[In the following essay, Schmidt examines Welty's references to the sibyls of classical mythology—particularly the figure of Medusa—and Welty's place in the canon of women writers who have used sibyls as metaphors for their writing.]

she carries a book but it is not
the tome of ancient wisdom,
the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages
of the unwritten volume of the new;
all you say, is implicit,
all that and much more;
but she is not shut up in a cave
like a Sibyl …
she is Psyche, the butterfly,
out of the cocoon.

—H. D.

References to sibyls figure crucially in at least three of Welty's most important stories, “Powerhouse,” “Music from Spain,” and “The Wanderers,” though they may also be found in other stories, including “Petrified Man,” “Clytie,” “Moon Lake,” “The Burning,” and “Circe.” They are also often twinned with references to Medusa. Here are the three most important passages:

Then all quietly he [Powerhouse] lays his finger on a key with the promise and serenity of a sibyl touching the book.

… He gets to his feet, turning vaguely, wearing the towel on his head.

“Ha, ha!”

“Sheik, sheik!”

… He still looks like an East Indian queen, implacable, divine, and full of snakes. …

“Come on!” roars Powerhouse. He is already at the back door, he has pulled it wide open, and with a wild, gathered-up face is smelling the terrible night.

(CS [The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty] 131, 135)

Eugene felt untoward visions churning, the Spaniard with his great knees bent and his black slippers turning as if on a wheel's rim, dancing in a red smoky place with a lead-heavy alligator. The Spaniard turning his back, with his voluminous coat-tails sailing, and his feet off the ground, floating bird-like up into the pin-point distance. The Spaniard with his finger on the page of a book, looking over his shoulder, as did the framed Sibyl on the wall in his father's study—no! then, it was old Miss Eckhart's “studio” …

(CS 408)

Miss Eckhart had had among the pictures from Europe on her walls a certain threatening one. It hung over the dictionary, dark as that book. It showed Perseus with the head of the Medusa. “The same thing as Siegfried and the Dragon,” Miss Eckhart had occasionally said, as if explaining second-best. Around the picture—which sometimes blindly reflected the window by its darkness—was a frame enameled with flowers, which was always self-evident—Miss Eckhart's pride. In that moment Virgie had shorn it of its frame.

The vaunting was what she remembered, that lifted arm.

Cutting off the Medusa's head was the heroic act, perhaps, that made visible a horror in life, that was at once the horror in love, Virgie thought—the separateness.

Miss Eckhart, whom Virgie had not, after all, hated—had come near to loving, for she had taken Miss Eckhart's hate, and then her love, extracted them, the thorn and then the overflow—had hung the picture on the wall for herself. She had absorbed the hero and the victim and then, stoutly, could sit down to the piano with all Beethoven ahead of her.

(CS 459-60)

The three quotations are points of descriptive excess or rupture in Welty's tales, points where the violence and strangeness of the tropes contrast strikingly with the language used before and after these passages. A black male musician is suddenly turned into a woman, his piano called a book, a towel a headdress. The pictures on the walls of Miss Eckhart's study are obviously invaluable evidence for how she sees herself, yet they are described not in the story we would expect, “June Recital,” in which the music teacher Miss Eckhart is a central character, but in two other stories in Welty's 1949 volume The Golden Apples, “Music from Spain” and “The Wanderers,” in which she is a peripheral presence haunting the action. Moreover, the pictures are described in a thoroughly contradictory way, as if Welty changed her conception of the pictures' meanings as she wrote The Golden Apples. We have no way of being sure how many pictures are being described, nor can we be sure we understand the link Welty is drawing between a picture of a sibyl that Eugene MacLain remembers in “Music from Spain” and a picture of Perseus slaying Medusa that Virgie Rainey recalls in “The Wanderers,” the climactic story in The Golden Apples. Something is obviously going on here, but the symbolic meanings that sibyls have seem so volatile, so explosive, that Welty's narratives seem to approach them indirectly, with great caution, and then reveal them only briefly before covering them up again.

The sibyl references in these texts are thus truly sibylline: they are hidden rather than highlighted, cryptic rather than lucid. They do not merely ask for interpretation, or highlight moments in these stories when we see how characters' interpretations of the events are influenced by racial, gender, and class perspectives—though they do both these things and do them superbly. They also seem to ask us as readers to question the very grounds upon which any interpretation of Welty's text—including ours—will be offered. When thought through, the sibylline references in Welty's stories provide new keys to interpreting these narratives and allow us to link her with earlier women writers, European and American, who used sibylline prophecy as a complex metaphor for their own art and its relation to their culture.

What follows is a four-part meditation on the role references to sibyls play in Welty's stories. It begins with a reading of “Powerhouse,” then considers the function of allusions to Medusa, the sibyl's dark alter ego, in “Petrified Man.” Welty's references to sibyls in The Golden Apples are then briefly placed within the context of earlier art and literature, from Italian Renaissance painting to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing by women.

“Powerhouse” demonstrates that sibyls are important to Welty in at least three ways. The first contrasts the authority of oral language with that of written texts and suggests that a sibyl's prophetic power is subversive precisely to the degree that it undermines the authority traditionally given to writing over speech. Second, the sibyl is repeatedly linked with the Medusa figure, demonstrating that for Welty prophecy also carries a frightening price: women such as Miss Eckhart are inevitably seen as Gorgons—as monsters—by their society and even by themselves. Third, all references to sibyls give us a glimpse of a potential transfer of power from the sibyl to another person. Feminist criticism has given us a name for such a moment, calling it a scene of instruction (Gilbert and Gubar 93-104; Homans).

For the black musicians in “Powerhouse,” the written word and the written musical sign are associated with the power of white culture: white music is written down, black music improvised without a score.¹ In “Powerhouse,” each time a text is mentioned, it is a threatening text. Powerhouse's white audience always hands him written requests for songs, for example, making it clear that this act is symbolic of the power that his white audience feels it can exercise over him as its entertainer:

Powerhouse has as much as possible done by signals. Everybody, laughing as if to hide a weakness, will sooner or later hand him up a written request. Powerhouse reads each one, studying with a secret face: that is the face which looks like a mask—anybody's; there is a moment when he makes a decision. Then a light slides under his eyelids, and he says, “92!” or some combination of figures—never a name.

(CS 132)

Note here how Powerhouse counters written requests with his own oral language, a system of signals and code words. Significantly, this system has the crucial function of disguising whether or not he has actually followed all of his audience's requests. Such a “mask” is important for maintaining a degree of freedom and dignity as an artist: he may very well have played what he wanted to play, not solely what the audience wanted.

The other piece of writing in the story, the telegram, of course threatens Powerhouse much more directly. But it too is transformed and partially evaded, as Powerhouse improvises different versions of what happened and, in the end, hints that the telegram may not exist: “‘No babe, it ain't the truth.’ His eyebrows fly up … ‘Truth is something worse, I ain't said what, yet. It's something hasn't come to me, but I ain't saying it won't’” (CS 139). The fact that the telegram may have been written by a black man (either Uranus or Powerhouse) does not diminish its link to white culture, for although all musicians have to confront fear, guilt, and loneliness on the road, racial segregation in the North and South in Powerhouse's time made the black musicians' plight more frustrating. The telegram symbolizes that truth. Powerhouse's improvising his blues choruses around the telegram's brutal four words, “your wife is dead,” consequently stands as his protest against it. It is surely not a coincidence, moreover, that Powerhouse chooses the waltz number to begin that protest. He takes a form associated with his white audience (“Pagan Love Song,” the only waltz he will ever “consent to play” [CS 133]) and then turns it into a blues number, overlaying 4:4 on 3:4 time and translating the original lyrics into a series of blues choruses. In the process, he forces his unexpecting white audience by the end of the story to see the pain as well as the power of his art. They are no longer able to see him as an exotic performing “monkey” (CS 131), the way they viewed him at the start.

If black men such as Powerhouse may revise the roles that white society writes for them, so may women. But with the exception of Ruby Fisher and Phoenix Jackson, the women in Welty's first volume of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941), do not really find a way to alter the cultural scripts that were given to them. The price that they pay is to become secret Medusa figures, full of rage that cannot express itself. The Medusa head that rears upward briefly in the midst of “Powerhouse” near the end of A Curtain of Green is the last in a series of portraits of grief-distorted, wild, and threatening women's faces in that volume. Significantly, these portraits are also associated with frustrated oral energy, the repressed voice of their inner feelings clamoring to get out. Mrs. Larkin's obsessive interior monologue in “A Curtain of Green” is complemented by Addie's shouting down her roommate's polite conversation in “A Visit of Charity,” Mrs. Bird's screaming and Mrs. Marblehall's possessing “a voice that dizzies other ladies” in “Old Mr. Marblehall” (CS 95, 92), and Clytie's cursing in “Clytie.” The end result of such a frustrated release of energy is silence: the face that greets Clytie in the water just before she drowns herself has a mouth “old and closed from any speech” (CS 90). With Powerhouse, however, Welty images a Medusa figure whose speech not only controls its audience but also carefully evades or rewrites the cultural texts she is “requested” to perform. In “Powerhouse” an image of emptiness and imprisonment that has tormented many of Welty's characters—the abandoned house that Lily Daw lives in, the “madhouses” of Addie, Sister, and Clytie—becomes a powerhouse. Powerhouse not only shows his audience his Medusa-like grimace, emblem of the price his psyche pays for their treating him as a monster, but he presents himself as a sibyl, an interpreter and controller of texts. (In the passage quoted above Welty says “the” book, not “a” book, making the sibyl's power more inclusive.) Such a vision lasts only briefly. But Welty's image of Powerhouse as a sibyl altering his or her culture's texts is the single most powerful instance in A Curtain of Green of what she expects a heroine (and an artist) to be.

This vision of a sibyl's power is explored more fully in Welty's next three volumes of stories, The Golden Apples in particular. Before considering Welty's later references to sibyls and their proper context, though, it is worth making a brief detour to consider the sibyl's dark, twin image, the Medusa, and the story “Petrified Man,” in which it is given its most provocative treatment. If a sibyl is associated for Welty with the power of rewriting cultural texts, the Medusa is the dark, reverse image of that power—its negative, so to speak, representing entrapment, anger, despair, and self-destruction.

Welty's critics have greatly praised “Petrified Man,” but the readings they have given it seem somewhat odd, for they are unanimous in blaming the women in the story for the perversions of sexuality that it depicts. It is rather as if the story's Medusan gaze is so disturbing that its commentators—both male and female—have rushed to cast themselves in Perseus's role and wield righteous swords against the story's villains, arguing that the women have perverted “natural” sexuality, stripping men of their masculinity and, like modern Medusas, causing all they gaze at to turn to stone. Astonishingly, however, no commentator has fully confronted what it means to have a rapist be the central male character in the story or explored the connections that the story draws between representations of women in advertising and violence toward women in society.² The women may be Gorgons to their men, but the true Gorgon in the story is the world of mass culture, a Medusan world whose uncanny power consists in its ability to make women see themselves only through an essentially male point of view, both idealizing them and treating them as objects of rage and violence. Welty plays a better Perseus than her critics, for she knows how to spot the real villain and decode its dangerous gaze—and all this in 1941, years before the recent developments in feminist criticism that it anticipates. No doubt Welty's brief experience working in advertising in New York City in 1930-31 after graduation from the University of Wisconsin provided her with an inside view of how the mechanism of mass culture may work.³

“Petrified Man” is told entirely through two conversations that take place between Mrs. Fletcher and Leota while Mrs. Fletcher is getting her hair done on March 9 and again on March 16, 1941, in Leota's beauty parlor. The subplot of “Petrified Man” is concerned with lurid crimes and traveling freak-show exhibitions, whereas the main plot depicts the commonplace violence against women that occurs in a beauty parlor. In the subplot, a rapist joins a freak show and disguises himself as Mr. Petrie, the Petrified Man, realizing that a man whose body supposedly turns everything he eats into stone will be the perfect cover for his brutal appetites as a rapist. In the main plot, Mrs. Fletcher seeks to disguise the fact of her pregnancy—the fact that her body will change its shape and use its food to nourish another life—with a petrified disguise of her own, a “permanent” hair-do and “fixed” smile that conform to her conception of Beauty's eternal forms. A newcomer to town named Mrs. Pike is the only character in the story who figures in both plots. She first notices that Mrs. Fletcher is pregnant and that Mr. Petrie is the same man as the one pictured, with a $500 reward on his head for rape, in an old copy of Startling G-Man Tales.

Welty's story is less concerned with Mr. Petrie's private motives for rape than it is with unmasking the cultural connections between the marketing of ideal images of female beauty and the hidden rage and violence against women that underlie those supposedly pure images. For Leota and Mrs. Fletcher have been conditioned to see what is done to their bodies in the beauty parlor not as acts of violence but as acts of love—techniques that affirm their beauty, independence, and importance as women. Such thorough conditioning may be their culture's most disturbing act of violence against women, for unlike the crime of rape, the beauty parlor's ideal is universal and disguised as its opposite, as something indispensable to a woman's self-esteem, and it affects more women than all the rapists in the country.

Leota's beauty parlor is an elegantly appointed torture chamber with the female body as its victim. In order to achieve the physical standards that society sets for beauty, an array of tools and machines in Leota's shop remake nature. References to the technology of the beauty industry are frequent, from the “aluminum wave pinchers” used to make curls to the hair-drying machines that “cook” their occupants (CS 18). The natural shape of one's hair is given a new “body,” and called a “permanent”; one's smile is no longer natural but “fixed” (CS 28) by face powder and lipstick. If the parlor's creations are not truly permanent—Welty notes ironically that Mrs. Fletcher speaks of her “last permanent”—nevertheless the body's new shapes aspire to the permanent and ideal standards that the beauty parlor's machinery represents. Even more important, Welty shows that the beauty parlor's standards of beauty are themselves created by a larger machine, the mass marketing apparatus of popular culture. Several times she mentions popular reading materials in the story, which vary from the purportedly high-class “rental library” (where Mrs. Fletcher primly says that she first met her husband) to the “drugstore rental” library supplying the cheap novels and some of the periodicals with names like Life Is Like That and Screen Secrets that entertain the parlor's customers while their hair is being dried. As the title Screen Secrets suggests, the standards of beauty that the parlor sells are created by the motion picture and advertising industries. Those mass cultural images of perfection themselves become molds that may create endless reproductions of their products in the women who are influenced by them. And although pop cultural icons purport to portray healthy images of women as wives and mothers, they in fact teach the women to treat their sexuality as threatening and scandalous—an affront to the image of proper beauty that the beauty parlor mass produces.

Welty first alerts us to this fact when she describes the women at the parlor as “customers” who are being “gratified in [their] booths” (CS 17)—a striking verb that suggests sexual pleasure perversely displaced, not merely onto consumer objects but on further, to the narcissistic contemplation of a constructed image that is sold with those products. When sexual relations do occur in the story, they threaten ideal standards of beauty by causing everything from dandruff to pregnancy. “I couldn't of caught a thing like that [dandruff] from Mr. Fletcher, could I,” Mrs. Fletcher whines early in the story (CS 18), and Leota on the same page gingerly abbreviates and spells the word “pregnant” (as if it were something that must never be named aloud) and then asks, “how far gone are you?”, implying that Mrs. Fletcher's pregnancy is a kind of dying. The women's belief that both sexuality and pregnancy are grotesque rather than beautiful is shown most clearly in their discussion of the traveling freak show that comes to town. Significantly, it occupies “the vacant store next door to the beauty parlor” (CS 20): businesses selling beauty and ugliness are adjacent, mirror images of each other. Indeed, as the women's conversations show, they need to have a sense of the grotesque in order to enforce a sense of their own normality; but the more they try to separate what is normal from what is monstrous, the more the two threaten to merge. Welty adroitly shows this largely unconscious connection in their minds by having Mrs. Fletcher's and Leota's conversation about the freak show continually stray from discussing the freaks to discussing their own lives. The show is first mentioned almost in the same breath as Mrs. Fletcher's newly revealed pregnancy; it's as if Mrs. Pike has as keen an eye for the spectacle that Mrs. Fletcher makes as she does for the freaks. As Leota says, “Well, honey, talkin' about bein' pregnant an' all, you ought to see those [Siamese] twins in a bottle, you really owe it to yourself” (CS 20). Part of the women's horror and fascination with this display is that it seems not only to be an example of the frightening disorder of nature (creating two babies instead of one) but also of what they take to be the sickening and unnatural union of mother and child:

“… they had these two heads an' two faces an' four arms an' four legs, all kind of joined here. See, this face looked this-a-way, and the other face looked that-a-way, over their shoulder, see. Kinda pathetic.”

“Glah!” said Mrs. Fletcher disapprovingly.

(CS 21)

If the beauty parlor and the freak show next-door are the arbiters of the beautiful and the ugly, then, the lines that they draw are not nearly so sharp as the architectural lines dividing the two buildings imply. The mirrors on the wall of the beauty parlor (perhaps on the very wall that separates the parlor from the freak show) play a crucial role in “Petrified Man”: they give us lucid glimpses of the many ways in which society defines beauty and ugliness as mirror opposites. More powerfully than any other piece of equipment in the parlor, the mirror presents a standard of beauty and measures the women against it. When they view themselves in the mirror, they view not only their own image but the ideal image of what they wish to be. The mirror (like a movie screen) holds the spectacle of infinite examples of Beauty itself, yet also cruelly presents an (also infinite) spectacle of monstrous failure: “[Mrs. Fletcher] stared in a discouraged way into the mirror. ‘You can tell it when I'm sitting down, all right,’ she said” (CS 23).⁴ Beauty and the Medusa are twinned images, each the “negative” of the other.

The parlor's mirror does not hold an image, of course, so much as reflect one that is projected upon it. In Mrs. Fletcher's case, Welty shows, she projects that ideal image from her own imagination, which is in turn projected (much like a movie) by the powerful and subtle machinery of popular culture that has invented those beautiful images and then imprinted them in the women's minds. Here lies the subtlety of Welty's diagnosis of how commercial culture may corrupt. The women are dependent upon market images for their sense of beauty and normality, yet they do not realize this; rather, they take those very images as signs of their own independence and power, the irrefutable proof of respectability that they themselves have earned. The most powerful allure of mass culture in Welty's view is not that it sells the comforts of conformity, but that it promotes them as their opposite—as examples of an individual's independence and power. The function of the beauty parlor mirror is to show how this hidden process works. Looking into the mirror as she receives her shampoo and set, Mrs. Fletcher proudly boasts: “Women have to stand up for themselves, or there's just no telling. But now you take me—I ask Mr. Fletcher's advice now and then, and he appreciates it, especially on something important, like is it time for a permanent—not that I've told him about the baby. He says, ‘Why, dear, go ahead!’ Just ask their advice” (CS 25).

The beauty parlor is an all-female domain where women can mock men and assert their own power over them; this surely “gratifies” them (CS 17) as much as the beauty treatments. But like the beauty treatments, the sense of power that the parlor gives them—power over their husbands, over each other, and over their own bodies—is a dangerous illusion; it is not at all the kind of power it seems. The parlor's images of perfection dictate the terms by which Mrs. Fletcher must define her “independence,” and all of those make her dependent upon mass cultural images of perfection that are marketed by men.⁵ Welty subtly enforces this irony by having Mrs. Fletcher sitting down in one of the parlor's chairs staring at the mirror even as she speaks about women “standing up for themselves.”

If there is a Medusa in “Petrified Man” who turns all who gaze on her to stone, it is the world of commercial culture, not the women who are its victims. And it has done its work not by merely petrifying its victims with a vision of ugliness, but also by hypnotizing them with a vision of false beauty. The presence of a rapist on the other side of the beauty parlor's mirror, moreover, exposes the connection between commercial culture's images of women as beautiful objects and its treatment of them as perverted monsters. The same advertising world that reproduces endless images of idealized women for women to copy also treats women as sex objects for men like Mr. Petrie to possess and desecrate: sexual relations are perverted into either utter passivity (as with Leota's and Mrs. Fletcher's husbands) or violent aggression (as with Mr. Petrie).

Who is Perseus in this retelling of the myth of Medusa? Welty, of course. Like Perseus, she uses her art to allow us to see how the Gorgon's gaze is directed at us without letting us succumb to its power. The story's meticulous commercial details of the parlor's decor and the women's slang may be thought of in traditionally mimetic terms, as a mirror. In Welty's hands, however, this mirror functions differently from the mirror in the beauty parlor or the screen in the movie house: it does not present these images under the guise of the natural but reveals them to be representations, a set of artifices and disguises. In doing so, Welty's story exposes the hidden, demonic source of the images that are projected onto its mimetic reflective surface and uncovers how those representations acquire authority until their naive consumers believe that “life is like that.” Such an understanding of culture is the true “screen secret” of “Petrified Man,” allowing us to decode the sexual politics involved in making some forms of representation become accepted as natural in mass culture, while others are excluded. These revelations are the reward Welty reserves for us if we read even more carefully than Mrs. Pike. But Welty's darkly comic analysis of mimesis as a paralyzing mirror is thoroughly disturbing. Ruth Vande Kieft is most eloquent on this point: “We can say of this story what a critic has said of the comic spirit of Jonathan Swift: it ‘frightens us out of laughter into dismay’” (Eudora Welty [1962] 75; see also Sypher 235). The irony is that early in Welty's career, at the time of “Petrified Man” (and occasionally later), she was excoriated for her use of grotesquerie and cryptic metaphors, for not being “realistic” enough.⁶ Another way to put this is to say that she was accused of being too sibylline. But the power of a story like “Petrified Man” comes precisely from its analysis of popular culture's production and consumption of dangerously naive notions of mimesis.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have eloquently argued that the role played by the sibyl in women's fiction is essentially to initiate a feminist scene of instruction. Discussing Mary Shelley's account of a woman's exploration of the caves associated with the Cumaean sibyl in Italy, Gilbert and Gubar note that the narrative may be read as a parable about a

woman artist who enters the cavern of her own mind and finds there the scattered [Cumaean] leaves not only of her own power but of the tradition which might have generated that power. The body of her precursor's art, and thus the body of her own art, lies in pieces around her, dismembered, dis-remembered, disintegrated. How can she remember it and become a member of it, join it and rejoin it, integrate it and in doing so achieve her own integrity, her own selfhood? Surrounded by the ruins of her own tradition, the leavings and unleavings of her spiritual mother's art, she feels … like someone suffering from amnesia. Not only did she fail to recognize—that is, to remember—the cavern itself, she no longer knows its languages, its messages, its form. … Bewildered by the incoherence of the fragments she confronts, she cannot help deciding that “I have forgotten everything / I used to know so long ago.”

(98)

These hidden sibylline powers are traditionally associated not only with the recovery of memory but with oral rather than written authority—song rather than text, inspiration and improvisation rather than imitation. In Domenichino's most famous painting of a sibyl, for example, a new, hand-written scroll is juxtaposed against an ancient printed text.⁷ Translated, the scroll in the picture reads, “The Only and Almighty God His Great Unbornness [or, “Unborn Greatness”].” The sibyl appears to have just been inspired by these words before writing them down on a scroll. Although they have been received later than the printed scripture on which they rest, as a kind of supplement, the sibyl's words in fact overthrow, or at least challenge, the authority of the earlier text. Written in intentionally ambiguous syntax to reproduce the moment of furor divinus or divine inspiration, such a sibylline text overturns the traditional Western investing of greatest authority in written texts. It celebrates the potentially subversive and revisionary prowess of oral discourse, seeing it as a return to the original, oral authority of God's Word.

Three details are of particular interest in this juxtaposition of pointing hand, handwritten scroll, and printed book. First, the sibyl's scroll may be written, but its form is more provisional than the written text and thus is closer to their shared source of revelation. Paradoxically, the supplement supplants the earlier text, accruing priority and authority for itself. The content of the prophecy confirms this, for it stresses that the divine word has not yet revealed itself in its entirety: it is not fixed; it may be added to. Second, the sibyl is not shown holding a pen, even though she has presumably just finished writing down the text she points to. The absence of a writing tool suggests not only the author's gender but the link all her writing has to the original oral discourse that inspired it, and will inspire it again. The third detail may be most important of all. The sibyl points not to the printed text or to her recently written text but to the blank space following her writing. She indicates this space because her prophecies represent the power to open all texts, to make a space in them for revisions and supplementary revelations (the unborn referred to in Domenichino's painting). In H. D.'s eloquent words, the blank on the page represents “the blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new” (103). Such a portrait of a sibyl's power is thus even more radically revisionary than that of Mary Shelley's parable as interpreted by Gilbert and Gubar; it argues that the true sibylline role is to write new texts, not only to recover and rearrange the fragments of old ones.⁸

When sibylline women appear in women's literature, they stage scenes of instruction that teach their initiates to identify, question, and alter the cultural texts—the stereotypes—that define what a woman's identity may be. Just as importantly, such authority is often associated with recovering the lost power of oral discourse—the ability to revise spontaneously what society has tried to make permanently fixed. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's fiction that appropriates Western images of sibyls thus gives them an even more subversive power than that bequeathed by Michelangelo and Domenichino. Now the sibyl's authority is applied to social roles, not necessarily God's Word; and it decrees that patriarchal society has not had the final word on what a woman's identity may be.

Acts of displacement, revision, and remembering thus characterize the comic heroines in Welty's stories, most notably Virgie Rainey in “The Wanderers,” the climactic story in The Golden Apples. She appropriates the role of Perseus and slays Medusa, as Welty's tragic heroines (Miss Eckhart, Jenny, Old Addie, Clytie and others) cannot. With one stroke of the imagination, Virgie Rainey assaults Morgana's deadly, stereotypical image of a strong independent woman as a monster. To do this, like Perseus she reflects that dangerous image back to itself, identifying it as an image, a cultural fiction, thus taking the first step toward conquering its power to dominate her. And like the Cumaean sibyl in Mary Shelley's parable, Virgie meditates on how a new tradition may replace the old one, in which a woman may be Perseus, not merely Medusa. Her struggle, however, will be never-ending, always a part of the ongoing struggle of women's history. In Welty's words,

She might be able to see it now prophetically, but she was never a prophet. Because Virgie saw things in their time, like hearing them—and perhaps because she must believe in the Medusa equally with Perseus—she saw the stroke of the sword in three moments, not one. In the three was the damnation—no, only the secret, unhurting because not caring in itself—beyond the beauty and the sword's stroke and the terror lay their existence in time—far out and endless, a constellation which the heart could read over many a night. … In Virgie's reach of memory a melody softly lifted, lifted of itself. Every time Perseus struck off the Medusa's head, there was the beat of time, and the melody. Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless.

(CS 460)

Domenichino's famous portraits of a sibyl may in fact be behind many of Welty's portraits of sibylline powers, especially those that inspire Miss Eckhart and, through her, Virgie Rainey. In “Music from Spain” we learn that Miss Eckhart has a picture of a sibyl on her wall who strikes the same pose as Domenichino's—she too has her finger on the page of a book, looking over her shoulder (CS 408). Why should a music teacher in Mississippi own a reproduction of a sibyl by Domenichino? One answer suggests itself: by Domenichino's time, this pose associated with sibyls was often transferred to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, as well. Apparently, the Cumaean sibyl's indelible association with “prophetic song” in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue caused her to become associated with other kinds of music, and eventually with St. Cecilia (Ferguson 197-98; Kaftal 250-58). But Miss Eckhart's sibyl, fittingly, represents not merely the teaching and performance of music so much as a sibylline scene of instruction—the creation and transmission of a new text for women's heroism, a dark and mysterious text that Virgie learns to read only later in life, as she realizes during the soaring epiphany that ends “The Wanderers” that she has loved and learned from her music teacher, not hated her.⁹

Like Virgie Rainey in The Golden Apples, sibyls, Medusas, and women musicians have played important roles in earlier literature by women, of whom Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Stoddard, Augusta Evans, and Madame de Staël are especially important for readers of Welty. It is necessary to discriminate, however, between the cautionary scenes of instruction prominent in nineteenth-century sentimental romances that sometimes feature women artists, such as Augusta Evans's Vashti; or, “Until Death Us Do Part” (1869), and the truly empowering scenes of instruction that are centerpieces of women's local color literature, a somewhat separate, realist tradition that partakes of romance conventions but tends to parody and revise them.¹⁰

The classic example of a scene of instruction in the American local color tradition is in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, set in a rural town in Maine not completely unlike Welty's Morgana, Mississippi. Coming from a large eastern city, the narrator immediately is struck by the way in which one of the women, Mrs. Todd, has made a professional as well as a social identity for herself: she is the town's herbalist and its social arbiter. But she quickly becomes a figure of mythic power as well, a vision of a woman in the midst of a community of men and women entirely in control of her own identity: “She stood at the centre of a braided rug, and its rings of black and gray seemed to circle about her feet in the dim light. Her height and massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a huge sibyl, while the strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew in from the little garden.” At the end of the story cycle the narrator's last glimpse of Mrs. Todd shows that she has internalized her solitary strength: “her distant figure looked mateless and appealing, with something about it that was strangely self-possessed and mysterious. … [A]t last I lost sight of her as she slowly crossed an open space on one of the higher points of land …” (Solomon 51, 150). The narrator may be leaving, but her tutelage in self-reliance has been completed.

Descendants of Jewett's Mrs. Todd can be seen in the stories of Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter, particularly Old Mrs. Harris in Cather's story by that name in Obscure Destinies and Grandmother in Porter's Miranda stories, among others. Porter characteristically treats her version of this character ironically: her stubbornness and sentimentality are inextricably a part of her heroism. The unwavering strength of Cather's matriarchs seems almost superhuman in comparison. The young heroines of “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Old Mortality”—Vickie Templeton and Miranda—learn from these women, but there are no straightforward scenes of instruction or farewell as there are in Jewett. The girls learn from these older women largely without knowing that they are doing so, and their last scenes with them, ironically, find them asserting their own independence against what they take to be their antiquated and oppressive influence. But their very rebelliousness shows that they have absorbed their mentors' strength of character; and it is only later in their lives, usually after their mentors' deaths, that they look back and see how much they owe. In Cather's eloquent words, “when they are old, they will come closer and closer to Grandma Harris. They will think a great deal about her, and remember things they never noticed …” (158).

With many American women writers, the heroic matriarch tends to be not an artist or a musician but a spinster or a divorced or widowed woman who through her own efforts has gained special status working in her community. Welty's richest examples of the scene of instruction, however, tend to involve the teaching of music.¹¹ The reason that women musicians play such an important role in Welty's stories may be because of the influence of two works by Willa Cather that are about women artists, The Song of the Lark and the stories in Youth and the Bright Medusa. These works offer a complex combination of the cautionary scenes of instruction featured in romances such as Vashti and the empowering scenes of instruction that characterize some women's local color writing.

Cather's novel The Song of the Lark portrays the life of an opera singer based on Olive Fremstad, and it is considerably more sanguine than her stories about women artists in Youth and the Bright Medusa. In Welty's essay on Cather in The Eye of the Story, she praises The Song of the Lark, among other novels, in the midst of a discussion of how Jewett taught Cather to “find your own quiet center of life and write from that” (48); Welty sees it as a novel of an artist's rebellion and self-discovery—how she trains herself to be reborn. The most important role models for its heroine, Thea Kronborg, are her music teachers. The first is Professor Wunsch, whose name in German means desire. A homeless musician trained in Europe, he supports himself in Colorado with only a few students, of whom only Thea has any real talent. He boards with a family at the edge of town and has bouts of depression, violence, and alcoholism. Like Miss Eckhart, he is a “wanderer” (Lark 23) whose career ends in madness, with his trying to chop down an orchard and dove-house while (as in “June Recital”) children watch the events from their second-story bedroom windows. Thea's second teacher is Andor Harsanyi, a successful musician in Chicago. Welty singles out his credo in her essay: “every artist makes himself born. It is much harder than the other time, and longer” (175).

Thea Kronborg's story is not a cautionary tale to her women readers but a (potentially) revolutionary one: Thea's success teaches them to question how identity is defined, not merely to choose from among the patterns that society offers. The epigraph for Cather's novel (“It was a wond'rous storm that drove me,” from Lenau's Don Juan) could be the epigraph for “June Recital,” especially the scene in which Miss Eckhart plays Beethoven during a thunderstorm. And when Thea sings Frika's part from Wagner's Das Reingold, Cather describes her “distant kind of loveliness for this part, a shining beauty like the light of sunset on distant sails. She seemed to take on the look of immortal loveliness, the youth of the golden apples, the shining body and the shining mind” (447). Such a passage is a precursor to all the images of radiant and powerful heroines in The Golden Apples, from Snowdie MacLain at the beginning to Virgie Rainey at the end, as well as a source (along with Yeats's “Song of Wandering Aengus”) for its title. Furthermore, when Welty alludes to this passage by Cather, she joins it with Cather's other vision of the woman artist forced by her society to be a “bright Medusa”: Miss Eckhart may be a heroic quester like Aengus and Perseus, but she is also characterized at the end of “June Recital” by her flaming hair—the “grave, unappeased, and radiant” Medusa's-head of her madness that forever remains the frightening alter-ego of the woman artist (CS 330). No image of the sibyl's shining mind is entirely separable from the threat of Medusa's shadow, in Cather or in Welty.

Cather's inspiration for Thea Kronborg came partly from her acquaintance with Olive Fremstad, partly from Henry James's stories about art and artists, and partly from Augusta Evans's Vashti. As Ellen Moers has pointed out (287-92), another important influence was not an American work at all: it was Madame de Staël's Corinne; ou, L'Italie (1807), the most famous nineteenth-century novel about a woman artist. De Staël's heroine was an improvisatrice in Rome, a national poet-sibyl who spontaneously composed and recited verses during great public exhibitions. She is thus a kind of modern Cumaean sibyl whose prophetic and revolutionary arts include literature as well as music. De Staël's Corinne, moreover, did not fit into any of the social roles played by other women in the novel; rather, her arts inspired a revolutionary transgression of social roles. Several passages about Corinne's public performances portray her as a sibyl exactly in the mode of Domenichino, with black hair, beautiful blue drapery flowing from her shoulders, and a rich Indian fabric wrapped turbanlike around her head.

Most of the sentimental romances popular in the nineteenth century offer a hypnotically powerful forgery of a Corinne-like heroine to their women readers, however. Edna Earl in St. Elmo—the heroine of the best-selling nineteenth-century romance that Welty satirized in The Ponder Heart and shows her mother gently mocking in One Writer's Beginnings (7)—appears to combine the intelligence of Corinne with the morality of an upright American girl; but actually she is much closer to Corinne's half-sister and rival in the de Staël novel, the thoroughly proper embodiment of what would become the conservative Victorian ideals of true womanhood. Here is Evans's revealing description of Edna Earl: “The young face, lifted toward the cloudless east, might have served as a model for a pictured Syriac priestess. … The large black eyes held a singular fascination in their mild sparkling depths, now full of tender loving light and childish gladness; and the flexible red lips curled in lines of orthodox Greek perfection” (8). Disguised behind this stylized profile is a heroine completely lacking Corinne's revolutionary power even as she masquerades with her beauty and at least some of her authority. Other women who more blatantly aspire to Corinne's power, such as Salome Owen in Vashti, are punished for their ambition. Such features of the sentimental romance give special force to Gilbert and Gubar's point that the feminist scene of instruction must involve a traumatic but liberating displacement of one kind of cultural text for another that has been dismembered and forgotten. The sibylline references in Welty's stories show precisely that process. They identify and then transgress the sentimental romance's portraits of dutiful daughters as angels and powerful women as monsters that all twentieth-century women writers (particularly southern ones) have inherited. But Welty's references to sibyls also identify moments in women's writings—especially in American local color literature—that have subverted that inheritance and firmly place Welty's work within that tradition. In effect, her stories teach her readers to change the ways in which they may resist confining cultural texts—showing them how to evolve from identifying with Medusa to identifying with a sibyl, from self-destructive rage and guilt to empowering acts of disguise and revision. It seems particularly just that as contemporary readers are recovering and remembering a lost tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's literature, Eudora Welty should be so instrumental in teaching us how to understand their prophetic power.

Notes

1. For essential background information on “Powerhouse,” see Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty: “she wrote [the] story rapidly just after going to a dance where the Negro jazz musician, Fats Waller, played with his band” (23). The best discussions of “Powerhouse” are in Vande Kieft's book, esp. 81-84; Appel's Season of Dreams 148-64; and Stone. The jazz critic Whitney Balliett's essay on Fats Waller, which refers to Welty's story, is also recommended. Vande Kieft is especially prescient discussing why Welty does not reveal whether Powerhouse's wife is really dead, while Appel's is the fullest and most balanced reading the story has received; he stresses the various shifts in the story's point of view and demonstrates the tension between Powerhouse and his various audiences.

2. Such readings are offered in Appel, Season of Dreams, 93-99; Zelma Turner Howard, Rhetoric, 73-74; and St. George Tucker Arnold, Jr. Arnold speaks of a “savage matriarchal deity to whom human sacrifices, often male infants, were dedicated in the dawn phases of human society,” and calls Welty's women “avatars of the Terrible Mother” (22). Appel even goes so far as to call the rapist, Mr. Petrie, the “only free man”: “with the arrest of the petrified man the women seem to have succeeded in subjugating the only free man in the story—but not quite, for Billy Boy remains to be vanquished” (97). One partial exception in Welty criticism is Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty, 62-65. For two articles cataloguing the presence of Medusa allusions in the story, see Helterman; and Walker. For more on Medusas, mirrors, and other relevant matters, see Gilbert and Gubar; Auerbach; McGann; Irigaray; and Cixous.

3. My understanding of advertising and the “male gaze” has been particularly influenced by Barthes, especially Mythologies; Berger; Mulvey; and Ewen's Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, a history of advertising in America focusing on the radical transformations that occurred between the 1920s and the 1950s. Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience and Marchand's Advertising the American Dream provide a general history of the development of advertising in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ewen notes the influence on advertisers of social psychologists and their theories of female narcissim (180) but does not connect his discussion of advertising's treatment of women as sexual objects to male narcissism or rape fantasies.

4. Compare Ewen on the role played by mirrors in advertising in creating anxiety (177-83 and, in particular, 239, n121): “In an informal survey of Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post ads through the 1920s, I have found that between eight and ten ads per issue depict a woman at or looking into a mirror. Many of these ads are not for cosmetic products.”

5. On the subject of advertising as a male-dominated field see esp. Marchand 1-51, 66-69.

6. For a concise history of Eudora Welty's critical reception, see Devlin, Eudora Welty's Chronicle.

7. Domenichino, “The Cumaean Sibyl,” Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome (c. 1620-23). See Spear plate 255 vol. 2 and 232-33 in vol. 1.

8. I thank my colleague William Turpin of Swarthmore's Department of Classics for translating and analyzing Domenichino's Greek text for me. Spear translates the phrase as follows, somewhat simplifying its ambiguous syntax: “There is only one God, infinite [and] unborn.” He notes that the Cumaean sibyl is traditionally associated with this prophecy (1: 232). For two cogent discussions of the difference between the authority of oral speech versus the authority of written texts in the Western tradition, see Thoreau's distinction between the mother and the father tongue in his chapter on “Reading” in Walden, and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: “[In the Renaissance, the spoken word] is stripped of all its powers; it is merely the female part of language, Vigenere and Duret tell us, just as its intellect is passive; Writing, on the other hand, is the active intellect, the ‘male principle’ of language. It alone harbours the truth” (38-39). Foucault, however, ignores the authority given in the Renaissance to God's spoken word. Derrida has written on the subordination problems created by adding a “supplement” to a prior text, as well as on the vexed relations between oral and written discourse (6-26, 141-64).

   Domenichino's portrait of such sibylline powers is of course indebted to Michelangelo, whose five sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling dramatize the contrast between the oral and the textual, the authority of inspiration versus the authority of tradition. The Cumaean sibyl is given special authority in Michelangelo's sequence because the contents of her prophetic song as recorded in Virgil's Fourth (Messianic) Eclogue were thought to foretell the coming of Christ and the founding of His church in Rome. The Cumaean sibyl thus anticipated the essentially oral moment of Christian revelation: her song was her strength, allowing her to contravene false prophets and centuries of written pagan law. Four works are especially relevant for a survey of the role sibyls have played in Western art: Charles de Tolnay 2: 57-62, 155-58; Wind; Schiller, esp. plates 33 and 51 and commentary 1: 19, 102-03; and Dotson. These critics—particularly de Tolnay and Dotson—disagree considerably about the meaning of Michelangelo's placement and posing of the Sistine sibyls, but all the commentators stress that from Augustine to Aquinas to the Neoplatonic philosophers of the Renaissance the sibyls were thought to be among the most privileged of the pagan prophets. Especially relevant for the reader of Welty's stories is this sentence by de Tolnay: “The motif of the turned-away head, covered by a head-cloth, is an old one in Italian art, used to express the mysterious Cassandra-like female character …” (157). Michelangelo's interpretation of the sibyls is revolutionary for the clarity with which it depicts the fact that the sibyls' authority comes from oral rather than written language: the first sibyl in the Sistine sequence, the Delphic oracle, hears the word of God directly; the last, from Libya, puts down a book and prepares to rise, as if in preparation for the Day of Judgment. Domenichino's more secularized sibyls are strongly influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine sibyls. The standard work on Domenichino is Spear; see 1: 191-92, 232-33 in particular, which discuss Domenichino's two most important sibyl paintings. Relevant early literary texts mentioning sibyls include Plato, Phaedrus 224B; Virgil, Eclogues IV, Aeneid III.443ff and VI.9ff; Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV.143ff; Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.66; and Milton, “Il Penseroso.”

9. For this second Domenichino sibyl, in the Villa Borghese, Rome, dated 1616-17, see Spear, 2: plates 171-72 and 1: 191-92. Excellent discussions of “June Recital,” “Music from Spain,” and “The Wanderers” in the context of The Golden Apples include those by Vande Kieft, Appel, McHaney, Pitavy-Souques, Pugh, MacKethan, Rubin, and Yaeger.

10. My understanding of American sentimental romance and local color writing is especially indebted to Baym, Tompkins, Smith-Rosenberg, Donovan, Huf, Petry, Falk, McNall, Douglas, and Papashvily. More general studies by Gilbert and Gubar (cited in the text); Auerbach, DuPlessis, Moers, Homans, Showalter, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray were also indispensable. Jennifer Lynn Randisi has recently published a study chronicling Welty's skepticism toward the sentimental romance as shown in her novels, and Devlin's Eudora Welty's Chronicle makes a similar point about Welty's novels. As useful as these two books are, neither one discusses Welty's stories within the context of the sentimental romance as interpreted by recent developments in feminist literary theory and historiography.

11. Women musicians are prominent in some nineteenth-century American women's fiction; perhaps the four most instructive examples are Margaret Huell in Elizabeth Stoddard's “Lemorne versus Huell” (1863); Salome Owen, the foil for the heroine in Augusta Evans's Vashti (1869); Candace Whitcomb in Mary Wilkins Freeman's “A Village Singer” (1891); and the music teacher, Mademoiselle Reisz, in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Evans's handling of this character demonstrates how in sentimental romances such heroines provide cautionary, not potentially revolutionary, scenes of instruction. As Fletcher and Baym have shown, Salome devotes all her energy to a singing career but loses her voice on the night of her debut and spends the rest of her days doing penance for her sin of pride. Stoddard's and Wilkins Freeman's stories, on the other hand, are considerably more sardonic; Stoddard's recounts an independent woman's betrayal by an evil fairy godmother figure, while Wilkins Freeman's depicts the losing battle a church choir's premier soprano wages with her church's power structure.