Woman's language has recently become the subject of a set of elaborate and contradictory mystifications. While a number of American feminist critics have begun to join French theorists in asserting that language is a patriarchal institution, French feminists like Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, and Luce Irigaray additionally insist that this institution can be transcended, that woman's writing is an ecstatic possibility, a labor of mystery that can take place in some fruitful void beyond man's experience. “We the precocious, we the repressed of culture,” says Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa.” “Our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies—.”¹ If past repressions have become the source of woman's strength, the discovery of her secret and self-perpetuating language will give woman “access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories,” delivering paradise and more (p. 250). In a 1975 interview in Signs Marguerite Duras echoes and extends parts of Cixous' theory, arguing not only that woman can discover her own private and libidinal realm of connotation through writing but that men and women live in different linguistic cultures; they write from radically different perspectives. “Men … begin from a theoretical platform that is already in place, already elaborated,” she says. “The writing of women is really translated from the unknown, like a new way of communicating rather than an already formed language. But to achieve that, we have to turn away from plagiarism.”² Plagiarism, as Duras defines it, is any complicity with masculine ideology, theatricality, or rhetorical style. “Feminine literature is a violent, direct literature,” she insists. “To judge it, we must not—and this is the main point I want to make—start all over again, take off from a theoretical platform” (p. 425). “Translated” from subterranean depths, women's writing must resist cooperation with the tradition, must avoid the temptation to be patrilineal. In this essay I wish to argue, however, that women's writing employs a useful form of “plagiarism.” Women who write are not only capable of appropriating myths, genres, ideas, and images that are “populated” with patriarchal meaning; they are continually endowing a male mythos with their own intentions and meanings. According to this argument women write about their own lives by appropriating masculine traditions and transforming them, adapting what has been called “phallocentric” diction to fit the needs of “feminocentric” expression. While this view is necessarily controversial it will lead, I hope, to an interesting thesis: although the plots that women construct for their heroines continue to focus on, and therefore in a sense to privilege, the dominant sex/gender system, the language that women writers have begun to develop to subvert or deconstruct this system is at once traditional and feminocentric. Language is not a reductively patriarchal system but a somewhat flexible institution that not only reflects but may also address existing power structures, including those conditioned by gender.

“Language,” as Mikhail Bakhtin argues in his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” “is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from … the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language.”³ Disruptive, emotional, nonhegemonic, language, according to Bakhtin, is open to intention and change. Moreover, both spoken and written language are dynamic and plural, and, as such, language resists all attempts to foster a unitary or absolute system of expression within its boundaries. This does not mean, however, that language itself is either nonpossessive or free from obsession. As Bakhtin explains, “language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (p. 294). The process of its transformation is dialogic; that is, this process involves a dialectical interaction between words, between styles, between points of view. According to Bakhtin, this interaction is highly visible in the novel:

The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents; prose art finds discourse in this state and subjects it to the dynamic-unity of its own style.

(p. 331)

Bakhtin argues that we are accustomed to think of the novel in terms of thematic unities or structural polarities but that the novel is neither univocal nor dialectical in structure. “The style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (p. 262). The novel, then, is polyphonic; it is composed of various styles, speech patterns, and ideologies that interact dynamically as a “heteroglossia,” or many-languaged discourse. In the novel various stratifying forces come together and diverge, styles speak or argue with one another, barely constrained by the shifting framework of the author's intentionality. The novel, Bakhtin explains, is not a closed system in which style is controlled by authorial monologue. Instead, it represents, or results from, a dynamic conversation, a dialogue between those heterogeneous styles that, even as they are woven into a new plot and reinterpreted by an author, still speak with the intentions of their previous contexts.

Bakhtin's theories of linguistic evolution, of dialogism, and of heteroglossia will give us a useful vocabulary and a new perspective from which to examine the central tensions between men's and women's writing. Using his framework of ideas I will discuss Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, a beautifully crafted and gender-preoccupied novel whose emphasis on sexuality and intertextuality has not been fully comprehended.⁴ By focusing on Welty's dialogue with the “already formed” language of the masculine canon, specifically on her appropriation of themes and images from the poetry of William Butler Yeats, we will see that Welty's appropriation of Yeats's poetic imagery is neither a destructive form of “plagiarism” nor a source of disempowerment but a potent rhetorical and ideological strategy.

In the final moments of “June Recital,” the second story in The Golden Apples, Cassie Morrison is possessed—erotically—by a poem:

Into her head flowed the whole of the poem she had found in that book. It ran perfectly through her head, vanishing as it went, one line yielding to the next, like a torch race. All of it passed through her head, through her body.

(p. 330)⁵

The poem is William Butler Yeats's “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” which tells the story of a man driven by the “fire” in his mind to seek an object equal to his desire. He finds this object in “a glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair / Who called me by my name and ran / And faded through the brightening air.” After calling his name she disappears, but in her echoing image the wanderer discovers his vocation:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.(6)

Yeats's poem focuses on the simultaneous impotence and persistence of the male poet's will to define himself through a feminine muse. And yet the final tone of the poem is one of self-assurance: “I will find out where she has gone,” the speaker says, equating his discovery of the “glimmering girl” with a capacity to conjure presence out of absence, closure out of uncertainty, eroticism out of ennui. The feminine persona who enables the poet to create this sense of presence has the quality of a projection: she is the shadow or penumbra of the speaker's mind, the figment of his imagination. Although she enters the poem as an Ovidian enigma, returning briefly to human form after an immersion in nature, by the end of Yeats's poem she has been reabsorbed not only by nature but by the poem itself, her body becoming metaphor for the sexual plenitude of the landscape where the poet gathers his images. In Yeats's poem, in other words, the “glimmering girl” is assimilated into a masculine story. Even though she has been the first to call him by his name, she is also echoing the sound he wants to hear—“the name of the father”—enabling him to speak as she gives birth to his poem.

Although it has become a commonplace of feminist analysis to argue that patriarchal culture and writing undermine women's creativity, throughout The Golden Apples Eudora Welty makes extensive use of the “Song of the Wandering Aengus” as well as of “Leda and the Swan.” Paradoxically, she finds these texts useful because of their masculine bias; they provide tropes of the imagination that must be redefined to include women as well as men. On the most primary level Welty borrows images from the “Song of the Wandering Aengus” to describe those women characters who find themselves in a situation like that of the glimmering girl. At the end of “June Recital” Cassie Morrison is dispossessed by Yeats's poem; she utters only a few words from the Aengus' song before falling back “unresisting” into her dreams. Maideen Sumrall, whose very name, with its sense of warmth and seasonality, its alliterative syllables, resembles that of Yeats's muse, is another avatar of the glimmering girl and commits suicide soon after sleeping with Ran MacLain and preventing his suicide. Maideen's lover and the narrator of her story, Ran is the son of Miss Snowdie and King MacLain, a couple who are avatars not only of the glimmering girl and the Wandering Aengus but of the folk heroine Snow White and her wandering prince. As true to her name as Maideen is to hers, Snowdie is an albino who must stay out of the light; her house becomes both coffin and palace where she is always at home, always on view for her prince's pleasure. Snowdie is not simply kept out of the light; she is deprived of the vision and will to wander. “We shut the West out of Snowdie's eyes of course,” her neighbor and friend Katie Rainey explains, referring to more than Snowdie's feeble vision (p. 270). Snowdie's husband, King, by contrast, is a roustabout who wanders through the forest, wild-eyed and white-suited, in search of maidens to distress. King is not only the legendary maker of community babies but the designated wanderer, the procreator of the more erotic and exuberant aspects of the communal plot.

Strangely, it is this most stereotypical of male roles that Welty reverses first in The Golden Apples. King becomes both “muse” and narrative subject in the fables that the women of Morgana tell themselves as they go about their work. “With men like King, your thoughts are bottomless” (p. 274), says Katie Rainey at the end of “Shower of Gold.” King, like the glimmering girl, has the capacity to disappear and reappear, not just in fact, but in women's fancies.

Why is this role reversal important in our estimation of Welty's stories? In order to understand Welty's expropriation of Yeats's poetry, we need to examine Bakhtin's theory of the novel at closer range. For Bakhtin, novels are “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (p. 261); they are created by mingling many styles and genres. This “mingling” is progressive and dialectical. The novel, Bakhtin argues, both enacts and represents “a radical revolution in the destinies of human discourse” (p. 367). The novelist joins disparate languages and inserts disruptive points of view into dominant discourses and ideologies. As a result, the novel records a situation and becomes the site of struggle. At the same time, although the novel's openness to historical change can provide an increasingly flexible medium for deconstructing dominant mythologies, in numerous situations counter-mythologies remain difficult to voice. Since language is “overpopulated with the intentions of others,” the novelist has at his or her disposal only those words that are already qualified or inscribed by others; writing occurs within a hostile linguistic environment. “Not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this … seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them” (p. 294). This struggle against constraining ideologies is complicated by the fact that words may not submit easily to the writer's will. The limiting “intentions and accents” of a language system can be inscribed to such a depth that words become difficult to reappropriate even in new dialogic contexts. As linguistic and social patterns reinforce one another over time, language may change only to remain the same.

What feminist critics have come to call “patriarchal” discourse is clearly a variant of this general linguistic tendency. But women writers have begun to find voices: they continue to free language from the constraints of a mother or “father” tongue; and they have discovered within the multi-vocal structure of the novel fertile ground for their own reappraisals of history. Welty, for example, incorporates Yeats's poetry into The Golden Apples in order to reveal the limitations of his mythology of gender while extending the imaginative power that this mythology brings to male speakers to women as well. Welty uses the energy generated by Yeats's traditional images to question the source of these images and to challenge the masculine nature of his themes.

In order to reveal the hidden zone of women's desires, Welty employs several rhetorical strategies. First, to describe those women characters who wish to become wanderers or storytellers and to protest their positions in a hierarchical and gynophobic society, Welty needs a discourse that is adequate to her characters' complexities—a discourse that is articulate, resonant, and capable of expressing women's aspirations. Instead of abandoning the tradition and creating the new dispensary of images that feminists like Duras have envisioned, Welty expropriates and redefines images from the masculine tradition; she places her own prose or prose intentions in dialogue with what has already been said. “The prose writer,” Bakhtin explains, “makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve … new intentions, to serve a second master” (pp. 299-300). But in order to create this dialogic tension Welty must simultaneously call on and interrupt the singularity of Yeats's fictions; she must rupture his language with an intensity of her own. Welty's strategy, then, is to preserve, to intensify, and yet to anatomize Yeats's poems. She inserts fragments from Yeats's “Song of the Wandering Aengus” and “Leda and the Swan” into her own prose contexts, simultaneously challenging and calling upon a well-known male plot.

For example, in “Sir Rabbit,” the third story in The Golden Apples, Mattie Will, a young woman bored with her sedentary marriage, imagines making love to King in the forest. As she sits on her front porch, churning and dreaming, she stages his gargantuan approach: “When she laid eyes on Mr. MacLain close, she staggered, he had such grandeur, and then she was caught by the hair and brought down as suddenly to earth as if whacked by an unseen shillelagh.” While Mattie Will's fantasy begins as a clever parody of “Leda and the Swan,” it develops into a serious commentary on the poem itself: “But he put on her, with the affront of his body, the affront of his sense too. No pleasure in that!” Quarreling with Yeats's mythology of gender, Welty recontextualizes his diction; she bestows several of his most memorable phrases on her own female speaker.

She had to put on what he knew with what he did—maybe because he was so grand it was a thorn to him. Like submitting to another way to talk, she could answer to his burden now, his whole blithe, smiling, superior, frantic existence.

(p. 338)

While Mattie Will's precursor Leda had no power to control her own fate, Mattie Will has a measure of control over her own story. Welty's references to “Leda” enable us to measure the relative autonomy of Mattie Will's fantasy even as they remind us that women's desire for pleasure is still inscribed by a male economy: “And no matter what happened to her, she had to remember, disappointments are not to be borne by Mr. MacLain, or he'll go away again” (p. 338). King's “burden,” or song, replicates the masculine impositions of the Wandering Aengus, and yet Welty herself could be said to answer to Yeats's “burden” in this story; she submits his language to her own system of accents, her own “way to talk.”

Some readers have taken Mattie's fantasy of lovemaking for a real encounter with King in the forest.⁷ Why does “Sir Rabbit” have this effect on its readers? Certainly, there is no first-person narrator, as in “A Shower of Gold,” to cast doubt upon the narrator's reliability. In addition, Welty invites us to identify—here, and in other stories—with the structures of idealization and fable that add a patina of glamor to the everyday tedium of women's lives. But Mattie Will is day-dreaming; her dreams are inspired by the very taboos that deny them: “Junior Holifield would have given her a licking … just for making such a story up, supposing, after she married Junior, she had put anything in words. … Poor Junior!” (p. 333).

Readers may mistake Mattie Will's imaginary adventure for reality because they confuse the shared ideology of Welty's Morgana with the painful and contradictory reality this ideology works to hide. An ideology is a set of beliefs that allows individuals to experience themselves as unified or coherent in a society that is neither. In “A Shower of Gold,” King MacLain and Snowdie are asked, within the communal mythos, to represent the ideological extremes of male and female identity. By representing these extremes, they play delicious roles in the fantasy lives of Morgana women, but insofar as these women talk about the extremes of King's and Snowdie's identities as if they were inevitable, the “naturalness” of these extremes is bolstered or reinforced. If it is natural for men to be boisterous, libidinal, and free-spirited like King, and for women to be pale, patient homebodies like Snowdie; if it follows that men are afraid of home and family since children are both silly and burdensome, then the women of Morgana must be content with yarning and churning; they must put up with their lot. What Welty emphasizes, however, as she moves from “A Shower of Gold” to “Sir Rabbit” is something far more liberating: the restrictive myths that the neighborhood women need to fantasize about King lead them paradoxically to identify with his power. “He was going like the wind, Plez swore to Miss Lizzie Stark. … But I bet my little Jersey calf King tarried long enough to get him a child somewhere. What makes me say a thing like that? I wouldn't say it to my husband, you mind you forget it” (p. 274).

In “Sir Rabbit” Mattie Will also imagines that her husband is conveniently missing from the story. Junior Holifield has been knocked cold, made oblivious not just to King's desire but to Mattie's as well. The dialectical structure of The Golden Apples prepares us for this subterfuge. After discovering the controlling gender myths of the Morgana community in the first story, we learn their results in “June Recital.” Since the community only idealizes wandering men and sedentary women, there is no space in Morgana for women wanderers. Women who want to be visionaries like the Wandering Aengus, or roustabouts like King MacLain, must either become self-destructive or deviant (that is, commit suicide like Mrs. Morrison, go crazy like Miss Eckhart, or become unhappily promiscuous like Virgie Rainey), or—they may let this impulse go underground by imagining wild, compensatory stories about themselves and King, the designated wanderer.⁸

Thus mythos and ethos work together. But while this imaginative wandering is limited in scope, it also provides a motive for liberation. Throughout the novel, Welty uses Yeats's poems “to write what cannot be written,” to extend the scope of Mattie Will's story. Though Mattie Will can only draw on the limited myths of her community, she tries, in a rush of sexual energy conveyed through the images Welty has borrowed from “Leda and the Swan,” to reinscribe these limits, to become the author of her own sexuality. And while the images that Welty selects to describe Mattie Will's revisionary reading of her world are comic, they hint at something beyond community:

Then when he let her fall and walked off, when he was out of hearing in the woods, and the birds and woods-sounds and the wood-chopping throbbed clearly, she lay there on one elbow, wide awake. A dove feather came turning down through the light that was like golden smoke. She caught it with a dart of the hand, and brushed her chin; she was never displeased to catch anything. Nothing more fell.

(pp. 338-339)

In imagining what happens to Mattie Will after the rape, Welty revises both of Yeats's poems; she is in dialogue not only with his sense of an ending but with his reading of women's creativity as well. In “Sir Rabbit” it is not King but Mattie Will who ventures imaginatively through the forest, alone with whatever her imagination can conjure. “In the woods she heard sounds, the dry creek beginning to run or a strange man calling, one or the other, she thought, but she walked right up on Mr. MacLain again, asleep—snoring” (p. 339). Like the Wandering Aengus, Mattie Will hears the call of a stranger whom Welty has deliberately associated with the glimmering girl. “‘You boys been sighting any birds this way?’ the white glimmer asked courteously, and then it passed behind another tree. ‘Seen my dog, then?’” (p. 334).

His coat hung loosely out from him, and a letter suddenly dropped a little way out from a pocket—whiter than white.

Mattie Will subsided forward onto her arms. Her rear stayed up in the sky, which seemed to brush it with little feathers. She lay there and listened to the world go round.

(p. 340)

Like a cherubic version of Zeus, Mattie Will could almost be said to resemble a baby swan as King's letters (his quills, his white and authorial feathers) fall from him and begin to describe Mattie Will's fledgling, if less than philosophic imagination. But these feathers are also signs of Zeus/King's sexual triumph, and Mattie Will's sense of vocation is short-lived:

… presently Mr. MacLain leaped to his feet, bolt awake, with a flourish of legs. He looked horrified. …

“What you doing here, girl?” Mr. MacLain beat his snowy arms up and down. “Go on! Go on off! Go to Guinea!”

She got up and skedaddled.

(p. 340)

Yeats's mythology is both temporalized and satirized in Welty's prose, and a modicum of creative power is translated to woman from man. But while King becomes the “other” that Mattie Will's fantasy transforms, he also blocks her deeper hearing; she misses the “dry creek beginning to run or a strange man calling” and stumbles instead upon an old man who is swearing and snoring. Seeking a romance within herself, Mattie Will rediscovers the limits of domesticity: “Junior Holifield would have given her a licking … just for making such a story up, supposing, after she married Junior, she had put anything in words” (p. 333). Although Mattie Will's fantasy becomes a lyric of sexual subordination in which only King's sons can inherit his freedom and power, her exuberant metaphors in this fantasy within a fantasy give evidence of a playful—if not yet powerful—imagination, unfairly constrained.

But as she ran down through the woods and vines, this side and that, on the way to get Junior home, it stole back into her mind about those two gawky boys, the MacLain twins. They were soft and jumpy! That day, with their brown, bright eyes popping and blinking, and their little aching Adam's apples—they were like young deer, or even remoter creatures … kangaroos. … For the first time Mattie Will thought they were mysterious and sweet—gamboling now she knew not where.

(pp. 340-341)

The bitter memory of Mattie Will's earliest sexual experience has been transformed by this forbidden seizure of linguistic and imaginative power, and it is in this capacity of imagination that Mattie Will Holifield née Sojourner most resembles Eudora Welty herself. We must distinguish, however, between Mattie Will's persona and Welty's own authorial voice. “The activity of a character in a novel is always ideologically demarcated,” Bakhtin suggests. “He lives and acts in an ideological world of his own[;] … he has his own perception of the world that is incarnated in his action and in his discourse” (p. 335). Mattie Will makes her own mistakes, and yet her “ideological world” is useful to Welty as an arena in which Yeats's authoritative language and Welty's own intended themes begin to clash. If Mattie Will is a figure of the artist as a young woman, she is also a symbolic site where the dialogic interactions of text and intertext become visible. Since she is unable to imagine terms for herself beyond those provided by the erotic plot, Mattie Will's fantasy represents the limited scope of creativity that Morgana society confers—even on women of strong imagination.

In The Golden Apples Welty has invented a complement of characters who replicate even as they relativize the patterns of Yeats's poetry. She achieves this primarily by giving the figure of Yeats's glimmering girl a literary if not a social status equal to that of Yeats's wanderer. Women like Mattie Will, Snowdie MacLain, Maideen Sumrall, and Cassie Morrison do not remain peripheral to Welty's plot; they become instead the central “actors” on the stage of her story. Welty not only redefines female desire in her revisions of “Leda”; she also breaks the “Song of the Wandering Aengus” into a series of quotations spoken by Cassie and a set of fragmentary images defining both male and female characters. She alters the poem's context and its meaning by insisting that Yeats's poem has two protagonists and that each protagonist incarnates a different aspect of woman's story. If at times Welty's female characters resemble the passive, mysterious figure of the glimmering girl whom Yeats portrays as the object of man's desire, in other moments they resemble the ostensible subject of Yeats's poem, the Aengus, in their imagination and their desires.

In “The Wanderers,” for example, the last story of Welty's novel, King MacLain reminisces that he once nicknamed Katie Rainey “Katie Blazes” because of her tendency as a child to set her cotton stockings on fire at a dare. “‘Whsst! Up went the blazes, up to her knee! Sometimes both legs. Cotton stockings the girls used to wear—fuzzy, God knows they were. Nobody else among the girls would set fire to their legs. She had the neighborhood scared she'd go up in flames at an early age’” (p. 438). Throughout The Golden Apples this imaginative fire is associated with woman rather than with man. And yet, in describing Katie's charred stockings Welty has overliteralized the opening images of Yeats's poem to emphasize that Katie's desires and the social limits of those desires are in conflict. The stockings become an image of impotence, of Katie's inability to go “out to the hazel wood” because a fire was in her legs. But it is in the character of Miss Eckhart, one of Snowdie MacLain's boarders, that Welty has invented the most direct and disturbing counterpart to Yeats's male wanderer. Miss Eckhart, a piano teacher fiercely devoted to her pupils and her art, sets a literal “fire in her head” the day she escapes from the county asylum and returns to Morgana. Having given the daughters of Morgana's community a forbidden vision of the 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. But Miss Eckhart tries, in her own peculiar way, to remain close to both the male economy of power and the female economy of nurturance. She passes the gift of her insight and her disobedience to Virgie Rainey, her protégée and Katie Rainey's daughter: “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” (p. 459). The threat of the picture comes from its frightening invitation to female passion and creativity:

Miss Eckhart, whom Virgie had not, after all, hated … 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. With her hate, with her love, and with the small gnawing feelings that ate them, she offered Virgie her Beethoven. She offered, offered, offered—and when Virgie was young, in the strange wisdom of youth that is accepting of more than is given, she had accepted the Beethoven, as with the dragon's blood. That was the gift she had touched with her fingers that had drifted and left her.

(p. 460)

After Katie Rainey's funeral Virgie Rainey not only contemplates the community that has constrained both her and her mother; she also accepts Miss Eckhart's “gift,” her absorption of “the hero and the victim” embodied in the frightening picture of the Medusa and Perseus. In “Women's Time” Julia Kristeva outlines a similar pattern of feminist inquiry: “the habitual and increasingly explicit attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or a countersociety may be replaced by the analysis of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterize each identity, each subject, each sex.”⁹ Virgie begins to propound for herself a pattern of meditation and self-engagement in which she achieves a freedom she has always sought—not by enacting the violent stories that have been thrust on heroic men like Perseus but by achieving a dialectical vision of the rhythms of victim and victimizer that are the pulse of every heroic and gender-specific plot. “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” (p. 460).

This dissociation of the story of Perseus from its mythic origins is characteristic of Welty's writing. Her prose is an absorbing exercise in freeing language from previous meanings. As Bakhtin explains in “Discourse in the Novel,” the seizure and redefinition of any story whose traditional meaning has seemed synonymous with “truth” has farreaching consequences:

By “dissociation” we have in mind here a destruction of any absolute bonding of ideological meaning to language, which is the defining factor of mythological and magical thought. An absolute fusion of word with concrete ideological meaning is, without a doubt, one of the most fundamental constitutive features of myth, on the one hand determining the development of mythological images, and on the other determining a special feeling for the forms, meanings and stylistic combinations of language.

(p. 369)

If it is mythological thinking that makes language seem absolute in its affirmation and expression of a “patriarchal” authority, then by subverting the seemingly inviolable fusion of word and ideology, by converting “authoritative discourse” into a new form of metaphor, Welty also challenges the view of reality this language represents. Perseus, as Virgie understands, is finally as culpable and as benign as the Medusa herself. Their terrible and seemingly archetypal hatred and love are only elements in an endlessly painful linguistic melody through which our gender differences are maintained. But finally it is more than the gender-specific structures of Yeats's poems or the gynophobic nature of Greek myth that Welty protests in The Golden Apples. She protests, as well, that “dark” dictionary which sits beneath Miss Eckhart's picture, a dictionary as blinding as the picture's frame. “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” (pp. 459-460). Welty begins to “free” language systems that have encouraged us to associate gynophobia and heroism. Like Virgie she has altered their reflections, released them from their frames, allowing language to express something more powerful: the “fire” in women's minds that it has sought to contain.

While it could be argued that Welty's transformations of the canon's “alien” mythologies should come under the auspices of Harold Bloom's theory of “the anxiety of influence” or Gilbert and Gubar's theory of “the anxiety of authorship,” clearly Welty's intertextual dynamics are of a different order. Welty, for example, does not deny, repress, or disguise her obligation to Yeats; she emphasizes her own comic resourcefulness by expropriating Yeats's poems in unexpected ways. Welty has, moreover, taken the title of The Golden Apples from the “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” as if to signal Yeats's complicity in her story. But her title is also ambiguous; it evokes Atlanta's golden apples and the fruit of the Hesperides. Yeats's poem resonates from the beginning, then, in a number of different contexts. Neither a strong misreading nor a simple repetition, Welty's use of the “Song of the Wandering Aengus” is dialogic.

We can define dialogic discourse, or what Bakhtin calls “dialogic heteroglossia,” as the reciprocal action or play that occurs among a novel's collective and heterogeneous systems of language. “In it the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls” (p. 261). The novel's incorporation of poetry, however, presents a different set of opportunities and problems. Unlike the novel, the poem tries, Bakhtin argues, to be monovocal:

Poetry also comes upon language as stratified, language in the process of uninterrupted ideological evolution, already fragmented into “languages.” … But poetry, striving for maximal purity, works in its own language as if that language were unitary, the only language, as if there were no heteroglossia outside it. Poetry behaves as if it lived in the heartland of its own language territory. …

(p. 399)

When the poem is incorporated into a prose text, however, the poetic voice ceases to possess the illusion that it is “alone with its own discourse”: it can be altered—even violated—by a new prose context.

As soon as another's voice, another's accent, the possibility of another's point of view breaks through the play of the [poetic] symbol, the poetic plane is destroyed and the symbol is translated onto the plane of prose. … In this process the poetic symbol—while remaining, of course, a symbol—is at one and the same time translated onto the plane of prose and becomes a double-voiced word: in the space between the word and its object another's word, another's accent intrudes, a mantle of materiality is cast over the symbol.

(pp. 328-329)

The prose writer who quotes another's poem in her or his text changes that poem's meaning and orientation by representing the poem's symbols in a different light. This operation occurs in Welty's prose when Yeats's figural fire becomes the fire literally blazing up Katie Rainey's legs or the “fire in the head” of Miss Eckhart. And yet, even within these simple examples, Welty's transformation of Yeats's images acquires new complexity. Welty may impose a new accent or point of view onto Yeats's poem (women, like men, have imaginations or fires in their minds), but she also allows Yeats's poem to work on her own images and characters (women who have “fires” in their minds are still unable to escape the role of victim, of literally “glimmering girl”). Although Welty reaccents Yeats's poem with her own powerful intentions, at the same time this process is limited by the recalcitrance of Yeats's language and plot.

The woman in The Golden Apples who is compared most frequently to Yeats's glimmering girl is Cassie's mother, Catherine Morrison. Like many of the women Welty portrays in The Golden Apples, Mrs. Morrison sees herself as a failed artist: “‘Could you have played the piano, Mama?’ ‘Child, I could have sung,’” she tells her daughter with bitter pride (p. 293). To inscribe Mrs. Morrison's now-frivolous life, Welty transposes the imagery associated with Yeats's muse into a modern key. While the wanderer sees “a glimmering girl, with apple-blossom in her hair,” who fades into “the brightening air,” Cassie Morrison experiences her mother as a vanishing or evanescent fragrance. “Her bedroom door had been closed all afternoon. But first her mother had opened it and come in, only to exclaim and not let herself be touched, and to go out leaving the smell of rose geranium behind for the fan to keep bringing at her” (p. 287). Cassie's younger brother, Loch, Mrs. Morrison's favorite Child, is also disturbed by his mother's disappearances.

By leaning far out he could see a lackadaisical, fluttery kind of parade, the ladies of Morgana under their parasols, all trying to keep cool while they walked down to Miss Nell's. His mother was absorbed into their floating, transparent colors. Miss Perdita Mayo was talking, and they were clicking their summary heels and drowning out—drowning out something. …

(p. 280)

If Welty's prose suggests a transposition of the call the Wandering Aengus hears as he begins his quest, these women hear nothing as they chatter mindlessly on the way to a summer party, “drowning out—downing out something. …” At this moment Mrs. Morrison, like the glimmering girl, disappears from view, “absorbed” by the other women's transparency. Later in the novel she fades altogether, for we learn in “The Wanderers” that she, like Maideen Sumrall, has committed suicide. Just as Yeats's glimmering girl becomes an object, a mirror for the Aengus' desires, so Mrs. Morrison has become an “object” to herself, a mirror to the desires of her community, and only through suicide can she speak her despair. Ironically, it is not until after her death that someone calls Mrs. Morrison by her name. To commemorate her mother's death, Cassie first marks the grave with a stone angel and then plants her own front yard with a bed of narcissi that spell out “Catherine.” By writing her mother's name in floral letters, Cassie is attempting to bring her mother back into the communal garden: she does not allow Catherine Morrison to have a plot of her own even in death. Moreover, Catherine Morrison's death is reincorporated into the myth of Narcissus, making her once again the “echo” of a masculine story.

But beneath the lackadaisical surface of Mrs. Morrison's life as it is described in “June Recital,” Welty invites us to see something unvoiced and ominous—the glimmer of an untold story. From the beginning of “June Recital” Cassie's mother is more absent than present, reluctant to fulfill the chores of mothering, guilty about the fates of other women. Even Loch notices her vacant presence. “It was not really to him that his mother would be talking,” Loch observes, “but it was he who tenderly let her, as they watched and listened to the swallows just at dark. It was always at this hour that she spoke in this voice—not to him or to Cassie or Louella or to his father, or to the evening, but to the wall, more nearly” (p. 328). In this moment we are allowed to see beyond the plot that has been scripted for her by her community and to look into the margins of Catherine Morrison's own story. As her voice moves back and forth in the fading light, she tells Loch her story about the garden party. Heard in this darkening context the garden “plot” becomes liminal, and we begin to read between the lines, to realize that Mrs. Morrison's speech is more nearly a parable about the permissible range of feminine creativity in this small Southern town than it is an anecdote about a ladies' social:

“Listen and I'll tell you what Miss Nell served at the party,” Loch's mother said softly, with little waits in her voice. She was just a glimmer at the foot of his bed.

“Ma'am.”

“An orange scooped out and filled with orange juice, with the top put back on and decorated with icing leaves, a straw stuck in. A slice of pineapple with a heap of candied sweet potatoes on it, and a little handle of pastry. A cup made out of toast, filled with creamed chicken, fairly warm. A sweet peach pickle with flower petals around it of different-colored cream cheese. A swan made of a cream puff. He had whipped cream feathers, a pastry neck, green icing eyes. A pastry biscuit the size of a marble with a little date filling.” She sighed abruptly.

“Were you hungry, Mama?” he said.

(p. 328)

If a number of characters in The Golden Apples are “just a glimmer at the foot” of someone's bed, if they replicate, even as they comment on, the limited powers of Yeats's muse, others, like Cassie's piano teacher, Miss Eckhart, initially appear as figures of capable imagination. Although by the end of “June Recital” Miss Eckhart has been ostracized and packed off to the County Farm, she maintains throughout the story a strange nobility and a will to wander. Even after she has taken leave of her senses, she is still able to resurrect a private teleology; she returns to the house where she taught piano lessons, as determined as the Aengus to finish her story.

Miss Eckhart's attempted recreation and destruction of past events become the central dramatic action in “June Recital.” As Cassie Morrison looks forward to an evening's hayride and creates a “tie-dye scarf” according to communal formula, her brother, Loch, watches the world outside his window and composes stories about the vacant house next door. Already the separation between genders has begun. Cassie's attention is focused on an object of feminine adornment that is safely unpredictable. Loch allows his mind to wander freely; his stories are fantastic, his metaphors inventive. As he watches Virgie Rainey and a “friendly” sailor making love on the second floor of the vacant house, Loch is established as a naive and unbiased observer who is already attempting to construct a metaphoric language to account for a world he does not understand. At first he is the only one to see an old woman enter the house and begin to putter about downstairs. Her behavior is strangely festive:

The old woman was decorating the piano until it rayed out like a Christmas tree or a Maypole. Maypole ribbons of newspaper and tissue paper streamed and crossed each other from the piano to the chandelier and festooned again to the four corners of the room, looped to the backs of chairs here and there. When would things begin?

(p. 283)

This is the room where Miss Eckhart used to give her June recitals, the room where every year she would come to life for one handsome, perfectible evening:

Then she would look down ceremoniously at the sleepiest and smallest child, who had only played “Playful Kittens” that night. All her pupils on that evening partook of the grace of Virgie Rainey. Miss Eckhart would catch them running out the door, speaking German to them and holding them to her. In the still night air her dress felt damp and spotted, as though she had run a long way.

(p. 315)

In her sweaty garment she resembles a benign goddess, in love with the world she has made, for like Yeats's wanderer she is a creator who has struggled, who seems to have “run a long way.” Thwarted in love and in art she sustains herself by giving June recitals and imagining an artistic life for Virgie Rainey, who, at thirteen, is still passionately absorbed in her music:

She played the Fantasia on Beethoven's Ruins of Athens, and when she finished and got up and made her bow, the red of the sash was all over the front of her waist, she was wet and stained as if she had been stabbed in the heart, and a delirious and enviable sweat ran down from her forehead and cheeks and she licked it in with her tongue.

(p. 313)

Images of sweating, of licking, of violence, of delirium bind child and woman together and reveal the price both must pay for their art. Too eccentric, too foreign and impassioned for Morgana, Miss Eckhart loses her pupils and Virgie her inspiration. “Perhaps nobody wanted Virgie Rainey to be anything in Morgana any more than they had wanted Miss Eckhart to be,” Cassie reminisces, “and they were the two of them still linked together by people's saying that” (p. 306). Miss Eckhart's return from her banishment to the County Farm is poignantly ceremonial: she comes back to the place where she organized recitals and cultivated a talent in Virgie Rainey as beautiful and as violent as her own.

In decorating the room for the final recital Miss Eckhart refurbishes it with numerous mementos. The piano is crowned with magnolia blossom—Virgie's perpetual and too fragrant gift to her teacher. Earlier in the story the magnolia has been an emblem of exuberant and rebellious female energy, but at this final recital it becomes—like the nest Miss Eckhart weaves in the piano—a symbol of woman's defeat. Miss Eckhart is preparing her beloved objects—piano, magnolia, metronome, empty house—for a small and funereal conflagration:

She wanted things to suit herself, nobody else would have been able to please her; and she was taking her own sweet time. She was building a bonfire of her own in the piano and would set off the dynamite when she was ready and not before.

Loch knew from her actions that the contrivance down in the wires—the piano front had been taken away—was a kind of nest. She was building it like a thieving bird, weaving in every little scrap that she could find around her. He saw in two places the mustached face of Mr. Drewsie Carmichael, his father's candidate for mayor—she found the circulars in the door.

(p. 316)

Just as this collage contains patriarchs who will be burned in effigy, so the house contains Virgie Rainey, whose participation in the erotic play overhead (an eroticism that, we are led to believe, has helped disconnect Virgie from her art) may be permanently ended. But in spite of the fire Miss Eckhart envisions in her head, her plot is poorly conceived from the start. As Loch explains to himself, watching her clumsy activities through his bedroom window, “only a woman” would try to start a conflagration in a breezeless room where the windows are down, their cracks stuffed with paper. Unlike Yeats's wanderer Miss Eckhart lacks the freedom or knowledge to take her fire to that traditional source of inspiration—the hazel wood with its attendant rhetoricity.

She bent over, painfully, he felt, and laid the candle in the paper nest she had built in the piano. He too drew his breath in, protecting the flame, and as she pulled her aching hand back he pulled his. The newspaper caught, it was ablaze, and the old woman threw in the candle. Hands to thighs, she raised up, her work done.

(p. 317)

This Promethean and painful act is thwarted at once. Two husky wanderers who have spent the day fishing have been watching Miss Eckhart through the window as she painstakingly decorates her recital hall and builds her empty nest. As she holds her candle to the paper they jump into the house with a yell.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Bowles together beat out the fire in the piano, fighting over it hard, banging and twanging the strings. Old Man Moody, no matter how his fun had been spoiled, enjoyed jumping up and down on the fierce-burning magnolia leaves. So they put the fire out. … When a little tongue of flame started up for the last time, they quenched it together. …

(p. 320)

Woman's “fierce-burning magnolia leaves,” her “little tongue of flame,” and her fiery piano are amusing objects to these men. But even in the moment when they play, child-like, with woman's fire, their pleasure edges toward sadism.

She rose up, agitated now, and went running about the room, holding the candle above her, evading the men each time they tried to head her off.

This time, the fire caught her own hair. The little short white frill turned to flame.

Old Man Moody was so quick that he caught her. He came up with a big old rag. … He brought the cloth down over her head from behind, grimacing, as if all people on earth had to do acts of shame, some time. He hit her covered-up head about with the flat of his hand.

(p. 322)

Her hair aflame, Miss Eckhart becomes an archetype of woman's fury and desire. Like Yeats's wanderer she has a “fire in her head,” and yet the image turns in on itself and becomes parodic as she strikes back, not at society, but at herself. Her fire becomes a masochistic flame: it scorches before it illuminates. Miss Eckhart's resemblance to Yeats's wanderer, then, at once expands and collapses. Her aspirations are mediated by her culturally inscribed role as victim, as literally “glimmering girl.”

“Old Man Moody was so quick that he caught her. …” Her hair in flames, her victimizer still in pursuit, woman is caught in a periphrasis, but her desire to change roles is not so much thwarted by Yeats's poem as it is expressed through the poem:

When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch. … in the novel heteroglossia is by and large always personified, incarnated in individual human figures, with disagreements and oppositions individualized. But such oppositions of individual wills and mind are submerged in social heteroglossia[,] … surface manifestations of those elements that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradictory, saturate their consciousness and discourses with a more fundamental speech diversity.

(Bakhtin, pp. 300, 326)

Within the context of Welty's novel Yeats's poem becomes one of the voices that both describe and explain women's predicament within a society that represses their desires. His poem provides a set of differential images describing gender roles that Welty refracts with an even more frightening “speech diversity.” Old Man Moody prevents Miss Eckhart from acting out her chosen role, and although he saves her life, his act is mediated by violent images of suffocation (“he brought the cloth down over her head from behind”) and of sadism (“he hit her covered-up head about with the flat of his hand”).

Shadows of an older mythology, the men portrayed in “June Recital” have been demystified in Welty's prose, brought down to earth. But if they move through Welty's world clumsily, ineptly, their cruelty is not abated; Welty asks them to enact, as if by rote, their older roles of victor and victimizer. Miss Eckhart and her pupils are harassed, for example, by the second roomer at Miss Snowdie's boarding house, the encyclopedia saleman Mr. Voight, who “would walk over their heads and come down to the turn of the stairs, open his bathrobe, and flap the skirts like an old turkey gobbler. … he wore no clothes at all underneath” (p. 294). Welty's humor is a mediating device to keep these stories about human derangement dialogic. But neither the humor nor the dialogism obscures the fact that sexual, economic, and linguistic restraints are imposed on women at an early age. Cassie “herself had told all about Mr. Voight at breakfast, stood up at the table and waved her arms, only to have her father say he didn't believe it; that Mr. Voight represented a large concern and covered seven states. He added his own threat to Miss Eckhart's: no picture show money” (p. 295). Those women in Morgana who step outside traditional roles, who attempt to speak in the culture's excluded heteroglossia, either are denied scripts altogether or have scripts foisted on them. “‘Listen. You should marry now, Virgie,’” Jinny Love Stark shrieks at Katie Rainey's funeral. “‘Don't put it off any longer.’ … She was grimacing out of the iron mask of the married lady. It appeared urgent with her to drive everybody, even Virgie for whom she cared nothing, into the state of marriage along with her” (pp. 444-445). But while the community tries to prevent another outbreak of pyromania, the reader who is attuned to Welty's revision of Yeats's poem sees another story altogether. The Morgana community acts together, man and woman alike, to prevent feminine acts of Prometheanism: woman is not allowed to steal man's holy fire.

In her essay “The Difference of View” Mary Jacobus asks for a feminist criticism that does more than reaffirm the concept of gender difference as opposition. Instead, Jacobus envisions an alliance of feminism and the avant-garde in which the traditional terms of linguistics, of psychoanalysis, and of literary criticism “are called in question—subverted from within.” “Such a move has the advantage of freeing off the ‘feminine’ from the religion-bound, ultimately conservative and doom-ridden concept of difference-as-opposition which underlies Virginia Woolf's reading of the ‘case’ of George Eliot,” Jacobus argues. “Difference is redefined, not as male versus female—not as biologically constituted—but as a multiplicity, joyousness and heterogeneity which is that of textuality itself.”¹⁰ In forging an alliance between avant-garde literary practice and feminist criticism, textuality “becomes the site both of challenge and Otherness; rather than (as in more traditional approaches) simply yielding the themes and representation of female oppression” (p. 12). This redefinition of difference should, according to Jacobus, encourage the transgression or “transversal” of gender boundaries and expose these boundaries “for what they are—the product of phallocentric discourse and of women's relation to patriarchal culture” (p. 12). A new feminist poetics should begin, then, to address the heterogeneous languages, the dialogism, the “pleasure edge” in women's writing, since this writing will be in conflict, in conversation, and, to some degree, in correspondence with the ideologies it is trying to dislodge.

In this essay I have begun to show how such an alliance of feminist criticism and “those pleasurable and rupturing aspects of language” that Jacobus identifies with the avantgarde may work together in the analysis of a literary text. One of Welty's strengths as a writer is her recognition that she need not be coerced by those stories that coerce her female characters; she feels small compunction at her own Promethean acts.

In the last sentence of The Golden Apples words and images that have been appropriated from the poetic contexts of the “Song of the Wandering Aengus” and “Leda and the Swan” begin to reappear as part of the irresolution and diversity of Virgie's final vision:

She smiled once, seeing before her, screenlike, the hideous and delectable face Mr. King MacLain had made at the funeral, and when they all knew he was next—even he. Then she and the old beggar woman, the old black thief, were there alone and together in the shelter of the big public tree, listening to the magical percussion, the world beating in their ears. They heard through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon's crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan.

(p. 461)

Is Welty hinting at her text's demythologization not only of Yeats's poetry but of that “sixty-year-old smiling public man” who dreams so poignantly “of a Ledaean body” in “Among School Children” and celebrates organic beauty in the “chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer”? Welty has transformed Yeats's wished-for organicism into a series of dissolving images; she links the death of the mythological “King” with Virgie's own multiple vision. And finally, in subjecting Yeats's poetic discourse to the heteroglossia of her own story, Welty has displaced the ending of his story with a beginning of her own: the unresolved yet resolute image of “the big public tree” sheltering two marginal and intemperate women who are, nonetheless, afoot with their visions.

Notes

1. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 248. Further references to this work will be cited in the text.

2. Marguerite Duras, “An Interview with Marguerite Duras,” by Susan Husserl-Kapit, SIGNS, 1 (1975), 425. Further references to this work will be cited in the text.

3. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 288. Further references to this work will be cited in the text.

4. Only a few of Welty's critics have begun to discuss her prose in terms of feminist analysis or theory. For fine examples of such analysis see Mary Anne Ferguson's “Losing Battles as a Comic Epic in Prose,” in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979), Carol Manning's With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), and Louise Westling's Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

5. References to The Golden Apples (1949) follow the text of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). Page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

6. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 57.

7. See, for example, Carol Manning's reading of “Sir Rabbit” in With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling, pp. 100-103. Manning's analysis is representative of recent readings of “Sir Rabbit” in which the critic assumes the actuality of the episode; otherwise her analysis is very perceptive, especially her descriptions of King's mock heroism and Welty's comic flair.

8. Although a complete analysis of Welty's reading of gender in The Golden Apples is beyond the scope of this essay, the rest of the novel focuses on gender issues with a thorough dialectical force. After exploring the constrictions that an asymmetrical sex/gender system imposes on women, Welty begins in “Moon Lake,” and then in “The Whole World Knows” and “Music from Spain,” to address the pain this asymmetry creates for men as well. For a reading of this dialectic in “Moon Lake,” see my “The Case of the Dangling Signifier: Phallic Imagery in Welty's ‘Moon Lake,’” in Twentieth Century Literature, 28 (Winter 1982).

9. Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, SIGNS, 7 (1981), 34.

10. Mary Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Jacobus (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 12. Further references to this work will be cited in the text.