[In the following essay, Ardolino attempts "to demonstrate that along with the Christian motifs of rebirth, the cycles of natural imagery presented create the theme of life emerging from death [in 'A Worn Path']."]

Although most critics of "A Worn Path" noting the story's careful blending of pagan myth, Christian allusion and folk story motifs have praised Eudora Welty's allusive technique of reinforcing meanings on the story's several levels of perception, they have nevertheless been divided in their assessment of its overall mood and theme. While some emphasize the patterns of Christian rebirth, others insist upon the darker existential meanings of carrying out the journey of life in a wasteland, with no hope of regeneration. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate that along with the Christian motifs of rebirth the cycles of natural imagery presented create the theme of life emerging from death. Phoenix, who effects the rebirth of herself, her grandson and the earth through her perennial healing journey, represents the Kore figure—divine mother and child—who descends to Hades to recover her lost daughter and rises to earth where they are reborn. In sum, Phoenix's journey with its succession of deaths and resurrections parallels the pagan nature rituals at Eleusis where the eternal coming of life from death was celebrated.

The essential paradox of life coming from death is established in the first four sentences. Phoenix's journey begins in December, a "bright frozen day in the early morning." She is equated with the morning, the rising sun, for she is the immortal bird which rises from its own ashes as the sun rises, and dies only to be reborn. As Jones says: "Phoenix, in touch with the ancient sun and with nature, turns a sun-inspired force against the frozen earth about her" [William M. Jones, "Growth of a Symbol: The Sun in Lawrence and Eudora Welty," University of Kansas City Review, Vol. 26, 1959]. Phoenix's movement, "like the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock," parallels the rhythm of her experience, a continual fluctuation between negation and affirmation.

As the embodiment of the cycles of death and rebirth, Phoenix becomes a ritualistic figure, a priestess who will bring about the rebirth of the sterile land. She is described as wearing a "dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket. . . . " This last description emphasizes her ritual role as provider of nourishment for the land and her suffering grandson. When she crosses a creek by walking across a log, she is described as "putting her right foot out. . . leveling her cane fiercely before here, like a festival figure in some parade."

Yet Phoenix's powers as an effective nature priestess are threatened by imminent overthrow. She is very old, "her eyes . . . blue with age." Her shoelaces are untied so that "every time she took a step she might have fallen." Thorns grab her skirts and retard her progress:

. . . her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. . . .

"I in the thorny bush," she said.

This precarious balance between Phoenix's regenerative powers and their sudden overthrow reinforces the primary poles of the story, life and death.

In accordance with this nature ritural, Phoenix reenacts the death and rebirth of the pagan vegetation gods Osiris, Attis and Adonis. She is identified with these ancient gods by her physical description and the vegetation about her: "Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead. ... " She describes her journey as "Up through pines .. . now down through oaks." Phoenix is identified with the tree sacred to the vegetation gods, Attis and Adonis. Frazer describes the festival of Cybele and Attis at which the pine tree was revered: " . . . a pine tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity." In addition, she wears a red rag, the sanguinary symbol of Adonis' death, for when he died "roses and anemones sprang from the blood of Adonis" [James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1951]. Finally, Phoenix alludes to Adonis' violent death by a wild boar when she calls out: "Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way."

Phoenix is also associated with mistletoe, which in the winter remains green, thus symbolizing immortality. "Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe." As Frazer points out, the mistletoe is equated with the regenerative powers of the sun. Appropriately, Phoenix's skin is described as "having a golden color . . . underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark." Her cane, which is made from an umbrella and which she taps on the frozen ground in front of her, suggests the talismanic golden bough of mistletoe which enabled Aeneas to confront the horrors of Hades. She uses the cane as a support and it symbolizes her role as the nature priestess who will ultimately bring rain to soften the frozen earth. But at this point in her journey the cane's powers do not prevent her from being overturned by a Cerberus-like dog.

Her fall down the hill is a steady descent into the deepest pit of Hades. At the bottom of the hill she makes a series of feeble attempts to rise against the demonic forces arrayed against her regenerative journey. This section certainly merits the "existential" label [Saralyn] Daly has appended [in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, 1964], for Phoenix moves ahead only from sheer Sisyphean obstinacy and there is little hint of the resurrection she will effect at the end.

After she passes through the thorns, Phoenix "stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane." But again she must immediately pass through a trial of crossing a creek. Having passed this test, she rests on the bank and imagines that "a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble cake on it. . . . When she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air." Next, she crawls through a barbed-wire fence and emerges safely: "At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing." However, her "resurrection" is another illusion, for now she is among the "big dead trees, like black men with one arm, standing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard." Once more she is in the land of the dead: "She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn.... Through the maze now .. . for there was no path." The pun on maze-maize indicates the labyrinthine city of the dead. As J. P. Guepin explains [in The Tragic Paradox: Myth and Ritual in Greek Tragedy, 1968], the labyrinth is "Another version of the realm of the dead. .. . It is easy to enter, but difficult to leave. ... " Phoenix meets the ruler of the underworld in the form of a scarecrow, who inside his coat had "an emptiness cold as ice."

Rather than succumb to the death which this scarecrow represents, Phoenix invites this ghost to dance:

"I ought to be shut up for good," she said with laughter. "My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow . . . while I dancing with you."

Her behavior parallels Theseus' dance of life in the labyrinth where "there is an expression of the victory of life over death . . . in the labyrinth dance the dancers who gyrate together and turn back again, following the pattern of the labyrinth, first have a stifling sensation, and then feel free again, as if they are turning from death of life."

After passing through a land of enchantment, drinking sweet water from a well, Phoenix enters a new road: "Deep, deep the road went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the liveoaks met, and it was as dark as a cave." Again, this description represents the paradox of life-in-death, death-in-life, the road leading to a cave of darkness, but surrounded by green banks and live oaks. Once more Phoenix is knocked into a ditch by a Cerberus-like black dog where she "dies" and undergoes another illusory resurrection: "Down there her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull."

The hunter chases the black dog away, unwittingly provides Phoenix with a nickel, but at the same time, has a dead bobwhite hanging from his basket, another black dog on a chain, threatens Phoenix with his gun, and warns her not to go any further.

Not only does Phoenix resemble Aeneas in his descent into the underworld, but she also parallels the death and rebirth of Persephone. Persephone was abducted into Hades while she was picking flowers in much the same way as Phoenix is meditating when the dog knocks her into the ditch. Persephone took the pomegranate seeds as Phoenix takes the nickel from the hunter, the god of rich, Pluto. And finally, Persephone's rise from Hades marks the return of spring, just as Phoenix's rebirth will bring about a renewal of the wasteland and her maimed grandson.

In this latter regard, Phoenix serves also as a Demeter-figure who wanders the sterile earth looking to recover her lost child. Her journey to find a cure for her grandson's illness resembles in its travail C. Kerenyi's description [in Essays on a Science of Mythology, 1948] of the wanderings of the Kore figure: "To enter into the figure of Demeter means to be pursued, to be robbed, raped, to fail to understand, to rage and grieve, but then to get everything back and be born again. This realizes the universal principle of life, the fate of everything mortal." The city of Natchez represents the destination of Phoenix both as mythical bird and Kore figure. For the former, Natchez appears to be the sacred city of the sun to which the mythical phoenix was said to make a pilgrimage after immolating itself and then rising from its own ashes. But, in reality, Natchez is the city of darkness, the corrupt, paved Hades created by the forces of sterility where Phoenix, as Kore figure, must struggle to recover her grandson from the grip of death. Alfred Appel notes its garish harshness [in A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, 1965]: "As she [Phoenix] enters the town, the rich nature imagery gives way to a blunt, drab, journalistic style. . . . The garish is revealed with quick, deft strokes: all the lights are turned on in daytime. . . . The Christmas . . . tangle of electric lights is only a corruption of the red-green-and-silver tones that 'decorate' the backcountry. . . . "

Phoenix is forced to struggle for life in this neon land of the dead just as she had done earlier in the wilderness. As before, she manages to turn darkness into light, to bring life from death by obtaining the medicine. Her experience in the winding tower parallels the ritual recovery of the lost Proserpine at Eleusis as described by Kerenyi:

The Eleusianian experience began with sorrow, the wandering quest that corresponded to the wanderings of Demeter herself and her lamentations. Eleusis was the place of the finding of the Kore. In this finding something was seen—no matter through what symbols—that was objective and subjective at once. Objectively, the idea of the goddess regaining her daughter, and therefore herself, flashed on the experient's soul. Subjectively, the same flash of revelation showed him his own continuity, the continued existence of all living things, the not-knowing, the failure to understand that attached to the figure of the grieving Demeter, ceased. The paradox contained in the living idea—that, in motherhood, death and continuity are one in the losing and finding of the Kore—is now resolved.

Under the harsh interrogation of the doctor, Phoenix becomes mute, forgets her grandson, and the reason she came to Natchez. But as she sits down, she begins to reenact this ritual discovery of the Kore: '"Here I be,' she said. There was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body." Finally, she remembers and rediscovers her mission:

"It was memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming."

The curing of her grandson's affliction epitomizes the theme of life out of death. Two years ago he swallowed lye, both poison and deception, but now "it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last." Through her healing journey, Phoenix has brought about the rebirth of the lost god.

The paper windmill that Phoenix promises to buy for her grandson is also an apt symbol for the mystery of the precarious resurrection of life from death. The paper windmill is, on one hand, an emblem of the fragility of her quixotic quest for rebirth: "She will militantly "'march . . . back' . . . carrying an unbelievable symbol, the emblem of Don Quixote's undefeated madness" (Daly). On the other hand, the windmill is a star of good fortune, a blessing for her grandson, a symbol of the regenerative process of nature connected both with grain and water.

Kerenyi explains that the introduction of the mown ear of grain on the last day of the Eleusinian mysteries "was a symbol and example of how things come to be death and birth; a symbol of Persephone's fate, which is the whole meaning of Demeter's fate too." The connection of the windmill with water also has a relation to the Eleusinian rites where the tipping over of two vessels shaped like spinning tops had a cyclical significance: "There is no reason to doubt that it was water and no other liquid that flowed to east and west out of the overturned vessels, that is, in the directions of birth and death. . . . The primal element was expected to go on working for the realization of this idea, the idea of eternal birth." Thus, Phoenix's windmill signifies the cycle of life, the perennial rebirth of the grain.

Although the story ends with Phoenix "going down," the symbolic pattern clearly indicates that she will rise like the sun and that her grandson and the wasteland will be reborn. The Christian promise of sanctification and rebirth hinted at by the dove symbolism (Phoenix and her grandson are compared to birds; Phoenix sees a "mourning dove" and a dove watches her steal the nickel) is ultimately fulfilled by Phoenix's healing journey and the recovery of her grandson's voice.

"Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for lo, the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land."

(Song of Solomon 2:10-13)