SOURCE: Appel, Alfred, Jr. “The Grotesque and the Gothic.” In A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, pp. 73-103. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965.

[In the following essay, Appel distinguishes between grotesque and gothic elements in American fiction, using the works of Eudora Welty as examples of an author who successfully uses the grotesque to expound on themes of social and individual displacement while instilling a sense of compassion and hope in the reader.]

The grotesque and Gothic have always been major modes in American fiction and popular culture, from Brockden Brown to Paul Bowles, from frontier humor to W. C. Fields. Perhaps the grotesque is so persistent an American genre because of the peculiarly American belief that happiness is the norm of existence—a belief that is accompanied by an almost fanatical resistance to any suggestions to the contrary. It is not surprising that many American writers have felt the need to use the grotesque or Gothic, as though only through distortion and exaggeration could they begin to suggest the complexity of reality—and its tragicomic implications—to an audience thoroughly committed to the “optimistic.” As Flannery O'Connor said in The Living Novel (1957), “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The Gothic and the grotesque may be congruent in a single work, but in recent years the terms have often been used interchangeably, which has proved confusing. Some distinctions should be made.¹ The term “Gothic” originally referred to the prose genre that was popular in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Heralding the imminent shift of sensibility to Romanticism, the Gothic writers in Germany and England concerned themselves with things inexplicable, violent, grotesque, horrifying, and supernatural. The setting was often in the medieval past, in a dark forest, castle, convent, or tomb; enchantments, ghosts, hauntings, mirrors that gave back unexpected reflections, and paintings and statues that smiled or shed tears were standard Gothic fare. Despite its tendency toward horror pornography, European Gothicism sometimes managed to suggest, however crudely, the irrational aspects of life, the mysteries of the unconscious, and the destructive potential of the sex drive. But often the Gothic writers do not convince us that they are dealing with models of significant reality, and the Gothic effects remain gratuitous. Edgar Allan Poe popularized the Gothic genre in America, where it has been utilized by writers far superior to their European precursors.²

The grotesque is characterized by the distortion of the external world, by the description of human beings in nonhuman terms, and by the displacement we associate with dreams. The infinite possibilities of the dream inform the grotesque at every turn, suspending the laws of proportion and symmetry; our deepest promptings are projected into the details of the scene—inscape as landscape. Because the grotesque replaces supernaturalism with hallucination, it expresses the reality of the unconscious life—the formative source which the Gothic writer, in his romantic flights, may never tap. The grotesque is a heightened realism, reminiscent of caricature, but going beyond it to create a fantastic realism or realistic fantasy that evokes pathos and terror, and what Marlow, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1898), calls “that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams”—and of the grotesque. Characters seen grotesquely may be “flat”—not likely to develop or change much during the course of the action—but because they have been pushed to extremes, they become representative, objectifying the complex fears and compulsions that constrict the heart. In grotesque comedy one confronts these fears, and through laughter is released from them.

If artists and writers of the grotesque often render human beings in animal-like form or, like Kafka, as animals or insects, it is because too often our status seems subhuman, our lives shaped by dehumanizing forces beyond our control. It is the animal's eye view of things to look up and see the world looming above, menacing, dreadful, and confusing; thus writers of the grotesque often use the point of view of a child, animal, or dwarf, or the “lowest” perspective of all, a view from “underground.” Although it has flourished in other ages, the grotesque is most compatible with the modern sensibility; perhaps the grotesque vision is the modern world view. Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Conrad all employ the grotesque intermittently; it is central to the aesthetic of Kafka, Faulkner, West, Nabokov, John Hawkes and Eudora Welty. These writers rarely invoke the traditional Gothic trappings;³ instead, they use the technique of the grotesque, which involves the fusion of incongruous forms drawn from external reality (this point will be developed later). The impact of the grotesque depends on a sense of the familiar, for what Nathanael West called the “truly monstrous” resides not in the supernatural and the bizarre, but in our ordinary, everyday lives; “Gothic” is a term to be reserved for “special effects.”

The prevalence of the grotesque in Miss Welty's fiction became immediately apparent with the publication of A Curtain of Green. Louise Bogan's enthusiastic review in the Nation was misleadingly entitled “The Gothic South,” because only one story, “Clytie,” could properly be called Gothic.⁴ Clinically minded Time noted that “of seventeen pieces … only two report states of experience which could be called normal,”⁵ and Miss Welty was accused of showing “too great a preoccupation with the abnormal and grotesque.”⁶ But her use of the grotesque and Gothic can be justified, for the meaning of a story never lies solely in its horror or violence; the distortions intensify the pathos of a situation and express psychological and moral truths. Miss Welty herself has provided a rejoinder to such charges by stating in Place in Fiction that “life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believably, more inevitably so.”

Whereas Miss Welty often employs the grotesque, the Gothic appears in only three stories, “The Purple Hat,” “Clytie,” and “The Burning,” and none of these is as horrifying as Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Tennessee Williams' “Desire and the Black Masseur,” or almost any one of Paul Bowles's stories. Yet in spite of these distinctions, Miss Welty is often thought of as a Gothic writer. This misconception is the result of a kind of guilt by association, for it has become a critical commonplace to characterize all Southern writers as Gothic.⁷ Many reviewers and readers will group Miss Welty with any Southern writer who may come to mind, thus denying her work its virtues. The critics who force such comparisons do not distinguish between the Gothic and grotesque, nor between those writers who have used the two modes with artistic distinction and those who have exploited them. The atmosphere and symbolism in Truman Capote's fiction ultimately seem nearer to the methods of Edgar Allan Poe than to the accuracy of specification of either Faulkner or Miss Welty. Capote's South and Paul Bowles's North Africa represent a romantic symbolism in which the symbols rarely yield more than their own uniqueness. Moreover, Carson McCullers, Williams, Capote, and Flannery O'Connor far exceed Miss Welty in regard to the amount of perversion, violence, and Gothicism in their writing—and none of them has quite Miss Welty's variegated comic spirit. Unlike hers, their humor is almost always allied with horror. And in Mrs. McCullers' work, the loneliness is never relieved by any other mood.

The Gothic elements in “Clytie” and “The Purple Hat” are not a romantic symbolism, for they communicate a sense of social and individual distortion. “The Purple Hat,” however, poses several problems, and to a lesser extent, so does “Clytie.” “The Purple Hat” is Miss Welty's most obscure story. Here she closely approaches the traditional Gothic mode—with its violent, supernatural, and inexplicable happenings. The setting is a New Orleans bar, “a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon” and raining outside (WN [The Wide Net and Other Stories], 141). An affable fat man tells a story to the bartender and to a thin, unshaven young alcoholic with shaking hands. There is some kind of significance in the way the scene is “staged”: “the two customers had chosen very particularly the knobs [seats] they would sit on. They had come in separately out of the wet, and had each chosen an end stool, and now sat with the length of the little bar between them” (141). The intense young man is somehow involved in the story that is to be unfolded.

The fat man is the armed guard who patrols the little catwalk beneath the dome of a huge New Orleans gambling casino, “The Palace of Pleasure.” His little hands, “really helpless looking … for so large a man,” are emblematic of his combination of weakness and impassive cruelty. From his unique position as the “man that everyone knows to be watching, at all they do” (145), he has been able to observe the strange activities of a certain woman:

“In thirty years she has not changed,” said the fat man. “Neither has she changed her hat. Dear God, how the moths must have hungered for that hat. But she has kept it in full bloom on her head, that monstrosity—purple, too, as if she were beautiful in the bargain. She has not aged, but keeps her middle-age.”

(144)

Using her “outrageous hat” as a lure, she has for thirty years picked up a different young man “at the dice table every afternoon, rain or shine, at five o'clock, and gambles till midnight and tells him goodbye” (144). She not only leads them on to no purpose, but also engages them in a strange sexual ritual. Late in the evening she takes off her hat, which the young man watches hungrily.

He is enamoured of her ancient, battered, outrageous hat with the awful plush flowers. She lays it down below the level of the table there, on her shabby old lap, and he caresses it. … Well, I suppose in this town there are stranger forms of love than that, and who are any of us to say what ways people may not find to love? She seems perfectly satisfied with it.

(147-48)

Noticeable only from above or when she takes off the hat is

a little glass vial with a plunger [which] helps decorate the crown … [when] she … lays [the hat] carefully in her lap, under the table … you might notice the little vial, and be attracted to it and wish to take it out and examine it at your pleasure off in the washroom—to admire the handle, for instance, which is red glass, like the petal of an artificial flower.

(148-49)

There is also a ten- or twelve-inch long jeweled hat pin; the bartender purses his lips as the fat man describes how “she sticks the pin back through” after taking off the hat. But these suggestively obscene details are not to be taken too literally. The fat man announces that the woman is a ghost because “to my belief she has been murdered twice” (146): the first time she had been shot by one of her pick-ups; the second time another “young lover” killed her with the symbol of her lurking, criminal passions; “no one saw it done … except for me, naturally.” Yet she returned to the casino within a month after each “murder” and resumed her activities.

The hat's grotesque phallic overtones are obvious; their meaning, however, is not. The “flashing needle” piercing the “great, wide deep hat” (147) and the little “vial” that is best examined in the washroom have unpleasant enough symbolic connotations, suggesting that the story told by the fat man is some kind of terrible onanistic fantasy; it is his fantasy, after all—or is it? We can't be sure. Although the events narrated by the fat man are fantastic, Miss Welty has been careful to give the story a realistic frame; “fantasy itself must touch ground with at least one toe, and ghost stories must have one foot, so to speak, in the grave,” she says in Place in Fiction. Thus, the story about the purple hat is more than believable to the young man: the fat man says that “New Orleans … is the birthplace of ready-made victims,” and the young man, who has been listening with fascination—“as if there were something hypnotic and irresistible” about the fat man (148)—seems to have been already victimized by “this old and disgusting creature in her purple hat” (146). At five o'clock—the woman's hour of arrival—the young man had suddenly disappeared. The fat man gets up and pays for all the drinks, including the young man's. “Is she a real ghost?” the bartender asks confidentially, “in a real whisper.” “I'll let you know tomorrow,” answers the fat man. She is to be murdered for the third time that very night, and the young man is going to do it. Both he and the fat man have seemingly known it all along. At the beginning of the story the fat man said, “almost dreamily,” but without taking his eyes from the young man, “‘Oh, the hat she wears is a creation,’ … It was strange that he did not once regard the bartender, who after all had done him the courtesy of asking a polite question or two” (143). Later, the fat man cried, “‘I can never finish telling you about the hat!’ … and there was a little sigh somewhere in the room, very young, like a child's” (150). The story thus has a very definite realistic level; the above mentioned “toe” is placed solidly on the ground.

In spite of the Gothicism, the woman is a recognizable type—a fantastic version of “one of those thousands of middle-aged women who come every day to the Palace, would not be kept away by anything on earth” (143). Her loneliness has assumed a terrible form. One might say—as Poe did in the Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)—that the story's “terror is not of Germany but of the soul.” Yet the story's admixture of realism and fantasy creates a trompe l'oeil effect, making its meaning extremely—if not excessively—obscure. The confusion arises from Miss Welty's relatively unsuccessful application of the methods by which she achieves her finest stories.

“The Purple Hat” can be read as a loosely allegorical story. Trying to escape boredom and find some exotic and secret pleasure, young men are drawn to the fantasy world of the “Palace of Pleasure.” Once there they fall in love with the tawdry image of beauty, the hat, and especially with the mysterious vial in its crown. But the young men are left frustrated—their dreams are as empty as the vial. They try to destroy the temptress but she eludes them, for, as Ruth Vande Kieft suggests, she is “as deathless as is man's pursuit of pleasure.”⁸

The fat man shows off his ruby ring and says that from up above, the casino's red carpet “changes and gives off light between the worn criss-crossing of the aisles like the facets of a well-cut ruby” (145). As a miniature of the “Palace,” the ring symbolizes his singular position on the catwalk, and the omnipotence which affords him so clear a view of the most terrible aspects of the human comedy.

“Life in the ruby. And yet somehow all that people do is clear and lucid and authentic there, as if it were magnified in the red lens, not made smaller. I can see everything in the world from my catwalk. You mustn't think I brag. …” He looked all at once from his ring straight at the young man's face, which was as drained and white as ever.

(146)

What he “sees” is expressed in the “allegory” of the woman with the purple hat. He has a first-hand knowledge and understanding of the darkest of human aberrations, in the way that a prostitute might: “‘But I can never finish telling you about the hat!’ the fat man cried” (150). He is a grotesque version of the compassionate young man in “The Key,” who intuitively understood the plight of the deaf and dumb couple and did what he could to help them. But the fat man's sense of power—“up on the catwalk you get the feeling now and then that you could put out your finger and make a change in the universe” (152)—is unaccompanied by any sense of sympathy. Since he somehow knows that the pathetic young alcoholic has succumbed to the lures of “The Purple Hat,” his telling of the story becomes cruel. In spite of his superior knowledge he doesn't care what happens to the young man—or to anyone. He even enjoys the spectacle provided by his plight and that of all the others who pass beneath him in their futile pursuit of pleasure.

But even in his heightened awareness, he is not unlike others. After describing the second “murder,” he tells the bartender, “If you had ever been to the Palace of Pleasure, you'd know it all went completely as usual—people at the tables never turn around” (151). The fat man luxuriates in his intuitive powers, “lifting his little finger like a pianist” (143), gazing fondly at his ring, but he will never lift that finger to help another, even though he is by profession a guard. His impassive and perverse curiosity is all too familiar; the terror in the story is produced not so much by the supernatural happenings as by our recognition that the fat man's passivity may well be our own.

The problem in “Clytie” is not one of obscurity but of a surfeit of Gothicism and a literary influence that is all too apparent. Clytie Farr is an old maid who lives in Farr's Gin, a tiny town named after her once-prominent family. All her life she has been isolated from others because of a family pride (“the Farrs were too good to associate with other people” [CG (A Cutain of Green), 159]) that is now pathetic and ironic; she spends all her time taking care of her blind and paralyzed father, half-crazed sister, and drunken brother (whose wife left him shortly after their marriage because “he had threatened time and again to shoot her … he had pointed the gun against her breast. She had not understood” [167]). Another brother has committed suicide. Even Miss Welty's most ardent admirers must feel uneasy about the Farrs, who together form a virtual museum of Southern Gothic. Inside the Farrs' house,

it was very dark and bare. The only light was falling on the white sheet which covered the solitary piece of furniture, an organ. The red curtains over the parlor door, held back by ivory hands, were still as tree trunks in the airless house. Every window was closed, and every shade was down, though behind them the rain could still be heard.

Clytie took a match and advanced to the stair post, where the bronze cast of Hermes was holding up a gas fixture; and at once above this, lighted up, but quite still, like one of the unmovable relics of the house, Octavia [her sister] stood waiting on the stairs.

(160-61)

This kind of musty, Gothic interior is almost academic in Southern writing; Miss Welty makes fun of it in “Old Mr. Marblehall” and “Asphodel.” Clytie's mansion recalls Sutpen's Hundred in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Miss Emily's house in “A Rose for Emily,” whereas the drunken brooding of Clytie's brother may remind one of Bayard Sartoris in Sartoris. But as the story unfolds, the resemblances to Faulkner become less important, and, whenever the focus shifts from the setting to Clytie herself, the story assumes a life of its own. And it is told with a tenderness and compassion that is absent from “A Rose for Emily.” Miss Welty writes, “on some level all stories are stories of search … when Miss Brill [in Katherine Mansfield's story of that name] sits in the park we feel an old key try at an old lock again—she too is looking. Our most ancient dreams help to convince us that her timid Sunday afternoon is the adventure of her life, and measure for us her defeat.”⁹ The emphasis in “Clytie” falls not on the grotesque facts of her life but on her search for love.

As the story opens, it is raining in Farr's Gin. Everyone has gone under cover, except for Miss Clytie Farr, who stands still in the middle of the road, “peering ahead in her near-sighted way, as wet as the little birds” which are scurrying across her path. She finally clenches her hands and draws them “up under her armpits, and sticking out her elbows like hen wings,” she runs out of the street.

When the scene shifts indoors the perspective changes: the reader enters Clytie's mind and discovers that, mad or not, there is purpose in her grotesque antics; the nature of her search is revealed:

In the street she had been thinking about the face of a child she had just seen … [who] had looked at her with such an open, serene, trusting expression as she passed by! With this small, peaceful face still in her mind … like an inspiration which drives all other thoughts away, Clytie had forgotten herself.

(162)

Obsessed with the mystery of identity, Clytie has for a long time been inspecting the faces of people on the street; she has a deep, almost religious respect for the uniqueness, the inviolability of others: “The most profound, the most moving sight in the whole world must be a face. Was it possible to comprehend the eyes and the mouths of other people, which concealed she knew not what, and secretly asked for still another unknown thing?” She tries desperately to escape from her inner world; her reservoir of tenderness and wonder transforms reality. Even the idiot who calls himself “Mr. Tom Bate's Boy” seems fabulous to her: she observes grains of sand in his old eyes; “he might have come out of a desert, like an Egyptian” (163).

Clytie is searching for a specific face. “It was purely for a resemblance to a vision that she examined the secret, mysterious, unrepeated faces she met in the street of Farr's Gin.” She had seen that face long ago, but “now it was hard to remember the way it looked, or the time when she had seen it first. It must have been when she was young. Yes, in a sort of arbor, hadn't she laughed, leaned forward … and that vision of a face—which was a little like all the other faces … and yet different … this face had been very close to hers, almost familiar, almost accessible.” But her terrifying family situation separates her from this vision. “Their faces came between her face and another. It was their faces which had come pushing in between, long ago, to hide some face that had looked back at her” (168). Like the beauty that she saw in the face of the trusting child, this face is beyond Clytie's “reach.” But another face comes within distance of her actual reach.

Mr. Bobo, the nervous town barber who “was short and had never been anything but proud of it, until he had started coming to this house once a week,” and who is frightened of all the Farrs, comes into the old house to shave Clytie's bedridden father. Clytie looks at “his pitiful, greedy, small face—how very mournful it was. … What was it that this greedy little thing was so desperately needing?” (175). All of her desperation and loneliness erupt, and “with breathtaking gentleness” she touches his face.

Then both of them uttered a despairing cry. Mr. Bobo turned and fled. … Clytie, pale as a ghost, stumbled against the railing … the horrible moist scratch of an invisible beard, the dense, popping green eyes—what had she got hold of with her hand! She could hardly bear it—the thought of that face.

(176)

She runs out to the old rain barrel. She “suddenly felt that this object, now, was her friend, just in time, and her arms almost circled it with impatient gratitude.” As she looks into the water, she sees a face: “It was the face she had been looking for, and from which she had been separated.” It is ugly and distended, and “everything about [it] frightened and shocked her with its signs of waiting, of suffering. … Too late, she recognized the face. She stood there completely sick at heart, as though the poor, half-remembered vision had finally betrayed her” (177). Clytie is devastated by the realization that the face she had been looking for all along had been her own and that this lost self can never be recaptured. In that one instant, she recognizes the contrast between the vision of the laughing child of the past and the mirror image of the ugly and maddened adult of the present. Clytie submits to the terrible knowledge that the only kind of love possible for her is narcissistic love and that life for her has therefore become a living death. She “did the only thing she could think of to do.” She thrust her body and head down

into the barrel, under the water, through its glittering surface into the kind, featureless depth, and held it there.

When Old Lethy found her, she had fallen forward into the barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs.

(178)

The final image of her legs complements the inanimate, almost antiseptic quality of a lonely and loveless existence. The grotesque image expresses all the horror of Clytie Farr's unbearable discovery.

By virtue of its genuine pathos and psychological incisiveness, “Clytie” manages to transcend its Gothicism and resemblance to “A Rose for Emily.” But it should not be surprising if Faulkner has exerted an influence on his fellow Mississippian; Miss Welty has called him “the most astonishingly powered and passionate writer we have.”¹⁰ When Miss Welty began her career, Faulkner had already completed the best work in his “parable or legend of all the Deep South.” If the young Southern writer chooses to write about his region, he must inevitably face the question of how to avoid rewriting Faulkner. With the possible exceptions of “Clytie” and “The Burning,” Miss Welty has solved this problem.

In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie Fiedler deprecatingly refers to Miss Welty as one of the “feminizing Faulknerians,” yet the sounds of Faulkner's rhetoric are much more audible throughout the fiction of such “masculine Faulknerians” as Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and Andrew Lytle. Excerpts from their work might be intermingled with passages from Faulkner and many readers would be hard put to tell them apart. Except for some passages from the first version of “The Burning” and one from “Moon Lake” (GA [The Golden Apples], 100), this could not be done with Miss Welty's fiction because the qualities of her language and style are her own. Faulkner's emblem of the Southern experience informs Miss Welty's sense of her region's history and his example helped her to discover the raw materials of her own art. But the influence of his specific works is negligible, for Miss Welty's fiction abounds in characters, settings, and speech rhythms which only she could have created.

“Asphodel” is one of those stories which only Miss Welty could have written. Three old maids—Cora, Phoebe, and Irene—go on a picnic the day after the funeral of a certain Miss Sabina. They climb a hill and picnic near the ruins of Asphodel, an old mansion that had belonged to Miss Sabina's husband, Mr. Don McInnis. One of the old maids says that “he is dead too.” Although “her funeral was yesterday, and we've cried our eyes dry,” Miss Sabina's death seems a welcomed event: after dipping “their narrow maiden feet” in a stream, they laugh “freely all at once” (97), and then unpack a lavish lunch.

In the first part of the story, they reminisce about Miss Sabina, reconstructing the events of her life. Robert Penn Warren, otherwise one of Miss Welty's most sympathetic critics, describes the story as a “failure,” deploring its “hocus-pocus” and “strain for atmosphere.”¹¹ Perhaps it should not be dismissed so quickly. It is an unusual, if sometimes puzzling, combination of disparate elements, including fantasy, mythology, and parody. Its success depends on how the reader reacts to Miss Sabina's history, which is grotesque and highly melodramatic. In the fashion of a Greek chorus, the old maids “tell over Miss Sabina's story, their voices serene and alike: how she looked, the legend of her beauty when she was young” (98), her house, her family, her marriage to Mr. Don, his infidelities, his immense popularity, their three children (all of whom died), how “she drove Mr. Don out of the house … with a whip, in the broad daylight” (103) and then “gratified” herself by burning Asphodel, how “she laid down the law that the name of Don McInnis and … of Asphodel were not to cross our lips again” (104), how in her madness she ruled the town, and how she died grotesquely in the post office. The reader is unable to accept these events as literal because the “plot” constructed by the old maids is a cataloging of the kind of clichés rampant in Southern romance fiction. I find it hard to believe that Miss Welty intended us to take them all seriously. For example, Phoebe related her part of the narration, the deaths of Miss Sabina's children, as follows:

There was Minerva and she was drowned—before her wedding day. There was Theo, coming out from the university in his gown of the law, and killed in a fall off the wild horse he was bound to ride. And there was Lucian the youngest, shooting himself publicly on the courthouse steps, drunk in the broad daylight.

“Who can tell what will happen in this world!” said Phoebe, and she looked placidly up into the featured sky overhead.

(101)

But these events did not discourage Miss Sabina: “she was born grand, with a will to impose” (101). “Asphodel” may be seen as Miss Welty's oblique attack on the old ruling class and the ineffectuality of its descendants—a parody of the romantic view of Southern gentility as perpetrated by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) and a hundred other novels. Several passages suggest this. Cora talks about Miss Sabina's house and her wedding:

Inside, the house was all wood … carved and fluted … even mahogany roses in the ceilings. … The house was a labyrinth set with statues—Venus, Hermes, Demeter, and with singing ocean shells on draped pedestals.

Miss Sabina's father came bringing Mr. Don McInnis home, and proposed the marriage to him. She was no longer young for suitors. … We were there. The presents were vases of gold, gold cups, statues of Diana. … It was spring, the flowers in the basket were purple hyacinths and white lilies that wilted in the heat and showed their blue veins. Ladies fainted from the scent …

(98-99)

Irene continues the description of Mr. Don. Her narration is delivered in a style parodying cheap fiction:

A great, profane man like all the McInnis men of Asphodel, Mr. Don McInnis. He was the last of his own, just as she was the last of hers. The hope was in him, and he knew it. He had a sudden way of laughter, like a rage. … That night he stood astride … astride the rooms, the guests, the flowers, the tapers, the bride and her father with his purple face. … He was a McInnis, a man that would be like a torch carried into a house.

(100)

The exaggeration and hyperbole of these passages are certainly suggestive of parody. In its extravagance the mansion becomes absurd, the legendary Southern “gentlemen were without exception drunk,” and the usually dashing hero is animalistic—“profane.” The beautiful, desirable heroine of Southern romance fiction is transformed into Miss Sabina, and courting procedures are reversed: her father proposes to her suitor and “she was instructed to submit”—she is an antiheroine. Miss Welty seems to level Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and the mansion of Tara with a few well-chosen words. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the sharpest, most insensitive, and surprisingly personal attack upon Miss Welty's work is found in a review by the late Margaret Mitchell.¹²

Miss Sabina and Mr. Don are thus parodied versions of those staple, stock characters in historical fiction, the tempestuous Southern lovers. But Miss Welty's couple also represent basic contrasting forces. The story told by the old maids was “like an old song they carried in their memory, the story of the two houses separated by a long, winding, difficult, untravelled road—a curve of the old Natchez Trace—but actually situated almost back to back on the ring of hills, while completely hidden from each other, like the reliefs on the opposite sides of a vase” (98). The “two houses” are literally Asphodel and Miss Sabina's house, which are contrasted symbolically by Asphodel's “mounds of wild roses” and “the mahogany roses in the ceilings” of Sabina's house—just as Mr. Don represents the sensual, pagan, life-giving force, and Miss Sabina is a manifestation of the opposing and ultimately destructive urge to control and suppress others. The two “houses” finally suggest Eros and Thanatos.

After she has driven Mr. Don away and he has supposedly died, “all her will was turned upon the population” (104).

Her law was laid over us, her riches were distributed upon us … [she] set the times of weddings and funerals, even for births … named the children [and] moved people from one place to another in town, brought them together or drove them apart, with the mystical and rigorous devotion of a priestess in a story; and she prophesied all the things beforehand. She foretold disaster …

(105)

One cannot take this literally. The details of Miss Sabina's life become increasingly fantastic and grotesque. Her downfall can be read as a kind of allegory of the decline of the old South. Miss Sabina represents the survivors of the “old order,” with their manic attempts to maintain control and to guard against change, and their hostility to all spontaneity: “At the May Festival when she passed by, all the maypoles become hopelessly tangled, one by one” (105).

The end results of Miss Sabina's efforts to sustain an illusion are ludicrous, grotesque, and psychically crippling: she staggers along under the weight of a large black wig and heavy brocades, and suffers a terrible death in the post office—the “one door where Miss Sabina had never entered.” Because it is the element of modern life beyond her control, “she acted as if the post office had no existence in the world,” and “all the hate she had left in her when she was old went out to [the] little four-posted white-washed building. … For there we might still be apart in a dream, and she did not know what it was” (106). But in the end, she enters the post office: “‘It was as if the place of the smallest and the longest-permitted indulgence, the little common green, were to be invaded when the time came for the tyrant to die,’ said Phoebe” (107). In a horrifying sequence she first demands her letters—although she never got any—and then attacks the post office “with her bare hands,” ripping everything apart.

She was possessed … she raged. She rocked from side to side, she danced. Miss Sabina's arms moved like a harvester's in the field, to destroy all that was in the little room. In her frenzy she tore all the letters to pieces, and even put bits in her mouth and appeared to eat them.

Then she stood still in the little room. She had finished. We had not yet moved when she lay toppled on the floor, her wig fallen from her head and her face awry like a mask [italics mine].

‘A stroke.’ That is what we said, because we did not know how to put a name to the end of her life …

(108)

Since it is impossible to regulate every aspect of life, the fanatic's will to control is finally self-destructive: Miss Sabina is her own victim, and death reveals her impotency—the wig has fallen from her head. Miss Sabina's story is over, but the story about the three old maids is not.

They present a contrast to the violent and grotesque scene which they have just recalled, considering it happened only a few days before:

Here in the bright sun where the three old maids sat beside their little feast, Miss Sabina's was an old story, closed and complete. … Now they lay stretched on their sides on the ground, their summer dresses spread out, little smiles forming on their mouths, their eyes half-closed. … Above them like a dream rested the bright columns of Asphodel, a dream like the other side of their lamentations. [italics mine]

(109)

Their idyllic repose is suddenly interrupted by a bearded and naked Pan-like figure who steps out from the vines growing up among the columns and stares at the three spinsters. Terrified, they make “a soft little chorus of screams,” and flee from the scene (109).

“Southern summer is nostalgic,” Miss Welty once wrote, “because even when it happens it's dream-like. Find the shade of the biggest tree; in it your hammock is dreaming already, like a boat on the stream.”¹³ The summer atmosphere and the story's opening images of the surrealistic ruins place the action deep within a “season of dreams.” With the completion of the story-within-a-story, the controlling image returns, “above them like a dream.” They “did not know how to put a name” to her death, and, after narrating the children's death, Phoebe—who is undoubtedly named after Phoebus, the god of prophecy—looks “into the featureless sky” and exclaims: “Who can tell what will happen in this world!” Their narration has a decided improvisatory quality. It seems almost to be part of their consciousness—“an old song they carried in their memory.” The “narrative was only part of memory now, and its beginning and ending might seem mingled and freed in the blue air of the hill” (100). They recall the day Miss Sabina drove Mr. Don from home: “It was a day like this, in summer—I remember the magnolias that made the air so heavy and full of sleep. It was just after dinner time and all the population came out and stood helpless to see, as if in a dream” (103). The old maids have related Miss Sabina's story as “in some intoxication of the time and the place,” suggesting that most of the events which they have described may never have happened and that the three old maids, lost in their fantasy world—heightened and encouraged by the heat—choose to render Miss Sabina's life in the terms of Southern romance fiction, a set of fantasies equivalent to the unreality of their own lives. The elements of allegory and parody in their narration are thus presented in a psychological context, embodied in the characterizations of the three old maids. The parody is not forced upon the story, but grows organically out of its form: “The grapes they held upon their palms were transparent in the light, so that the little black seeds showed within” (107); this describes how Miss Sabina's story reveals the nature of the spinsters' lives. The powerful Miss Sabina was undoubtedly a real enough town eccentric, but her “story” has probably been manufactured by the old maids over a period of years as a legend in keeping with the extravagance of Miss Sabina's actual eccentricities and as a fantasy-projection of their own retreat from reality (“a dream like the other side of their lamentations”). Miss Sabina's highly grotesque death may be the only “real” event of her story. Its violence may symbolize their own suppressed anguish. Unlike Clytie Farr, they are not destroyed by their obsessions. By re-creating Miss Sabina's “life” and grotesque death—her virtual rape of the post office—they may be said to be activating and releasing their own inhibitions: Miss Sabina's story finished, “they lay stretched on their sides … little smiles forming on their mouths … eyes half-closed.” Their contentment is short-lived.

In “Asphodel,” Miss Welty uses the grotesque as both a tragic and a comic mask. When Miss Sabina died, “her wig [had] fallen … and her face [was] awry like a mask.” But the real “masks” in the story belong to Phoebe, Cora, and Irene. What is pathetic, if not tragic, in “Asphodel” is not Miss Sabina's story, but what her “story” has revealed about the three old maids. The full extent of their condition is not apparent until the appearance of the naked man. He represents the first intrusion of reality into the story. After “escaping” from him they stop. The bearded man has not moved. “That was Mr. Don McInnis,” says Cora. “It was not,” Irene says. “It was a vine in the wind” (110). In that one sentence of dialogue Miss Welty shows the depth of the dream world in which the old maid has immersed herself. It is one of those moments, frequent in her fiction, when she manages to squeeze meaning from the detail which, in ordinary realistic fiction, might be passed over. The reader may wonder, is it Mr. Don, or not? It doesn't matter; what is important is that it is a man, and how the three react to him.

“He was buck-naked,” said Cora. “He was as naked as an old goat. He must be as old as the hills.”

“I didn't look,” declared Phoebe. But there at one side she stood bowed and trembling as if from a fateful encounter.

“No need to cry about it, Phoebe,” said Cora.

(110)

Miss Welty may be reversing the Freudian method by projecting in broad daylight sexual nightmares that are in reality social symbols. The fantasy-like quality of the spinsters' lives in “Asphodel” is Miss Welty's expression of their tragic refusal to face the present and the failure of their minds to function in terms other than those of the past. Moreover, in creating a “past” for Miss Sabina, they spin fantasies out of clichés; Miss Welty thereby parodies the whole myth about that past, unmasking the myth, just as Sabina herself was unmasked at her death.

In “Asphodel,” Miss Welty has maintained a tough-minded and detached attitude toward the idea of the South, in spite of her attachment to her Mississippi “place.” This is in part due to the fact that Miss Welty is a first generation Mississippian whose parents did not come from the deep South; her mother is from West Virginia, and her father was from Ohio; they moved to Jackson in 1904, five years before Miss Welty's birth. She has humorously said that she did not suffer as a child, “except from my father's being … a Yankee”¹⁴—and her lack of antebellum ancestors has undoubtedly contributed to her sense of perspective and her independent view of Southern tradition. She has never belonged to a literary or political group, and, although many of her early stories appeared in the Southern Review, she never involved herself in regionalist theorizing. Unlike several Southern writers, she does not entertain any nostalgia for the grace and innocence of past Confederate days. Nor does she rail against the defilement of the “old order” by the new, commercial order; one cannot imagine Miss Welty as a contributor to I'll Take My Stand (1930). She offers no defense of the Old South, a fact made evident by “Asphodel,” “The Burning,” and the stories about the descendants of the Southern aristocracy. In “A Curtain of Green,” the town is named after Mrs. Larkin's father-in-law; the town in “Clytie” is also named for the family; and much is made of old Mr. Marblehall's descent from an old family. The lives of these well-born characters are more circumscribed by fantasy than any of Miss Welty's other characters, suggesting a critical view of the old families' abilities to cope with the vagaries of reality on both a personal and social level.

Suggestions of meaning are multiplied by consideration of the title of the story. The dictionary defines “asphodel” as “any of a genus of plants of the lily family.” The present-day ruins of Asphodel hardly suggest any such beauty and the past was no better; at Miss Sabina's wedding the “lilies wilted and showed their blue veins. Ladies fainted from the scent.” The three old maids, casting their dreams in Asphodel's shadow, are “wilted” women, existing as “weeds” in an emotional wasteland. The lily is the flower of mourning and, as such, it is an appropriate emblem for the three ladies. The ruins of Asphodel symbolize their physical and imaginative sterility.

The asphodel is also the traditional flower of immortality. In the Odyssey, it covers the meadows in the Elysian fields when Ulysses meets the great dead.¹⁵ Miss Welty makes uncommon use of her mythic material. Contemporary writers often utilize mythology in a solemn and pretentious way, but in “Asphodel” the classical correspondences are grotesque, humorous, and ironic. In the figures of Miss Sabina and Mr. Don, Miss Welty light-heartedly invokes Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces; the naked and bearded Mr. Don is her most explicitly Dionysian character: he steps out from among vines, looks like an “old goat,” and is remembered as having “had the wildness we all worshipped” (101). Throughout the story, Miss Welty has fun at the expense of the Old South's identification with a Golden Age; the ruins of “Asphodel” point to that grand anachronism in the history of American style, “the classic revival.” At Sabina's wedding, “the presents were vases of gold, gold cups, statues of Diana.” She later wielded a “stick mounted with the gold head of a lion,” and, when Mr. Don appears before the spinsters, he was “golden as a lion.” At the end of the story, Phoebe calls it a “golden day.” But instead of the immortal dead, one meets the three old maids and hears about Miss Sabina. She is a Southern Sabine who, though taken against her will, did not submit to her “conqueror,” the Dionysian Mr. Don. Her children include “Minerva” and “Lucian the youngest.” The spinsters serve as a Greek chorus; Cassandra-like, they were the first to inform Sabina of Mr. Don's unfaithfulness: Cora says, “We told the news. … We went in a body up the hill and into the house, weeping and wailing, hardly daring to name the name or the deed” (101). The old maids describe Asphodel as a Greek temple and recall that Miss Sabina's house had statues of the Seasons and of the gods—Venus, Hermes, and Demeter. Miss Welty keynotes the absurdity of the spinsters' “dream” by juxtaposing comical, almost slapstick action against the “classical” setting. Near the end of the story, as they gaze at the ruins of Asphodel, “a number of goats appeared between the columns … and with a little leap started down the hill.” It is fitting that the satyr-like Mr. Don should be living among goats. As if at his command, the goats pour out of Asphodel—like comic versions of the Eumenides emerging from a debased temple of Dionysus—and chase the women: “Into the buggy!” screams one of the ladies. “Tails up, the goats leapt the fence as if there was nothing they would rather do. … There were billy-goats and nanny-goats, old goats and young, a whole thriving herd. Their little beards all blew playfully to the side in the wind of their advancement” (111). The ladies throw biscuits to the closely pursuing goats to appease them, but it does not stop them. Miss Welty utilizes her mythology in the spirit of Mack Sennett rather than Sir James Frazer. “Cora was standing up in the open buggy, driving it like a chariot. ‘Give them the little baked hen, then,’ she said, and they threw it. … The little goats stopped … and then their horns met over the prize” (112). Routing the forces of order and control which Miss Sabina had exemplified, the chasing goats mock the old maids and their absurd “tender dreams” of the past.

After making their escape, Irene and Cora give thanks that “Miss Sabina did not live to see us then.” But in a surprise turn, Phoebe laughed aloud. As the story ends, “her voice was soft, and she seemed to be still in a tender dream and an unconscious celebration—as though the picnic were not already set rudely in the past, but were the enduring and intoxicating present … the golden day” (113). Phoebe seems to have enjoyed the triumph of the goats and Mr. Don, thus belying her namesake Phoebus Apollo. Perhaps all along she was secretly on the side of the Dionysian rather than Apollonian forces. With its elements of humor, fantasy, and grotesquery, “Asphodel” is a story about the South that could not have been written by any Southerner except Eudora Welty.

Miss Welty's most brilliant use of the grotesque occurs in “Petrified Man.” It seems to be her most popular story, for it has been reprinted more often than any other (fourteen times). It is a tightly controlled, ruthlessly objective study of vulgarity of spirit, a vulgarity so absolute that it appears chemically pure, exposed in its final subhuman form. The characters in “Petrified Man” are the ultimate spiritual embodiments of the grotesque bathers of “A Memory,” and the story is Miss Welty's “Waste Land.”

“Petrified Man” is set in a cheap beauty parlor. Its setting and manner resemble Ring Lardner's “Haircut,” although Miss Welty treats human callousness and meanness in a more complicated way than Lardner. She does not allow the reader and the writer just behind the persona such an easy sense of moral superiority.

“Petrified Man” is unfolded in two scenes, each one week apart, in which Leota, the beauty parlor attendant, and Mrs. Fletcher, her customer, converse at great length. The story's impact is almost completely dependent upon Miss Welty's ear, her gift for rendering all kinds of dialogue. Leota serves as an effaced narrator. She tells Mrs. Fletcher about her adventures with a friend from New Orleans, Mrs. Pike, thereby providing the story with its main theme. Their dialogue exposes their bitterness, rancor, self-pity, and baseness. Miss Welty's satire cuts through these levels of human weakness with unfailing sharpness.

Although there are few descriptive passages in “Petrified Man,” Miss Welty selects details which add to the story's scalding humor. Like Gogol, Miss Welty opens the doors and observes the setting, describing it closely, but never cataloging; each detail increases the story's sense of an overwhelming vulgarity. The setting itself affords an ironic comment; the intense revelation of vulgarity occurs in a place whose purpose is to “beautify” at least the exterior of the female. Instead, the inner ugliness of the women is revealed in a “den of curling fluid and henna packs” (32), where apparatus—wave pinchers, dryers, permanent wave machines, cold wet towels, and thick fluids—is utilized with a brutal vigor suggestive of a torture chamber: customers get “yanked up by the back locks” and thick wave fluid drips down their necks and into their eyes; “you cooked me fourteen minutes,” complains a customer, and Leota, with her “strong red-nailed fingers,” digs both hands into Mrs. Fletcher's scalp (33). Miss Welty utilizes her painter's eye: the beauty parlor—and every implement therein, including the combs—is lavender, a particularly vulgar color. There are rows of Coca-Cola bottles along the mirror. A drugstore rental book, Life Is Like That, Screen Secrets, and Startling G-Man Tales provide the customers and the beauticians with reading material. The story begins and ends with a handful of stale peanuts (“goobers”). As for sanitary conditions, Billy Boy, Mrs. Pike's child, plays on the beauty parlor floor, “making tents with aluminum wave pinchers … under the sink” (36). Then there are the women themselves: Mrs. Fletcher looked “expectantly at the black part in Leota's yellow curls as she bent”; Leota “flicked an ash into the basket of dirty towels.” Leota runs a comb through Mrs. Fletcher's hair, and the “hair floated out of the lavender teeth like a small storm-cloud” (33). When Mrs. Fletcher asks, “Is it any dandruff in it?” she frowns, her “hair-line eyebrows diving down toward her nose, and her wrinkled, beady-lashed eyelids batting with concentration” (34). The mention of brand names contributes to the tone. The pregnant Mrs. Fletcher talks about buying “Stork-A-Lure” maternity clothes, and the chauvinistic Leota says she drinks only “Jax Beer” because “that's the beer that Mrs. Pike says is made right in N.O.” (37). These small details combine to project a grotesque image of humanity.

The dialogue between Leota and Mrs. Fletcher abounds in phrases and passages intended to chill the reader by virtue of their grotesque insensitivity. Too stingy to send Billy Boy to a nursery, Mrs. Pike deposits him with Leota each day. “Only three years old,” Leota says, “and already nuts about the beauty-parlor business” (36). Because Mrs. Fletcher does not like children she finds her pregnancy disgusting and is trying to keep it a secret. She hasn't told her husband yet because she is contemplating an abortion. Leota tells Mrs. Fletcher about Mrs. Montjoy of the Trojan Garden Club, a customer who, already in labor, stopped at the shop on the way to the maternity ward because she “wanted to look pretty while she was havin' her baby, is all” (48). And of the woman's labor pains, Leota says, “Yeah man! She was a-yellin'. Just like when I give her a perm'net” (48). The grotesque incongruities embody the baseness of the beauty-parlor women.

The grim comedy reaches its most horrifying level when Leota tells Mrs. Fletcher about the traveling freak show which she and Mrs. Pike visited. “Well, honey,” says Leota, “talkin' about bein' pregnant an' all, you ought to see those twins in a bottle, you really owe it to yourself” (39).

“Born joined plumb together—dead a course.” Leota dropped her voice into a soft lyrical hum. “They was about this long—pardon—must of been full time, all right, wouldn't you say?—an' 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, over their shoulder, see. Kinda pathetic.”

From the bottled Siamese twins, Leota moves on to describe the pygmies:

“You know, the teeniest men in the universe? Well, honey, they can just rest back on their little bohunkus an' roll around an' you can't hardly tell if they're sittin' or standin'. … They're about forty-two years old. Just suppose it was your husband!”

“Well, Mr. Fletcher is five foot nine and one half,” said Mrs. Fletcher quickly.

(40)

Though the pygmies “are not bad-lookin' for what they are,” Leota and Mrs. Pike preferred another “freak”—the petrified man: “ever-thing ever since he was nine years old, when it goes through his digestion, see, somehow Mrs. Pike says it goes to his joints and has been turning to stone” (41). The women not only show no compassion for the petrified man, but, by continuing to talk about themselves and the “freaks” in the same breath, they ironically fail to distinguish between “freaks” and supposedly “normal” people. Leota says,

“He's turnin' to stone. How'd you like to be married to a guy like that? All he can do, he can move his head just a quarter of an inch. A course he looks just terrible.”

“I should think he would,” said Mrs. Fletcher frostily. “Mr. Fletcher takes bending exercises every night of the world. I make him. …”

“Did Mrs. Pike like the petrified man?” asked Mrs. Fletcher.

“Not as much as she did the others,” said Leota deprecatingly. “And then she likes a man to be a good dresser, and all that.”

“Is Mr. Pike a good dresser?” asked Mrs. Fletcher sceptically.

(42)

After dropping the petrified man from their conversation, Leota and Mrs. Fletcher discuss love and marriage. In “Petrified Man,” life between the sexes is repugnant, to put it mildly: “Dandruff, dandruff. I couldn't of caught a thing like that from Mr. Fletcher, could I?” (34). Mrs. Pike married a man fourteen years her senior. She has always sought advice from fortune tellers; “She ast Lady Evangeline about him” (42). The fortune teller advised Mrs. Pike to marry because Mr. Pike was due an inheritance, and Leota admits, “me an' Fred, we met in a rumble seat eight months ago and we was practically on what you might call the way to the altar inside of half an hour” (45).

In the second scene, a week later, Leota no longer considers Mrs. Pike a “friend.” Mrs. Pike had recognized the petrified man's photo in Leota's copy of Startling G-Man Tales—he was wanted for raping four women in California. “Did it under his real name—Mr. Petrie” [a logical name] (53). He had lived in the apartment next to the Pikes's in New Orleans for six weeks. The reward was five hundred dollars, which Mrs. Pike collected after the police had arrested the no-longer petrified man. Leota is virtually sick over losing the reward, begrudges Mrs. Pike the money—“it was my magazine”—and says, regarding the rape victims: “Four women. I guess those women didn't have the faintest notion at the time they'd be worth a hundred an' twenty-five bucks a piece some day to Mrs. Pike” (54).

The story ends on a savage note: the two women take out their wrath on Mrs. Pike's child and spank Billy Boy viciously. It is no coincidence that Billy Boy is the only male physically present in the story. At the beginning of “Petrified Man,” when Leota says, “So we rented [our extra room] to Mrs. Pike. And Mr. Pike,” she inaugurates a theme that is dominant throughout the story (33): like all the other men mentioned in the story, Mr. Pike is reduced to a subordinate position. In the passages concerning pregnancy the women deny their own femininity as well as attack their husbands' sexuality. Their attitude toward the men is exemplified in Leota's first remark to Billy Boy, “Billy Boy, hon, mustn't bother nice ladies” (36). Men must know and keep their place in the world of Leota, Mrs. Pike, and Mrs. Fletcher. “Fred's five foot ten,” says Leota, “but I tell him he's still a shrimp, account of I'm so tall” (41). Mrs. Fletcher says that if her husband “so much as raises his voice against me, he knows good and well I'll have one of my sick headaches, and then I'm just not fit to live with” (37). Mr. Montjoy, whose wife stopped by the beauty parlor during her labor, waited in their car but “kep' comin' in here, scared-like, but couldn't do nothin' with her a course” (47). As for his wife's yelling, Mrs. Fletcher thinks that

“Her husband ought to make her behave. Don't it seem that way to you? … He ought to put his foot down.”

“Ha,” said Leota. “A lot he could do. Maybe some women is soft.”

“Oh, you mistake me, I don't mean for her to get soft—far from it! Women have to stand up for themselves, or there's just no telling.”

(48)

It is no wonder that at best, Leota's husband Fred can “lay around the house an' bull … with that good-for-nothin' Mr. Pike. He says if he goes who'll cook” (49). Mr. Pike has been unemployed for six months, and Fred is virtually immobile.

The men seem to be well on their way to being figuratively “petrified” by the debilitating effects of their wives' domination; Leota suggests as much with a vivid juxtaposition: “‘All Fred does is lay around the house like a rug. I wouldn't be surprised if he woke up some day and couldn't move. The petrified man just sat there moving his quarter of an inch though,’ said Leota reminiscently” (42). Significantly, Mr. Pike does not want to call the police about Mr. Petrie—“Said he kinda liked that ole bird and said he was real nice. … But Mrs. Pike simply tole him he could just go to hell” (53); perhaps he recognized a kindred soul in the petrified man. He may have raped four women, but Mrs. Pike, who several times served him breakfast in bed, went unharmed. She either did not appeal to him—or else frightened him. Miss Welty is not morally interested in the rapes. Although the petrified man is sexually warped, he still acts and asserts himself—whereas the other men have been unsexed—“Mr. Fletcher can't do a thing with me” (37). They are at the complete mercy of their wives: “Mr. Fletcher takes bending exercises every night of the world. I make him” (42), and Leota has her husband work in Vicksburg because the fortune teller suggested it (“Said my lover was goin' to work in Vicksburg, so I don't know who she could mean, unless she meant Fred” [49]).

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. He has been told to “behave” at intervals throughout the story. When they catch him eating the last of the stale peanuts, his simple boyish act is seen as a major gesture of male defiance. “‘You come here to me!’ screamed Leota, recklessly flinging down the comb, which scattered a whole ashtray full of bobby pins and knocked down a row of Coca-Cola bottles. ‘This is the last straw!’” Mrs. Fletcher holds him while Leota paddles him with the brush, the scene becoming a communal rite of female vengeance: “From everywhere ladies began to gather round to watch the paddling” (55). As the three-year-old leaves the beauty parlor he yells, “If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?” Although he remains unconquered, he is as gross as the adults. But his taunting question is well taken, for as materialistic as they are, the women have nothing except their vulgarity and viciousness. Miss Welty succeeds in combining elements of the grotesque that are simultaneously comic and saddening. As Ratliff says of Snopesism in Faulkner's The Town (1957), “soon as you set down to laugh at it, you find out it aint funny a-tall.”

The petrified man symbolizes all the ultimately destructive possibilities of a life between the sexes that has been distorted by grossness of spirit. He symbolizes the hypocrisy, pettiness, and sexual barrenness in the lives of the three women and, though less directly, in the lives of their men as well—lives that can only find “fulfillment” in vicious, idle gossiping or in somnolent loafing. The petrified man had pretended to be turning to stone and was ultimately exposed as “alive.” The three women, however, are the real “pretenders” in the story because they are the ones who, figuratively, are turning to stone. That stone is their death-in-life. While their husbands have been “petrified” by female domination, the women are “petrified” because they are incapable of any human feeling; symbolically, they are as dead as the bottled Siamese twins which enthralled Leota.¹⁶ Mrs. Pike, Leota, and Mrs. Fletcher belong to Petrified Man—that vast family whose numberless members share a similar corruption of spirit and who are, in their condition, isolated from the human race. Significantly, Miss Welty dropped the article when she entitled her story, “Petrified Man.” The meaning thus moves from the particular to the general.

The elements of the grotesque and Gothic in Miss Welty's stories are artistically justifiable, for unlike Poe, she has never conjured up scenes of horror for their own sake. As Katherine Anne Porter says, in writing of “Petrified Man,” “her use of this material raises the quite awfully sordid … tale to a level above its natural habitat, and its realism seems almost to have the quality of caricature, as complete realism so often does. Yet, as painters of the grotesque make only detailed reports of actual living types observed more keenly than the average eye is capable of observing, so Miss Welty's little human monsters are not really caricatures at all, but individuals exactly and clearly presented.”¹⁷

As Miss Porter implies, there is a community of feeling shared by artists and writers of the grotesque. The overrun garden in “A Curtain of Green” points to the origin of the word grotesque in late fifteenth-century Italy. It initially referred to a style of ornamental wall painting comprised of monstrous and convoluted foliage.¹⁸ The disquieting jungles in the paintings of the surrealist Max Ernst are the nearest modern equivalent to the ornamental grotesque. When Miss Welty “clamps” the sun on one side of the “polished sky” in “A Curtain of Green,” she is echoing Ernst's series on the “Sun and Forest” motif. His paintings “The Joy of Living” and “A Moment of Calm” are remarkably accurate visual analogues to Mrs. Larkin's garden.¹⁹

Miss Welty's techniques recall the works of artists of the grotesque ranging from Bosch to Goya to Leonard Baskin. “Men with hawklike faces” aim their cameras at Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie.” When the girl in “A Memory” finally identifies the terrible laugh she has been hearing unconsciously and focuses on “the motionless open pouched mouth of the woman,” she could be looking at Edvard Munch's “The Shriek.” The intense white and red make-up caked on Miss Baby Marie's face in “Livvie” and the faces of the bathers in “A Memory”—“metallic, with painted smiles in the sun”—recall the masked and menacing carnival figures in James Ensor's “The Intrigue.” Mrs. Larkin's eyes are “puckered”; “her mouth was a sharp line”; Mr. Marblehall's “other wife” looks like “a woodcut of a Bavarian witch, forefinger pointing, with scratches in the air all around her”—these put-upon women are drawn with a striking clarity worthy of Callot or Goya; Miss Welty is compiling her own Caprichos. The affable fat guard in “The Purple Hat,” who has “rather small, mournful lips … [a] vague smile,” and a “look a little cosy and prosperous,” might have been drawn by George Grosz: he “put his elbow on the counter, and rested his cheek on his hand, where he could see all the way down the bar. For a moment his eyes seemed dancing there, above one of those hands so short and so plump that you are always counting the fingers.” The silent bartender's “mouth and eyes curved downward from the divide of his baby-pink nose, as if he had combed them down, like his hair.” Miss Welty here anticipates the methods of contemporary artists such as Francis Bacon, who blur the edges of modeled forms in their still-wet canvases or thin their pigments with turpentine, allowing separate painted areas to run together in order to achieve visual forms that express corresponding psychic states. In “A Memory,” the grotesque object of the narrator's revulsion is described in a manner that again anticipates important modern painters: the fat on the woman's arms is “like an arrested earthslide on a hill” and then her breasts themselves seem to turn to sand. The girl is experiencing something akin to the excremental vision of Jean Dubuffet, who paints his nudes with impasto pigments that are mixed with sand and pebbles, or of Willem de Kooning, whose monumental “Women” are painted in swirling and slashing brown, gray, and black strokes.²⁰

Although it sometimes resembles caricature—the bartender's “enormous sad black eyebrows raised, like hoods on baby-carriages, and showed his round eyes”—Miss Welty's technique of the grotesque is essentially different from it. Caricature distorts and exaggerates the human physiognomy, but it leaves the form intact and never destroys it. But in the grotesque, as in a dream, a dimension of humanity may be displaced, missing, or replaced by an incongruous form; one detail may be stressed to the absolute exclusion of all others. In the Radio City melee of “Flowers for Marjorie,” Howard stands close to a “large woman with feathery furs and a small brown wire over one tooth.” Instead of a face we have the inanimate detail, in place of a body, the furs; the sense of lifeless anonymity defines Howard's crisis, his state of flux. In “The Purple Hat” our attention is continually drawn to the guard's plump little hands; they seem to have a life of their own. In a sense, he is his hands; they project his weakness and the absurdity of his being the Law.

The concentration on dissociated parts of the body is central to the grotesque vision: the body serves as the microcosm of a universal disorder—the lawless fragments threaten to disintegrate. In “A Memory,” “fat hung upon [the woman's] upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill. With the first motion she might make, I was afraid that she would slide down upon herself into a terrifying heap. … The younger girl … was curled tensely upon herself. She wore a bright green bathing suit like a bottle from which she might, I felt, burst in a rage of churning smoke” (153). The “confusion of vulgarity and hatred which twined among them all like a wreath of steam rising from the wet sand” (154) is almost as self-annihilating as the spontaneous combustion which consumes Krook and his Rag and Bottle Shop in Dickens' Bleak House. Existence is so oppressive to some of Miss Welty's characters that they literally seem to fall apart. When the Camp Fire Girl concludes her visit of charity by leaning over the old woman and asking for her age, the old face on the pillow “slowly gathered and collapsed.” In her death throes, Miss Sabina all but comes apart at the seams, and, according to the fat man, when the woman with the purple hat was “murdered” with her hat pin, it “entered between the ribs and pierced the heart … [and] the old creature … simply folded all softly in on herself, like a circus tent being taken down after the show” (151).

Sometimes Miss Welty's technique of the grotesque involves the pathetic fallacy, the projection of human characteristics into the inanimate; the roses which Howard carries through the street—his “Flowers for Marjorie”—nod “like heads in his arms.” Her basic technique, however, is to describe the human in nonhuman terms: animal, vegetable, or mineral. Because the young girl in “A Memory” perceives them as virtual avatars of chaos, the bathers embody all of these possibilities. The woman's “breasts hung heavy and widening like pears”—and later seem to turn into sand—“her legs lay prone one on the other like shadowed bulwarks, uneven and deserted,” and her arms are a protoplasmic landslide. The man smiles “the way panting dogs seem to be smiling” and piles the sand higher and higher on her legs, “like the teasing threat of oblivion.” The family rehearses a sequence of transformations that seem to transport them from a higher order to a lower order, and from a lower order into nothingness.

Miss Welty draws upon all the details of speech, dress, and setting to fashion grotesque analogies within the various orders; the animate and inanimate share each other's properties in startling and unsettling ways. The torpor of the traveling salesman in “The Hitch-Hikers” is reflected in the old dog that moves “stiffly, like a table walking.” When the delirious and dying R. J. Bowman of “Death of a Traveling Salesman” remembers the congruent drabness of his sex life and his various living quarters, instead of an individual woman, he sees the “furniture of that room.” As Mrs. Marblehall walks among the crowded “old things” in her house, she “looks like funny furniture—an unornamented stair post.” And by the time the narrator projects the “other little boy's” view of his mother's incipient hysteria, she seems to have metamorphosed into furniture: “for a long time he supposed that his mother was totally solid, down to her thick separated ankles.” Adversity creates automata: Mrs. Marblehall “rolls back into the house as if she had been on a little wheel all this time”; Mrs. Larkin works as tirelessly as a machine; and when Miss Eckhart, the piano teacher in “June Recital,” stands over the grave of the man she loved from afar, she expresses her mute grief by rocking back and forth like the prized metronome which dominates most of her waking hours. In a rare moment, Miss Eckhart plays for herself, her body swaying ecstatically from side to side, “like a tree trunk.” Clytie Farr's big straw hat sags down on each side with the rain, “until it looked even more absurd and done for, like an old bonnet on a horse.” Caught out in the rain with the hens and chickens, she runs down the street with “her elbows out like hen wings.” In death, Clytie's legs hang apart “like a pair of tongs.” To the audience, Powerhouse looks like a monkey, has banana-like fingers, and eyes that are “horny like a lizard's”; the reader sees beyond the grotesque parts. In “A Visit of Charity,” the first sound the girl hears is “like a sheep bleating.” The old woman has “a bunchy white forehead and red eyes like a sheep,” “claws,” and a “square smile” that forces her old face “dangerously awry.” She speaks in a “foggy” voice, for the damp and cold place is more like an ice box than an Old Ladies' Home. When her hand reaches over to the girl, “it felt like a petunia leaf, clinging and just a little sticky.”

Plant imagery figures prominently in these virtual transformations. When the orphan Easter is pulled up from the muddy bottom of Moon Lake after almost drowning, “she was arm to arm and leg to leg in a long fold, wrong-colored and pressed together as unopen leaves are”; her wet hair “lay over her face in long fern shapes”; “her side fell slack as a dead rabbit's in the woods”; the whites of her eyes “showed under the lids pale and slick as watermelon seeds” (GA, 128). In “The Whistle,” Jason Morton lies under his quilt “in a long shape like a bean,” and when the frost threatens their crop, the Mortons undress and lay all their clothes over the plants. Because her overalls are stained green, Mrs. Larkin sometimes blends in with her garden. So complete is her victimization that when she swoons under the rain, her surrender to the absurd is orgasmic: “A wind of deep wet fragrance beat against her … as if it had swelled and broken over a daily levee, tenderness tore and spun through her.” She sinks back into the plants, “with her hair beaten away from her forehead and her open eyes closing at once when the rain touched them. Slowly her lips began to part” (219). The widowed Mrs. Larkin submits to the falling rain as if to a man; it is the ultimate grotesque conversion. Because they have been treated like things, these characters seem to have been reduced to “thinghood,” and the grotesque is a protest against their brutalization and abandonment. The grotesque configurations of each physiognomy reveal the price of consciousness.

The grotesque in Eudora Welty's fiction is not nihilistic, for it continually evokes our compassion and affirms the human worth of the individual. Mrs. Larkin's grotesque appearance—her mansized overalls rolled up at the trousers and sleeves, and her wild, uncombed hair—underscores her suffering. The grotesque literally gives way to pathos when she lifts the hoe to strike Jamey: her clumsy sleeves both fall back, “exposing the thin, unsunburned whiteness of her arms, the shocking fact of their youth.” Although Miss Welty's use of the grotesque sometimes precludes a sympathetic response, her intentions seem implicitly moral. Like Swift, Miss Welty might say that she hopes “to mend the world” through the grotesque satire of a story like “Petrified Man” or “A Memory.” She exaggerates the ugliness of the bathers, isolating and “magnifying” it as a trauma, because she does not want her readers, like the bathers, to be “resigned to [human] ugliness”—to grossness and corruption and hatred.

Notes

1. I am presently undertaking a full-length study of the grotesque in modern literature. The remarks I will have to limit myself to here are intended only as working definitions appropriate to the subject at hand.

2. Classic nineteenth-century American writing abounds in Gothic trappings: the obsessive image of the mirror in Hawthorne's work, the letter A written in the heavens in The Scarlet Letter, and Chillingworth, who is among other things a version of that Gothic staple, the mad medico; all the supernatural portents of the river world in Huckleberry Finn, and the grave robberies throughout Twain's work; the ghosts and gloomy interiors of James's The Jolly Corner and The Turn of the Screw; in Moby Dick, the baptism in blood, the mysterious appearance of the Parsee, Queequeg's coffin, and the flames in the try-works.

3. The most withering pejorative which Vladimir Nabokov can direct at an earlier master of the grotesque, Dostoevsky, is that of “Gothic novelist.”

4. Louise Bogan, “The Gothic South,” Nation, CLIII (December 6, 1941), 572.

5. “New Writer,” Time, XXXVIII (November 24, 1941), 110.

6. Rose Feld, “New Novels and Short Stories of America,” New York Herald Tribune Books, November 16, 1941, p. 10.

7. A notably confused passage in Robert E. Spiller, et al., (eds.), The Literary History of the United States (New York, 1953), furthers the assumption that all contemporary Southern writers are working in the same “Gothic” vein. See the remarks on the “Mississippi Delta School” in “Postscript at Mid-Century,” 1401.

8. Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty, 89-90.

9. Welty, “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories,” in William Van O'Connor (ed.), Modern Prose: Form and Style (New York, 1959), 437.

10. Ibid., 441.

11. Warren, “The Love and Separateness in Miss Welty,” 258.

12. Margaret Mitchell, “Notes by the Way,” Nation, CLXIX (September 10, 1949), 256.

13. Welty, “The Abode of Summer,” Harper's Bazaar, No. 2887 (June, 1952), 115.

14. “Eudora Welty,” Wilson Library Bulletin, XVI (February, 1942), 410.

15. See Homer The Odyssey xi. 1. 543; trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, 1961), 214.

16. The bottled twins recall Sherwood Anderson's story “The Egg.” As symbols, the twins are analogous to the malformed baby chicks which are similarly bottled and displayed for all to see on a shelf in the restaurant run by the narrator's parents. In both stories, the grotesqueness of the main characters is mirrored in the bottled specimens. Another parallel to “Petrified Man” is found in the macabre comedy of life and death in Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit: “‘Which Mr. Chuzzlewit,’ said Mrs. Gamp, ‘is well-known to Mrs. Harris as has one sweet infant (tho she do not wish it known) in her own family by the mother's side, kep in spirits in a bottle; and that sweet babe she see at Greenwich Fair, a travelling in company with the pink eyed lady Prooshan dwarf, and livin skelinton, which judge her feeling when the barrel organ played and she was showed her own dear sister's child …’” (chap. LII). Like Dickens, Miss Welty cannot abide egregious piety toward the dead and toward children; witness Billy Boy and Shirley T. (“Why I Live at the P. O.”), and the comedy of Bonnie Dee's death and funeral (The Ponder Heart).

17. Porter, Introduction, Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, xxi.

18. For a similar usage in literature, see Milton on the Garden of Eden, Paradise Lost IV.1.136. Mrs. Larkin's frantic planting may perhaps be seen as a terrifying attempt to duplicate that first garden.

19. See illustrations in William S. Lieberman (ed.), Max Ernst (New York, 1961), 32, 38, 39, 40.

20. See the reproductions of paintings by Bacon, de Kooning, and Dubuffet in Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York, 1959).

Works Cited

By Eudora Welty

Books

The Bride of the Innisfallen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941.

Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946.

The Golden Apples. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

Music From Spain. Greenville, Miss.: The Levee Press, 1948.

Place in Fiction. New York: House of Books, 1957. Unpaged. An edition limited to three hundred copies signed by the author. Originally published in South Atlantic Quarterly, LV (January, 1956), 57-72.

The Ponder Heart. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954.

The Robber Bridegroom. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1942.

The Wide Net and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943.

Uncollected Work

“The Abode of Summer,” Harper's Bazaar, No. 2887 (June, 1952), 50, 115.

“The Burning” [first version], in Robert Gorham Davis (ed.), Ten Modern Masters. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953. Pp. 462-76.

“The Doll,” The Tanager (Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa), XI (June, 1936), 11-14.

“A Flock of Guinea Hens Seen From a Car,” The New Yorker, XXXIII (April 20, 1957), 35.

“Hello and Good-Bye,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXX (July, 1947), 37-40.

“Henry Green. A Novelist of the Imagination,” Texas Quarterly, IV (Autumn, 1961), 246-56.

“How I Write,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XXXI (Spring, 1955), 240-51. Reprinted in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (eds.). Understanding Fiction. 2nd. ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959. Pp. 545-53.

“Ida M'Toy,” Accent, II (Summer, 1942), 214-22. Reprinted in Joshua McClennen (ed.). Masters and Masterpieces of the Short Story. New York: Holt, 1957. Pp. 221-25.

“In Yoknapatawpha,” Hudson Review, I (Winter, 1949), 596-98. Review of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust.

“José de Creeft,” Magazine of Art, XXXVII (February, 1944), 42-47.

“Life's Impact is Oblique,” New York Times Book Review (April 2, 1961), 5. Review of book on Henry Green.

“Literature and the Lens,” Vogue, CIV (August 1, 1944), 102-103.

“Pageant of Birds,” New Republic, CIX (October 25, 1943), 565-67.

“The Reading and Writing of Short Stories,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXXII (February, 1949), 54-58, and (March, 1949), 46-49. Reprinted in William Van O'Connor (ed.). Modern Prose: Form and Style. New York: Crowell, 1959. Pp. 427-43.

“Retreat,” River, I (March, 1937), 10-12.

“A Sketching Trip,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXV (June, 1945), 62-70.

“Some Notes on River Country,” Harper's Bazaar, No. 2786 (February, 1944), 85-87, 150-56.

“A Sweet Devouring,” Mademoiselle, XLVI (December, 1957), 49, 114-16.

“The Teaching and Study of Writing,” Western Review, XIV (Spring, 1950), 167-68.

“Time and Place—and Suspense,” New York Times Book Review (June 30, 1963), 5, 27. Review of The Stories of William Sansom.

“A Touch That's Magic,” New York Times Book Review (November 3, 1957), 5. Review of Isak Dineson's Last Tales.

“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” The New Yorker, XXXIX (July 6, 1963), 24-25.