitas with Miss Eckhart—and with Virgie—than they have ever given themselves over to before. Before they deal Miss Eckhart out, into the mental asylum, that is, they conduct one last recital with her. For the activity in the MacLain house on the present day is also a recital, the culminating, odd and transformative, June recital.

Seeing this activity as not a humanity-denying farce but rather a life-maintaining ritual calls for a difficult reversal of vision. Welty knows well that reversal is hard to accept, hard even to believe when proven. In this story Cassie sees Miss Eckhart slap her mother and then immediately distrusts the evidence of her own eyes. She thinks it must have been the mother who slapped the daughter. Even having made that point, Welty herself falls into Cassie's mistrust of reversal. In an interview, she “remembers” the mother slapping the daughter (Conversations 340).

Nonetheless, it is possible to fix on the idea of reversal; Turner and The Reversible World assist greatly in that endeavor. Furthermore, Welty demands the effort. She gives Cassie the capacity to hold on to her sense of reversal as well as the inability, at times, to countenance it. She discovers while reliving past years so intensely on this afternoon, that while she cannot remember Mr. Voight very clearly, she could be Mr. Voight (CS 296). She does that “without thinking,” but by making the desperate face he used to make while the piano lessons were going on. It is communitas that Cassie is experiencing here: sharing, experiencing one's alikeness with other people who otherwise seem very different. It abrogates distances among people.

On this June day when the Morganans are used to participating in recitals, they could be Miss Eckhart or they could be Virgie. Accordingly, they are attracted to bridge the distance that is only one of the double relationships between themselves and Miss Eckhart and Virgie. After all, the deviance from social rules they associate with these two is something they share with them. In performing the odd recital with them, they also take cognizance of the usually hidden side of their own humanity.

Turning the world upside down is old human activity, the old life Cassie perceives in the empty house. We know this hidden ritual with our “deep knowledge.” World-upside-down activity is apparent mayhem with the most serious of goals, keeping life going. Turner points out that societies require skepticism from their members as well as adherence to the rules that seem to work to maintain life-giving relations among people (Dramas 256). Expressing skepticism is exactly what the Morganans are doing in and away from that “vacant” house. The family home, with the symbol's capacity for condensation, stands for family life as the center of social life, for all of society's order, security, morality, sanctity, and the rest. At the same time, standing for all the normative rules, it stands for a network of constraints against all the lawlessness normative social life refuses to recognize.

The family home begets skepticism as well as loyalty because it has double effects: it protects, nurturing a young woman like Cassie, and at the same time, it excludes and lies. It speaks for the social structure that refuses to give Virgie Rainey the pianist her due, and as well for the patent willful blindness demonstrated by Cassie Morrison's father. Cassie's father is the town's newspaper publisher (the man who determines what can be made public): “If there was anything that unsettled him it was for people not be on the inside what their outward semblances led you to suppose” (CS 327). Therefore, in the Morrison house, aberrant things, from tales of Mr. Voight's exhibitionism to Mrs. Morrison's apparent alcoholism (indicated in the vague manner in which she addresses her son every afternoon) and/or the amours some critics suspect her of conducting, to the hayrides on which Cassie is going despite her father's prohibition, are simply repressed, denied.

The story's doubling of the family home announces that normatively aberrant behavior holds a fair amount of sway in ordinary life and cannot always be controlled to the extent that Mr. Morrison controls it in his domain. The empty MacLain house is the Morrison house's double. Here more of the antinormative has long leaked into view. Here the ordinary social dictates have not been able to keep a regular cover on life's erratic or rebellious impulses. The husband has been long gone, off on his wanderings; there have been—right along with the normative piano lessons and the teacher's making a decent living thereby for herself and her mother—Germans with tantrums and strange cooking smells (strange and enticing but forbidden); there has been Virgie Rainey bringing her teacher magnolia blossoms but also turning the teacher into something inscrutably or ambiguously more complex than a mere teacher with authority over pupils; and there has been the exhibitionist, regularly flapping his bathrobe skirts while wearing nothing underneath, frantically opposing the piano lessons that are apparently as horrible to him as the ostracizing Morganans are to Pitavy-Souques and Arnold.

Morgana and the world cannot live by norms, kindness, and the social graces alone. If social ostracism can destroy, so can the normative rules. Thus breaking the rules is sometimes a necessity. The old MacLain house—its deviant history and its emptiness suggesting that the antinormative impulses have in that place vanquished the family home's constrictions and lies—becomes on the present June day, when the Morganans are accustomed to conducting the summer communal celebrations, not just an available stage but a magnet. Here the liminal impulse—the call to ostensible mayhem and to collective rites—takes over. Once someone begins the action, the others all fall readily into their corresponding roles.

Through the “turning” (CS 360) of life Welty explicitly notes in “Moon Lake,” Miss Eckhart becomes an insider very much a part of the town's action. She tries to burn down the family home; for it is the place that excludes the demands of Beethoven for yet finer, subtler order and for wilder, deeper passion. While Loch Morrison literalizes the symbolic action by hanging upside down out of the tree, the other Morganans do the following. Instead of keeping the home safe from the incendiary likes of the disappointed piano teacher, Mr. Holifield sleeps as if he were Rip Van Winkle in the Kaatskills, giving us family-abandoning King MacLain via a stand-in. Insofar as this family home stands in direct opposition to free love of the sort King MacLain is famous for, with its utter disregard of the primacy of family, Virgie and her sailor mock this citadel with their playful lovemaking. They do not even take their free love seriously; they eat pickles out of a bag for rest periods.

When adults come to the house—males, thus authorities, and one of them even the marshal—they let the old mad lady set her fire, twice. They run and romp with their lady downstairs much as Virgie is romping with her sailor upstairs, having a wonderful game. They demonstrate male solidarity with MacLain and Holifield in doing so; skepticism, along with the influence of the silent movies comics (manifesting the same skepticism) surely contributes to their delight at Miss Eckhart's torching the family home. When King MacLain shows up in person, he does not even know where his family is currently located, that they do not live here any more.

And what about the women: the sacred flames of the family home, the stable heart of society, trained to give their all for morality, order, family, children, the light of goodness, the prestige of husband? They have gone off duty. Cassie's mother and the other ladies have flightily abandoned their stations, gone off to play Rook and eat food fit for the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Gone off, and so left what will happen if they go away to happen: the ladies have allowed all this, permitted these depredations.

In thus reversing their procedures, from sanctifying the home to mocking it, the Morganans are both joining with those who regularly hold out against its constrictions and giving themselves the deep satisfaction of acknowledging what they normally, in the modality of social structure, hide. Even a socially prominent and humorous woman, Mrs. Morrison, has something to share with the piano teacher she thinks of as a witch; Mrs. Morrison would like the MacLain house to burn down. Is Loch mistaken, perhaps, in thinking that the old woman is lucky in not having been seen by the ladies going off to their party? Have they seen her and in tacit agreement pretended not to? In any case, at whatever moment in the afternoon's events they come into the action, the Morganans once again follow Miss Eckhart's lead in creating a recital. That this is the last one in its series does not authorize our finding more sorrow in it than recovery and release. When things are ready, they do not, cannot, stay (Welty makes that point explicit in “Moon Lake” [CS 356]); and in sending Virgie and Miss Eckhart off in different directions, this odd recital creates what Turner calls “the openness to the future” (Dramas 14).

When Cassie envisions the two “roaming, like lost beasts” (CS 330) she is phrasing a double reality: cut off from mere social structure, they are at the same time more intense and more mysterious, living deeper and farther, than the mere social personages she has known before this afternoon's revery and activity. Cassie does not merely remember on this afternoon; her awareness, like Josie's in Welty's “The Winds,” grows suddenly, within hours. She sees a vortex in which Morgana is swept up together with Miss Eckhart and Virgie. They stretch her knowledge of humanity beyond the familiar and allowed, even as they frighten her. Her sudden growth in vision comes from her communitas with them.

If the afternoon's action is beneficent as much as it is cruel, why, then, does Cassie Morrison work in apparent opposition to everyone else's denial of Miss Eckhart's identity and lament the woman's injuries? Once again, because things double, because here the right to remove and alter someone's identity comes accompanied by the obligation to preserve that identity, to recognize it fully by meditating on it, as Cassie does, going over Miss Eckhart's whole history in the town. Furthermore, moments of knowing just what to do, just how to preserve oneself and one's group, intersect with contrasting doubt about one's rights, one's kindness and cruelty, with moral anxiety emerging at once out of both the social separation of people and human communitas with other people. While her townspeople and family members get to cavort to produce this day's transformation, Cassie (though collaboratively dotted with unpatterned spots suitable to participation in the day's carnival) gets assigned the role of memory and contemplation that will knit sensitive appreciation of Miss Eckhart into the complex strands of the day's action on relationships.

In other words, Miss Eckhart is both a woman with a past in this town and a little old mad lady. While it is important to the town to remove her, it is also important that the woman she was be remembered. Perhaps acknowledging the woman is possible because the potential disaster is averted. The story keeps pointing to disaster unfulfilled, averted: Loch is sick but his life is not threatened; the ticking is not that of a bomb, it is only a metronome; Mrs. Morrison's disappointment is only in the food she has been served, not in something so great as whatever it is later that instigates her suicide. In this context, Miss Eckhart goes mad sanely, her explosive impulses no different in kind from all the overturning impulses of all the people around her in the group action. Further, because the Morganans take this preventive action, there is no Eckhart-holocaust to supplant the story of her earlier days here. For Cassie it is still possible to imagine the mother and daughter in a happier vein: “sometimes you could imagine them back far away from Morgana, before they had troubles and before they had come to you—plump, bright, and sweet somewhere” (CS 304). Thinking so, Cassie constructs continuity in time, and in the time of the present odd recital there is redirection and ease for the passage of power from one generation to the next.

For the action is caught up in that regular temporal movement as well. Cassie must be the one to do the remembering, to acknowledge the life of the woman called Lotte Elisabeth Eckhart, because Cassie is her inheritor. Cassie's feeling for Miss Eckhart may itself be double, too—one part genuine generosity, as Pitavy-Souques declares, and another part self-concerned, in Cassie's anticipation of her own life. She has been granted the music scholarship and already knows she will have a life as a piano teacher here in Morgana; she already sees her life as a long row of yellow Schirmer music books. Unlike Miss Eckhart, she will have success here and pupils as long as she wants them. She is an insider, with familiar and cautious ways. Without Virgie's higher talent or great need to mock, Cassie will know how to make classical music genteel and acceptable within the social structural life of Morgana. Cassie is specially concerned about Miss Eckhart because she knows what she owes Miss Eckhart, what she has taken from Miss Eckhart personally—life. Cassie, in inheriting, has stolen Miss Eckhart's job and livelihood; she has found that growing up means in some fashion displacing the people who came before you—the inevitable way of denying people's old identities, we might recognize.

In the events of “June Recital,” past and present, ordinary events of social prejudice and hijinks, accepting and rejecting relationships, the many interwoven strands of destruction and creation bound together validate that term, “mystery,” that Welty often offers her readers. Relations among the Morganans, Miss Eckhart and Virgie Rainey are not reducible to any single reality we can anathematize or approve. Welty entered her profession just after the “great moderns,” whose work is weighted towards a vision of destruction. She wrote in response to them, I think, implicitly arguing that life is quite as powerful as death. She shows vibrant life greater than any individual's life or any group's life, in which all individual and group lives participate. That triumphant life is everywhere implied in “June Recital”—in the beginning-of-summer day with all the generosity of life summer implies, in Loch's figs, in the hummingbird Cassie would not try to catch, in Miss Eckhart's Beethoven and that other, outside world that is the double of this world here in Morgana—the world King MacLain goes to and comes from, which somehow overlaps with the place in which a respectable Mr. Voight covers seven states promoting a respectable product in business, the backbone of America, and the place where World War I is fought and Victor Rainey killed, and also the place where Miss Eckhart had crippling troubles before she ever came to Morgana.

Welty works against reduction, towards the multivocality Turner sees as the primary property and function of symbols. Miss Eckhart's aloneness (which Loch observes) is matched by communitas. Ignorance comes paired with knowledge, and cruelty with kindness. Morgana, however cut off from the larger world outside, is also in that world, continuous with it. Virgie has had to hate Miss Eckhart as well as love the teacher because the Morganans have linked the two; she has had to hold off the woman's neuroses. But there was also good in the link during the piano lesson days: it led Virgie deep into great music; and until Virgie gave up her lessons, it must have kept Miss Eckhart sane. All of this life is what compensates in Welty for the damages that come with the risks, what allows us to love life rather than lament over it.