[In the following essay, Donaldson compares the portraits of women created by Faulkner and Welty, noting that while Faulkner's narratives reverberate with the effort to impose cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern characters, Welty's narratives present women that break out of the narrow confines of their worlds, “a carnival of gothic and grotesque heroines” who resist placement in traditional roles and themes.]

By the time Eudora Welty published A Curtain of Green and Other Stories in 1941, the term “Southern Gothic” had become something very like a synonym—or a cliche—for modern Southern literature. Louise Bogan even titled her review of Welty's collection “The Gothic South.”² Other reviewers of A Curtain of Green tended to use the catch-all category of Southern Gothic interchangeably with the grotesque—or in the words of the reviewer for Time Magazine, “the demented, the deformed, the queer” (quoted in Peterman, p. 107). No doubt these reviewers were reassured in their easy reference to the term Southern Gothic by Carson McCullers's remarks in her 1941 essay, “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” in which she declared that Southern writers shared with nineteenth-century Russian writers a vision of “the cheapness of human life” and a strikingly similar technique for vividly evoking that vision—“a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of man with a materialistic detail.”³

Considering the stereotypes and the cliches associated with Southern Gothic and the whole host of myths defining the image of “the benighted South,” as George Tindall aptly calls it, I think it's quite understandable that Welty herself has often resisted being categorized as a writer of Southern Gothic. “They better not call me that!” she abruptly told Alice Walker in an interview.⁴ Following her lead, Welty scholars, Ruth Weston most recently, have often argued against placing Welty in the same category of Southern Gothic as Carson McCullers or the Faulkner of “A Rose for Emily” and As I Lay Dying.⁵

I would like to take issue with this reluctance to couple Southern Gothic and Welty in the same breath and with our tendency, for that matter, to take those hoary old terms Southern Gothic and Southern grotesque for granted—terms, we often argue, that were all too readily applied to William Faulkner himself in the 1930s when critics found themselves perplexed with works ranging from “A Rose for Emily” to As I Lay Dying. Patricia Yaeger has already undertaken the task of examining versions of the grotesque in the writing of modern Southern women writers. Her series of essays on O'Connor and Welty and her forthcoming book Dirt and Desire promise to recast our whole conception of the grotesque in Southern literature in distinctly feminist terms. And if we take heed of the wealth of scholarship emerging on the gothic and gender in the last twenty years, we might learn in particular that the peculiar propensity of modern Southern writers to evoke the gothic, the macabre, and the grotesque might very well have a good deal to do with regional anxiety about rapidly changing gender roles in the first half of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the New Woman in the South—and the way both Faulkner and Welty responded to the implications of her presence—might also tell us a good deal about the intertextual relationship between Faulkner's frieze of gothic women in his short fiction of the 1920s and 1930s—especially “A Rose for Emily,” “Dry September,” “There Was a Queen,” and “That Evening Sun”—and Welty's own parade of monstrous women in A Curtain of Green. What we discover, I think, is something like an intertextual debate on women and the disruption of tradition in the twentieth-century South. Half sympathetic toward and half horrified by the spectacle of women betwixt and between tradition and change, Faulkner creates short stories about dangerous women who serve as disrupters of male narratives and as signifiers of the breakdown of cultural narratives of traditional manhood and womanhood. Welty's gothic heroines, though, suggest not so much the fragmentation of traditional narratives as the emergence of narratives to come—female stories about hysterics whose bodies provide expression in the absence of appropriate language. The difference, ultimately, lies in the politics of spectacle and vision—issues that have long concerned the genre of the gothic.

As Susan Wolstenholme notes, the gothic has usually been characterized as having a peculiarly “visual quality” precisely because so many scenes in gothic fiction are framed as scenes and because characters often present themselves as scenes in themselves or as spectators of scenes.⁶ And as a good many commentators have noted, reading a gothic novel often takes on strikingly voyeuristic connotations. After all, what Michelle Masse calls the “Ur-plot” of gothicism focuses on a suffering woman—a titillating twist on the “Richardsonian courtship narrative in which an unprotected young woman in an isolated setting uncovers a sinister secret.” Not for nothing, then, does Masse pronounce the gothic novel “a peep show of terror”—one that seems to ensure the distinction between observers and the observed.⁷

More to the point, Masse argues that the gothic stages, in her words, “what Freud calls the beating fantasy, in which a spectator watches someone being hurt by a dominant other” (p. 3). In this respect, she draws from Freud's famous 1919 essay, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in which the master speculates on the stages of a childhood fantasy entertaining the scenario of a child being beaten and the peculiar pleasure accompanying that fantasy. Noel Polk has already pointed out the relevance of this essay for a host of Faulkner texts,⁸ but I would like to probe the gender implications of this beating fantasy a little more deeply. For it is with a certain grim determination that Freud catalogues the slippery transformations marking the beating fantasies of little girls in particular:

In the first and third phantasies the child who is being beaten is always someone other than the subject; in the middle it is always the child herself, in the third phase it is almost invariably only the boys who are being beaten. The person who does the beating is from the first her father, replaced later on by a substitute taken from the class of fathers.

(p. 196)

Even the girls themselves seem to experience metamorphosis within the realm of fantasy. “Another fact, though its connection with the rest does not appear to be close,” Freud adds with a certain uneasiness and obliqueness, “is that between the second and third phases the girls change their sex, for in the phantasies of the latter phase they turn into boys” (p. 196). As Masse shrewdly notes, the closer Freud looks at the mutations of the fantasy, the more it blurs and mutates, and the more Freud himself suspects the difficulty of pinning down the fantasy once and for all. “Like the voyeur,” Masse declares, “Freud contemplates the scenario again and again, seemingly unsure of the source of his dis-ease, ‘an uneasy suspicion that this is not a final solution to the problem’” (p. 65).

Faulkner's and Welty's versions of Southern Gothic, I would argue, evoke something of this dis-ease and suspicion in part because some of their most prominent stories, like classic gothic tales of heroines under siege, bring attention to the spectacle of a woman, in Masse's words, “being hurt by a dominant other”—sometimes by a male character, sometimes by the community at large, and sometimes, unsettlingly enough, by the audience of the story itself. Whether Nancy in “That Evening Sun” or Welty's eponymous character Clytie in “A Curtain of Green,” these women find themselves in various forms of confinement and entrapment, and quite often their imprisonment is signified by the boundaries of the stories that enclose them and by the communities and readers who scrutinize them.

In some of Faulkner's most famous short stories, like “A Rose for Emily” and “That Evening Sun,” explicit attention is brought to the activity of watching the suffering of confined women. We watch along with Quentin, Caddy, and Jason as they survey with interest Nancy's increasing fear, evidenced in her keening and moaning, as the black maid anticipates the return of her husband Jesus and her own murder. Similarly, the narrator of “A Rose for Emily” underscores the intense scrutiny by the town under which Emily falls and by implication the reader as well by suggesting that Emily lies trapped in the collective gaze like a fly in amber: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily's slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.”⁹ And we watch along with the cook Elnora in “There Was a Queen,” as she scornfully meditates on the comings and goings of Narcissa Benbow Sartoris, desperate to retrieve stolen obscene letters now in the possession of a Federal agent.

These stories are uncomfortable and vaguely salacious, I would argue, because they do evoke something of Freud's beating fantasy, posing a triangular relationship between the woman who is beaten, the figure or figures who do the beating, and the spectators who stand aside and watch. But they are also uncomfortable stories precisely because they suggest a rogues gallery of women who have stepped out of line, transgressed the boundaries of their traditional roles, and served as disruptive forces in male narratives or perhaps even threatened to usurp narratives in general. It is significant, after all, that Narcissa Sartoris in “There Was a Queen” feels a certain freedom to pursue whatever course necessary to acquire those stolen letters because she lives in a world singularly empty of white male authority. With the deaths of all the Sartoris men except her own son, “the quiet was now the quiet of womenfolks” (p. 727). It is also significant that Nancy, in “That Evening Sun,” is implicitly seen by her white employers as a black woman gone wrong, one who prostitutes herself to white men, demands payment due her, and elicits beatings from irate clients and angry jailers. “[I]f you'd just let white men alone,” the children's father tells her (p. 295).

Such representations were reminders that even in the early twentieth-century South the roles of women were rapidly changing as the True Woman of piety, submissiveness, and purity began to give way, in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's words, to “the single, highly educated, economically autonomous New Woman.” Quite simply, the New Woman, whether the flapper of the twenties or the professional woman resisting marriage, “challenged existing gender relations and the distribution of power” and as such, Smith-Rosenberg argues, became a “sexually freighted metaphor for social disorder and protest.”¹⁰ And if this sense of threat seemed pronounced in the nation as a whole, it bore a special weight in the South, where, as Bertram Wyatt-Brown has argued, the subordination of women was required for the maintenance of a white elite culture of honor and shame, intertwining the identity of an individual white male with the esteem of the community at large. For white women to step off the pedestal, for black women to take off their aprons, was to shake the very foundation of white Southern culture.

Hence if Faulkner's short-story portraits of women being beaten in one form or another evoke the kind of imprisonment for women often associated with the gothic, it is partly because his stories suggest something of Foucault's “spectacle of the scaffold” in a culture of shame and honor. Faulkner's gothic women—characters like Nancy, Emily Grierson, Narcissa Sartoris, and Minnie Cooper in “Dry September”—undergo narrative traits uncomfortably similar to the public executions suffered by criminals before the penal reforms of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Confined in their stories and subject to the scrutiny and sometimes the brutality of other characters, their communities, and even their readers, they face ritualistic punishment: the inscription of their culture's judgment upon their bodies so that, in Foucault's words, “the sentence [would be] legible for all.”¹¹ In a word, we watch them being punished—by being exposed, confined, and figuratively beaten (and sometimes literally)—for not being the Southern women they are supposed to be.

The problem, though, is that the cultural narratives of discipline and punishment inscribed on their bodies are not quite successful, the sentence not quite legible, in part, I think, because Faulkner himself was so profoundly ambivalent about traditional definition of Southern womanhood and manhood. Narcissa, for one, remains distinctly unrepentant for bedding the Federal agent as the price to pay for getting her letters back, and though Jenny Du Pre seems to die from the pure shock of learning what Narcissa is capable of, her death can be read as much as a pungent commentary upon the overdue demise of the Old Order as it can a condemnation of Narcissa's actions.

But more unsettling by far is the curious interweaving in “Dry September” of Minnie Cooper's gothic tale of incarceration in small-town life with the narrative of white honor and vengeance culminating in the lynching of an innocent black man. The tale begins with a male narrative—men in a barbershop arguing about how to respond to “the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro” (p. 169). That this is an issue crucial for defining and asserting one's manhood in public is demonstrated in the charges of unmanliness hurled at the barber who counsels caution. The momentum of this tale of offended white male honor, though, is interrupted periodically by the story of Minnie Cooper's own background—the “furious unreality” of “her idle and empty days” and her own reaction to the way the town responds to her accusations of assault (p. 175). Our last sight of her, followed by a brief vignette about one of the lynchers, is of Minnie laughing hysterically, unable to articulate what she feels but nevertheless posing a disturbing counterpoint to the tale of white male vengeance—a counterpoint, moreover, hinting that there is more than one way to tell the tale of what happened to Minnie Cooper. And that hint in turn suggests a great deal about the tentativeness and fragility of the white male narrative in which Minnie's own fragmented tale is framed.

The figure of Minnie laughing, avidly eyed by the community, unable to talk, making her body talk for her, echoes with a peculiar force throughout the whole of Welty's first collection of short stories—A Curtain of Green. For Welty's volume is full of figures—the poor, the black, the marginal, the deformed, but especially women—like Minnie in particular, who make spectacles of themselves, and they do so in a strikingly panoptic world defined by a merciless collective gaze surveying the odd, the bizarre, and the marvelous. Like staffage in nineteenth-century landscape painting, her observers direct our attention time and time again to the collective gaze and to the spectacles luring that gaze: Lily Daw displaying a zinnia in her mouth; sideshow attractions like the Petrified Man and Keela the Indian Maiden; a deaf couple animatedly discussing in sign language their miraculous discovery of a key; “loud, squirming, ill-assorted” bathers at a park; Clytie Farr and Mrs. Larkin, whose private agonies render them conspicuous; the farm couple that the salesman R. J. Bowman wistfully ponders; and the jazz pianist Powerhouse, avidly watched by his white audience.¹² No wonder, then, that Ruby Fisher in “A Piece of News” suddenly feels herself under scrutiny when she discovers her name in a discarded newspaper: “What eye in the world did she feel looking in on her?” the narrator asks (p. 13). No wonder, too, that Mr. Marblehall in “Old Mr. Marblehall” strolls about under a public gaze so glaring that his house windows and the candle burners of his carriage resemble nothing so much as eyes, and that Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie” feels so exposed in the public, impersonal setting of the city that he is not at all surprised to be told four times on a subway wall “God sees me” (p. 103).

Much like Welty's characters, we as readers are encouraged to scrutinize these representations of the strange and the marvelous. But we are also urged to consider those who do the scrutinizing and the act of scrutiny itself. As a result, reading A Curtain of Green is roughly akin to looking at an exhibit and being vaguely uneasy about the possibility of being on exhibit oneself.

Some of this uneasiness, interestingly enough, can be detected in contemporary reviews of the collection bringing attention to the horrified fascination with which one gazes upon the spectacles populating A Curtain of Green. Albert Devlin speculates that the volume probably caught the interest of a good many Northern reviewers precisely because the stories seemed to confirm the notion of the South as something of a spectacle itself—benighted, grotesque, peculiar.¹³ In her review for The Nation Louise Bogan noted that the characters could have originated in “some brokendown medieval scene ruled by its obscure and decomposing laws” (quoted in Devlin, pp. 5-6). A particularly perceptive British reviewer remarked upon the book's “fondness for the afflicted in mind or body and for strange violence of behaviour” but also took note of Welty's ability to “penetrate beneath the surface of the harsh or unprepossessing spectacle with quick, passionate sympathy” (quoted in Peterman, p. 106). If, in short, Welty's Mississippians appear peculiar and strange, veritable spectacles, these reviews suggest, so too is the experience of reading about those peculiarities.

Chief among those spectacles in A Curtain of Green are women whose antics and words suggest that there is something peculiarly feminine about making a spectacle of oneself, and in this respect Welty's spectacles hearken back to Minnie Cooper herself. I would argue, in fact, that Welty appropriates the figure of Minnie and other gothic women in Faulkner's short stories to explore their potential for subversiveness. For like Medusa and the Sphinx in stories of Perseus and Oedipus, Minnie and Welty's women are unsettling presences because they offer threats, in Teresa de Lauretis's words, to “man's clear vision, and their power consists in their … ‘to-be-looked at-ness' …, ‘their luring of man's gaze into the dark continent,’ as Freud put it, the enigma of femininity.”¹⁴ In traditional male narratives such monstrous spectacle-obstacles are ordinarily conquered and swept aside if the hero's story is to proceed with a clear view of the narrative ending. What happens, though, if such spectacles stubbornly resist this sort of expulsion, if they persist in making spectacles of themselves in the public gaze?

Mary Russo, for one, suggests that being too much in the public eye can be unsettling for all concerned. Looking back on her own childhood and admonitions by her mother, she observes:

For a woman, making a spectacle out of herself had more to do with a kind

of inadvertency and loss of boundaries: the possessor of large, aging, and

dimpled thighs displayed at the public beach, of overly rouged cheeks, of a

voice shrill in laughter, or of a sliding bra strap—a loose, dingy bra

strap especially—were at once caught out by fate and blameworthy. It was

my impression that these women had done something wrong, had stepped, as it

were, into the limelight out of turn—too young or too old, too early or

too late—and yet anyone, any woman, could make a spectacle out of herself

if she was not careful.¹⁵

In short, going too far, stepping over clearly defined boundaries, seems to be key in making a spectacle. It's not quite enough simply to be gazed upon, for we've been taught by feminist film critics and art historians just how gender-bound the activity of looking and being looked upon are in our culture. Stepping into the spotlight suggests the possibility of stepping into a designated site of femininity, a ready-made plot for the gothic heroine, but what happens when one essentially tries to take control of the spotlight and aggressively seeks the gaze of onlookers? What happens when women's bodies in particular become conspicuous, disorderly, disruptive—and in public spaces at that? We might discover, as Russo suggests, that “… women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive—dangerous, and in danger” (p. 217). We might also discover the slippery world of shifting boundaries, roles, and genders that baffles and irritates Freud in “A Child Is Being Beaten”—a slipperiness that appears to be part and parcel of that fantasy and implicit in gothic and Southern Gothic texts.

It is, I think, precisely this slippery, transgressive, dangerous possibility that Welty has inherited from Faulkner and has expanded to its fullest in story after story in A Curtain of Green, stories in which those who are usually marginal—the poor, the deprived, the retarded, but in particular white women and blacks—make spectacles of themselves by being excessive, transgressive, odd, disturbing, disruptive. Lily Daw unsettles her three lady friends and the entire town of Victory, Mississippi, by deciding to marry a xylophone player instead of accepting a ready-made plot of allowing herself to be put away at the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble-Minded. Ellie and Albert Morgan, so used to living in the shadows, take center stage in “The Key” where they silently but eloquently discuss their lives before a mesmerized hearing audience in a train station. Little Lee Roy in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” briefly relives his career as a geek in a sideshow with the two men who visit him and thereby underscores how he has changed the life of one of them forever. The narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.” is able to turn her entire family upside-down simply through the momentum of her ever-accelerating monologue. A “common” family of bathers in a park disrupts the daydreams of the narrator of “A Memory” by virtue of their outsized and grubby physical presence. Clytie Farr in “Clytie” disturbs the small community of Farr's Gin with unaccountable vigils in the rain, cursing sessions in her garden, and a suicide in a rain barrel. The despairing and unemployed Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie” inexplicably stabs his wife and then finds himself a prizewinner for entering Radio City Music Hall as the ten millionth person. Mrs. Larkin in “A Curtain of Green” obsessively over-plants her garden until it offers “the appearance of a sort of jungle” and she herself seems an appropriate inhabitant—“over-vigorous, disreputable, and heedless” (pp. 108 and 107). And perhaps most spectacular of all is Powerhouse, the jazz musician who is “so monstrous” with his huge feet and “vast and obscene” mouth that he sends his white audience “into oblivion” (pp. 132 and 131).

These all are figures that M. M. Bakhtin would group with the folk tradition of carnival and humor, with ritual spectacles, verbal comedy, and billingsgate finding their heyday in Roman saturnalias and the Middle Ages. But in particular he would link these figures with the grotesque, with material bodies that have become, in Bakhtin's words, “grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.” They find their exemplar in the famous Kerch terra cotta figures of laughing pregnant hags, combining “a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed.” Such images, Bakhtin asserts, serve as “the epitome of incompleteness,” and that, he adds, “is precisely the grotesque concept of the body.” Perhaps even more to the point, he notes that the grotesque body does not stand apart from the rest of the world but persists in growing, expanding, and ultimately transgressing its own boundaries. “The stress is laid on those parts of the body,” he remarks, “that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.”¹⁶

For our purposes, Bakhtin's grotesque bodies have two important implications for helping us make sense of the spectacles created in story after story in A Curtain of Green. Precisely because Welty's grotesque bodies do make spectacles, pursue excess, and transgress the boundaries of the expected and the ordinary, they serve as potent figures of women's anger protesting constrictions and limits. As Peter Schmidt, Ruth Weston, and Albert Devlin have shrewdly observed, the stories in A Curtain of Green are filled with narrow, confining spaces usually associated with women—kitchens, interiors, gardens, bedrooms, beauty parlors, and even the rain barrel in which Clytie drowns herself.¹⁷ These are settings, Schmidt emphasizes, that underscore the restrictive narrative plots available to women, what Schmidt calls “the either/or choice between conformity and madness” tormenting so many of the female characters in A Curtain of Green (p. 31). What better way, then, to question and undermine the boundaries of those narrow settings than with bodies that protrude, exceed, threaten to expand endlessly? We see Clytie's legs protruding from the rain barrel, Powerhouse opening his mouth as if to engulf his white audience, Mrs. Larkin, disheveled and frantically busy in her garden, the narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.” virtually drowning everyone around her in words.

Indeed, so excessive and exaggerated are Welty's own grotesque bodies that a sudden recognition of their own strangeness appears to liberate them momentarily from restricted plots and to enable them to envision alternative stories for themselves. Thus Ruby Fisher in “A Piece of News” is lifted out of the ordinary by her encounter with a newspaper article about a woman named Ruby Fisher who is shot by her husband. Suddenly she can imagine herself in alternative scenarios—a deathbed scene' for instance—and because she is able to conjure up these other stories, she and her husband are briefly transformed: “Rare and wavering, some possibility stood timidly like a stranger between them and made them hang their heads” (p. 16). Similarly, the key that Albert and Ellie Morgan discover in “The Key” makes them feel that they “were in counter-plot against the plot of those things that pressed down upon them from outside their knowledge and their ways of making themselves understood” (p. 34).

These are bodies that serve as half-formed articulation, protests that find tentative expression not in language but in the body itself. This sort of semi-articulation is akin to hysteria as Catherine Clement sees it, “the only form of contestion possible in certain types of social organization”—that is, language “not yet at the point of verbal expression restrained within the bond of the body.”¹⁸ That these bodies do struggle with the effort of articulation says a good deal about the difficulties women in particular face in finding their own voices. “Women's power under patriarchy,” Helena Michie notes in The Flesh Made Word, “comes only at great and psychic cost; its transformation into language, as the halting lines and gaps between the words indicate, is equally painful—the gaps themselves are scars and ruptures in the text.” For women's entrance into language, Michie adds, is painful precisely because such a threshold moment involves “a shattering of the silence which enshrouds women's physical presence.”¹⁹

The struggle to articulate inscribed on the bodies populating A Curtain of Green suggests something of Welty's own battle to find an appropriate idiom of expression. Elizabeth Bowen's perceptive remarks about that battle in The Golden Apples (1949) can also be applied to Welty's first volume:

With her, nothing comes out of stock, and it has been impossible for her to

stand still. Her art is a matter of contemplation, susceptibility, and

discovery, it has been necessary for her to evolve for herself a language

and to arrive, each time she writes, at a new form.²⁰

Welty herself once noted in an interview: “[I]n those early stories I'm sure I needed the device of what you call the ‘grotesque.’ That is, I hoped to differentiate character by their physical qualities as a way of showing what they were like inside—it seemed to me the most direct way to do it.”²¹

Indeed, the more grotesque the bodies in A Curtain of Green, the more likely they are to reverberate with scarcely repressed anger seeking articulation, the kind of rage, for instance, that inspires Clytie's cursing and Mrs. Larkin's near-act of murder—raising her hoe and almost directing it onto the head of her garden helper, Jamey—in her extravagantly overplanted garden. “Was it possible to compensate? To punish? To protest?” Mrs. Larkin asks herself, for she seemingly has no words to express the grief she feels for the death of her husband and for “the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability,” of her confinement in her garden and widowhood (pp. 111 and 110).

But Welty's grotesque bodies are more than inscriptions of suffering and rage. Their very outrageousness, their grotesqueness as Bakhtin would define it, blurs the boundary between those who watch and those who are being watched, between those who suffer and those who inflict the suffering, so that we are never quite sure, to return to Freud's scenario of the beating fantasy, just who is being beaten and who is doing the beating. From Bakhtin's perspective, the grotesque body, “composed of fertile depths and procreative convexities, is never clearly differentiated from the world but is transferred, merged, and fused with it. It contains, like Pantagruel's mouth, new unknown spheres.” And because the grotesque body does suggest the possibility of different worlds, different orders, different perspectives, it is able to dismantle what Bakhtin calls “the confines of the apparent (false) unity of the indisputable and stable” (pp. 339 and 48).

In short, the very grotesqueness of bodies in A Curtain of Green brings into question the detachment usually linked with the activity of looking, an activity that at once engrosses Welty's onlookers and renders them increasingly uncertain. Like Clytie Farr in “Clytie,” Welty's observers look “purely for a resemblance to a vision,” and like Clytie again, they seem to discover that the more they look the less familiar everything around them is (p. 86). Those who gaze upon the strange and marvelous, like Tom Harris in “The Hitch-Hikers,” anticipate the sort of certainty they feel as children: “standing still, with nothing to touch him, feeling tall and having the world come all at once into it round shape underfoot” (p. 62). What they discover, though, like Bowman in “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” is an odd blurring between those who appear to look and those who are looked upon. “Now we are all visible to one another,” Bowman thinks unexpectedly after Sonny returns with borrowed fire (p. 128). Even more unexpected is the deceptiveness of things to be seen, for the two farm folk Bowman studies are not an elderly mother and son, as he initially thinks, but a fairly young couple expecting a baby. Worse yet, Bowman, who originally thinks of the couple as odd and country-quaint, is himself the oddity, barred by his solitude from “the ancient communication between two people” (p. 129).

The stories of A Curtain of Green explore this sort of reversal between grotesque and norm, between gazers and gazed upon, again and again, and the result is a world in which the politics of the gaze and spectacle is problematicized and boundaries between binary oppositions, between normal and abnormal, classic and grotesque, insider and outsider, community and outcast, are thoroughly disrupted. In story after story, the possibility of alternative gazes, alternative perspectives, alternative narratives, is raised repeatedly, often by underscoring the limitations of the collective gaze leveled upon those labeled as strange, marvelous, grotesque, and suffering. Precisely because the raptly staring crowd in the train station has no inkling of the private story of Ellie and Albert Morgan in “The Key,” the third-person narrator's direct address to a second-person audience pondering the interior lives of the Morgans is especially poignant. Similarly, we're told pointedly that there is more than one way to view a sideshow attraction, like Little Lee Roy in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and it is the mystery of multiple views that is contemplated by the baffled and horrified young man who tells the story of Little Lee Roy's rescue.

Strikingly enough, the volume's two concluding stories, “Powerhouse” and “A Worn Path,” focusing on two central (and suffering) black figures, evoke the limitations of a collective gaze with the most acidity. The white audience that avidly stares at Powerhouse, watching him playing, watching him suffering in a sense, has smug assumptions about capturing the musician's very essence in its gaze—“of course you know it is with them—Negroes—bandleaders—they would play the same way giving all they've got, for an audience of one …” (p. 133). A similar smugness characterizes the whites who encounter Phoenix Jackson on her journey in “A Worn Path.” “I know you old colored people!” a young white hunter tells her (p. 145). But the truth of the matter is, of course, that they know neither Powerhouse nor Phoenix Jackson, whose individual stories exist outside those collective gazes. And more disconcerting still is the way both Powerhouse and Phoenix Jackson look back at their white onlookers with unsettling directness. “Somebody loves me,” sings Powerhouse, staring back at his audience, and adds, in a phrase erasing the boundary between spectacle and spectator, “… Maybe it's you!” (p. 141).

Most unsettling of all is the disruption of the spectator-spectacle relationship, and for that matter, of the beating fantasy as well, in “A Memory,” the story that serves in a sense as the key to the collection. For the narrator of “A Memory” recalls an earlier sense of self when she was a highly imaginative young girl very much an artist in the making and perhaps even more to the point an obsessive watcher and judge of others who never quite seem to meet her own high standards. “When a person, or a happening,” the narrator notes, “seemed to me not in keeping with my opinion, or even my hope or expectation, I was terrified by a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow” (p. 75). Nevertheless, she ponders each sight that comes before her, for she is convinced that anything she sees might reveal “a secret of life … for I was obsessed with notions of concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment” (p. 76).

The sense of power she feels simply from obsessive watching is heightened, she adds, “by the fact that I was in love then for the first time: I had identified love at once” (p. 76). Never passing a word with the boy at school who is the object of her infatuation, the young girl feels, she says, “a necessity for absolute conformity to my ideas in any happening I witnessed” (p. 76). Accordingly, she sits all day in school unceasingly apprehensive, “fearing for the untoward to happen” (p. 76). When the young boy drawing her attention unexpectedly suffers a nosebleed in class, the narrator feels a genuine sense of shock and horror. Having safely categorized the young boy as a dream of perfect love, the young girl now fears that he will not measure up, that his house and his family may be “slovenly” and “shabby” (p. 76).

But it is in the park one day, by the lake beach where she often obsessively watches, framing her vision with a square made with her hands, that she suddenly finds all her judgments and observations disrupted and thoroughly unsettled. Framing her view as always, the narrator sees more than she bargains for when that “group of loud, squirming, ill-assorted people who seemed thrown together only by the most confused accident” comes before her eyes (p. 77). Watching them with her usual stern sense of judgment, the narrator sees an overweight woman in the group unexpectedly pour great globs of sand out of her bathing suit. “I felt a peak of horror,” the narrator declares, “as though her breasts themselves had turned to sand as though they were of no importance at all and she did not care” (p. 79). So outsized is the moment that the narrator's framing vision is exposed for the fragile fiction that it is. Even after the group of bathers has gone, the narrator continues to lie there, “feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bulwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around the bodies, which changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm” (p. 79). It would be, she concludes, her “last morning on the beach,” and the implication is that the narrator will never again be able to conjure up the power of watching and easy categorization, of sharp distinctions between the ideal and the grotesque.

Decades after writing “A Memory,” Welty would write of that story in One Writer's Beginnings (1984): “This is not, on reaching its end, an observer's story. The tableau discovered through the young girl's framing hands is unwelcome realism. How can she accommodate the existence of this view to the dream of love, which she carried already inside her?” Rather ominously, Welty adds: “The frame only raises the question of the story.”²²

The result, I think, is a version of Southern Gothic that does indeed raise the question of the story, mark its terrain as highly contested, unsettle the politics of vision. If Faulkner's short story portraits of women reverberate with the effort—only partially successful—to inscribe cultural narratives of Southern femininity upon women's bodies, Welty's gallery of women evokes the implicit but logical conclusion of Faulkner's tales by posing scenarios of women who break out of haunted houses and narrow confines, abruptly change places with other participants in faint echoes of beating fantasies, and explore the full potential of just what it means to be a spectacle. The dis-ease we discover in Faulkner's portrait gallery of gothic women becomes in A Curtain of Green a full-fledged carnival of gothic and grotesque heroines running amok, resistant to placement in traditional plots and roles. Welty's women, in fact, are more often than not characters in search of stories that have yet to be articulated. And therein, perhaps, lies the crucial difference between their two versions of Southern Gothic. Faulkner may display for us sights that are at times all too painfully familiar—the frustrated spinster, the hypocritical widow, the utterly oppressed black woman—but Welty makes spectacles that are often so outrageous and boundary-breaking that we are never quite sure what we are looking at or where to place ourselves as spectators. Ultimately, if Faulkner's tales of gothic women allude uncomfortably to the spectacle of the scaffold, Welty's stories testify to nothing so much as the scaffold's dismantling.

Notes

1. A shorter version of this essay appeared as “Dangerous Women and Gothic Debates: Faulkner, Welty, and Tales of the Grotesque,” in Faulkner's Short Fiction, ed. Hans Skei (Oslo, Norway: Solum Forlag, 1997), pp. 106-116.

2. Gina D. Peterman, “A Curtain of Green: Eudora Welty's Auspicious Beginning,” Mississippi Quarterly, 47 (Winter 1992-1993), 104.

3. Carson McCullers, “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” in Friendship and Sympathy: Communities of Southern Women Writers, ed. Rosemary M. Magee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), pp. 21-22.

4. Quoted in Alice Walker, “Eudora Welty: An Interview,” in Conversations with Eudora Welty, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (New York: Pocket Press, 1984), p. 152.

5. Ruth Weston, Gothic Tradition and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), p. 4.

6. Susan Wolstenholme, Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 6.

7. Michelle A. Masse, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 10, 40.

8. Noel Polk, “‘The Dungeon Was Mother Herself’: William Faulkner: 1927-1931,” in New Directions in Faulkner Studies: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1983, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), p. 65. See in general Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 175-205.

9. William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 123. Subsequent references to short stories in this collection will be cited parenthetically within the text.

10. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 245-246.

11. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. xiv. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random-Vintage, 1977), p. 43.

12. Eudora Welty, “A Memory,” in A Curtain of Green, in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1941; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 77. Subsequent references to the stories in A Curtain of Green will be cited parenthetically within the text.

13. Albert J. Devlin, Eudora Welty's Chronicle. A Story of Mississippi Life (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983), pp. 5-6.

14. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 110. For an examination of Welty's critique and inversion of the male heroic narrative, see Rebecca Mark, The Dragon's Blood: Eudora Welty's “The Golden Apples” and Feminist Intertextuality (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).

15. Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 213.

16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 5, 19, 25, and 26.

17. Peter Schmidt, The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 4; Weston, Gothic Traditions, pp. 10 and 134; and Devlin, Eudora Welty's Chronicle, p. 16.

18. Quoted in Michele Richman, “Sex and Signs: The Language of French Feminist Criticism,” in Language and Style 13 (Fall 1980), 69.

19. “Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word. Female Figures and Women's Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 139 and 74-75.

20. “Elizabeth Bowen, review of The Golden Apples, in Books of Today (September 1950); rpt. in Bowen, Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood & Afterthoughts: Pieces on Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 216.

21. “Quoted in Linda Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction XLVII: Eudora Welty,” in Conversations with Eudora Welty, p. 93.

22. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 89.