SOURCE: "Love's Habit of Vision in Welty's Phoenix Jackson," in Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 7, Autumn, 1986, pp. 77-85.

[In the following essay, Walter briefly surveys critical interpretations of "A Worn Path " and offers a reading of Phoenix Jackson's character, focussing in particular on the significance of her faith.]

Phoenix Jackson, the protagonist of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," is first described as coming along a path through pinewoods far out in the country near the Natchez Trace:

She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her.

As if her name were not signal enough of her association with time, the evocation of the grandfather clock implies not only the venerableness of time as Phoenix lives it, but also its repetitive, inflexible quality. Her progression is strictly proportioned to an objective order of time to which she responds with a curious mechanical tapping that only heightens the impression of time's domineering over her actions. If the "heaviness" of the clock's descending pendulum suggests the submission of her personal time to a natural cyclic law, the "lightness" of the pendulum's upward swing almost hints of a redeeming quality of freedom in Phoenix's actions. The full sweep of the pendulum, with its upward motion incorporated periodically into a pattern of temporally dominant gravity—just as Phoenix's journey is incorporated into a landscape of winter and death—symbolically captures the full range of the "habit of love" at the heart of this story's meaning.

Atypically for a short story, the meaning of "A Worn Path" is not something discovered by a character in the story; as Louise Cowan observes, "the discovery of [Phoenix's] inner burning .. . is not. . . based on an epiphany," since the protagonist undertakes the worn path "in full awareness" ["Imagination and Survival," Dragonflies, Vol. 3, 1974]. Already in its first two sentences, however, Welty's story deftly promotes a change in the reader's perspective that becomes, through the action's complete unfolding, a genuine deepening of knowledge. This epiphany in the reader imitates and participates in a revisioning of history like that promoted by New Testament faith: earlier events that had seemed limited to immediate and transitory significance are discovered, in time, to have been prefigurations of a hidden life whose reach and destiny continue through the present and ultimately transcend time.

Despite its simplicity, or perhaps because of it, "A Worn Path" has provoked far-ranging interpretations by a number of critics who agree, at least, that in some way the worn path of Phoenix figures the path of life. According to Sara Trefman ["Welty's 'A Worn Path'," Explicator, Vol. 24 February 1966], Phoenix is "clearly a symbol of Christ" and her journey reverberates with symbols from Christian tradition. Neil D. Isaacs argues [in "Life for Phoenix," Sewanee Review, Vol. 71, 1963] that throughout the story are "allusions to and suggestions of the Christ-myth at large and the meaning of Christmas in particular"; moreover, that "the whole story is suggestive of a religious pilgrimage" by which Phoenix, "with an abiding intuitive faith, arrives at the shrine of her pilgrimage." While emphasizing the resurrection aspect of Phoenix's journey and finding possible Israelite and Christian parallels for it, both these critics overlook the important motif of cyclic revolution which becomes even a structural element when Phoenix turns and begins to retrace her steps.

Another commentator who explores the path: life theme is Saralyn Daly, who accepts Ruth Vande Kieft's description of Welty's vision as "pessimistic and existential" [in Eudora Welty, 1962] and argues [in "'A Worn Path' Retrod," Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, 1964] that Phoenix ("not a Christian") follows a path that leads to no certain Christian reward or promise. Daly believes, rather, that the old woman proves herself a stoic who "moves through 'chaotic reality'" overcoming many obstacles, including her own naïveté, to mature in a wisdom that expects little from either nature or Christian charity.

My interpretation agrees with Isaacs' that the faith of Phoenix is teleological, but I would emphasize that its constancy matures and is expressed through the mediation of her care for what is natural and temporal. And certainly Phoenix's thoughtful reading of nature's signs in a teleological light renders questionable any idea that the reality she moves in is intrinsically chaotic.

The initial description of Phoenix notes a suffusing brilliance, but its meaning remains mysterious. Although her clothing, "a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoetops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket," minimizes her personal presence, "a golden color ran underneath" her skin and "the two knobs of her cheeks were illuminated by a yellow burning under the dark." These carefully observed visual details lure the reader into the immediate presence of Phoenix without disclosing the secret of her journey's purpose. In an essay entitled "Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?" Welty recalled the experience that gave her the story:

One day I saw a solitary old woman like Phoenix. She was walking; I saw her, at middle distance, in a winter country landscape, and watched her slowly make her way across my line of vision. The sight of her made me write the story. ... I brought her up close enough, by imagination, to describe her face, make her present to the eyes, but the full-length figure moving across the winter fields was the indelible one and the image to keep, and the perspective extending into the vanishing distance the true one to hold in mind.

But Welty's fictional description of her heroine does more than bring her before the reader's eyes; by a skillful shift of perspective in the first two sentences, Welty transports the readers, not just from a vantage point of middle distance, but from a "far" distance to the nearness of an observer attending the approach of Phoenix along the path. By this almost imperceptible transposition, Welty quickly frees the reader from a more rationalist and urban interpretive context and inserts him into Phoenix's special world of nature, where she is "coming [not "going," as an objective reader might have expected] along a path through the pinewoods" (emphasis added). The last sensible detail in the description, her emanation of "an odor like copper," almost compels the reader's participation in the scene. Still, the signs and stages of her progress remain, for the reader, ambiguous, as do her "full pocket" and the "red rag" she wears on her head.

Phoenix's journey is along a path somewhat conventional for legendary questers: it goes through the thicket, up a hill and down, past the thorny bush, across the log over the creek, under the barbed-wire fence, through the "maze" of the cornfield, around the mocking scarecrow, over the whispering grass; when she finally reaches "easy going" on a familiar track, she still has to contend with the canine beast and the destructive hunter before she arrives at her goal—"Natchez shining," where Christmas bells ring and "dozens of little black children" whirl about her. Phoenix's responses to each obstacle along her path are not conventional, however; they reveal the imagination of a very unique and patient soul, capable of being fooled and even of fooling herself, but still resourceful enough to learn from her troubles and not just in spite of them.

As signs of her patience and her faith multiply, her comments to herself along the way express a preoccupation with time as a component of her journey. "Sun so high! . . . The time getting all gone here," she says in an early stage. As she bends down to drink from a hidden spring, she says, "Nobody knows who made this well, for it was here when I was born." She tells the hunter, "The time come around." And having achieved her object, she remarks, "We is the only two left in the world .. . He [Phoenix's ill grandson for whom she has travelled to town to get medicine] going to last. .. . I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation."

Parochial though her thought may seem, Phoenix moves the reader to question his own view of history and to expand his vision to the vast sweep, from the beginning to the end, that Phoenix includes in hers. The "well" she drinks from, coeval with her very life (which, she implies, has coexisted with all creation), figures a spiritual resource within Phoenix that is something like Augustinian memory, a faculty enabling the human to know innately more than the intellect can originate or tell. If Phoenix imagines herself as old as the creation and intends to remember her grandson until the resurrection (she implies this by her conviction that she will find him among "all the others" at the end of "enduring time"), then she must intuit her mortal journey as an epitome of time itself. Her essential mode of being was focussed symbolically in the "true" image of her that appeared to the writer's creative imagination: the full-length figure "moving across the winter fields" in a "perspective extending into the vanishing distance." This image suggests Phoenix's imitation of Christ, whose participation in a hidden totality unfolding in history is summarized in words John attributes to him: "I am Alpha and Omega" (Revelation 1:8; 22:13). At each stage of Phoenix's pilgrimage, her personal experience resonates for her with implications extending to and beyond time's borders. This mode Welty calls [in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1979] "the habit of love," which "cuts through confusion and stumbles or contrives its way out of difficulty, it remembers the way even when it forgets, for a dumbfounded moment, its reason for being."

Seeing the evidence of this visionary power as Phoenix overcomes her hardships, the reader is gradually persuaded that her perspective is not limited, at least not so severely as that of her secular foil on her path, the white hunter. In juxtaposition, Phoenix and the hunter personify two primordially opposed positions concerning the human's relation to nature and time:

"On your way home?"

"No sir, I going to town."

"Why, that's too far! That's as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble." He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. "Now you go on home, Granny!"

"I bound to go to town, mister," said Phoenix. "The time come around."

The hunter represents a pragmatism that proudly preys on nature for security against the revolutions of fortune and time; Phoenix, in contrast, embodies love's patience, accepting the conditions time and nature impose, yet transforming them at each turn by a spiritual vision which sees them as mediators of a Divine providence—"watching me the whole time," she says. Even the dead she imagines as vital and present when, in passing old boarded-up cabins, she remarks with a vigorous nod, "I walking in their sleep."

Both the first and the last names of the heroine are significant in "A Worn Path." While "Phoenix" figures her continuous personal renewal, "Jackson" echoes the history of the specific place in which her actions are rooted (Jackson, Mississippi, near the Natchez Trace, named after Andrew Jackson.) Welty comments elsewhere on the important role of place in self-understanding:

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is a sense of direction too. Carried off we might be in spirit, and should be, when we are reading or writing something good; but it is the sense of place going with us still that is the ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home [The Eye of the Story].

Phoenix Jackson's sense of her place, signalled in so many ways, is particularly emphasized by multiple references in the story to her feet, which seem to lead her along the earth almost instinctively to her destination; when she reaches the doctor's office, for example, "her feet knew to stop."

The key to Phoenix's sureness and largeness of vision, paradoxically, is her complete responsibility to and for temporality, her accepting and living profane time proportionate to its cyclic demands on her. She lives it, not in a romantic cult of immediacy, but carefully—in the same way she taps the frozen earth with her cane: probing, listening, seeing, listening. Although her meditative habit can cause her to appear foolish, as when a black dog rolls her in her state of abstraction into a ditch, it is also evidence of her contemplative capacity that sustains her dignity. Her eyesight may be bad, but her memory holds an image of her origin, her path and her goal.

The red rag she wears on her head, then, is, in one perspective, her tiara, signifying her sovereignty over the creatures in her domain. Like a queen, she issues commands and expects obeisance: "Please, missy, will you lace up my shoe?" she says to a city lady whose arms are filled with Christmas packages. In her relations with others, Phoenix's words and instructions are paradigmatic; she is a surprising, lovely lady, imposing heroic tasks, redistributing wealth, and creating manners. Her creativity is a result of her purposeful love and her ability, after long experience, to read people and know what she can expect from them. Although she cannot read letters, she is adept at reading signs in the books of nature and history.

When Phoenix arrives at the doctor's office to obtain the medicine, she reports with a "fixed and ceremonial stiffness," "Here I be." Nearing her journey's end, however, like a quester knight she faces a last crucial test. She must answer a question put to her, but to her consternation it is not the question she expected. The attendant asks her, "What's your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?" All observers of Phoenix, as perhaps the reader during the early stages of her journey, assume a self-serving motive for her actions. The questions of the woman behind the desk, reiterating categorical "you's," catch Phoenix off-guard since she is not in the habit of self-concern. For a moment, as she is encouraged to consider her own troubles instead of those of her grandson, she loses her sense of mission and withdraws into rigid self-preoccupation.

Fortunately, however, a more experienced nurse asks the question, perhaps the only question, that can stir Phoenix from her paralysis: "He isn't dead, is he?" It is her quick emotion responding to the threat in this question that brings forth the meaning hidden previously in her pendulum-like walk and in the "yellow burning" beneath her dark skin. As "a flame of comprehension" flickers across her face, the burning reveals itself to be the old woman's love, now insisting on her grandson's life for all time. "He going to last," she assures all who have ears to hear her voluble recollection of her task. Her unique heroism, this scene makes clear, is in her ability to remember, against odds, the purpose which keeps her true to her path. That it is a path worn by repetition is insignificant in light of the beginning and the end Phoenix remembers for it.

The plot of "A Worn Path," analysis has shown, is not constructed according to the conventional short story model in which an ascending action builds tension, rising climactically to a peripeteia or reversal, followed by a denouement or untying. From the start of Welty's story there is little mystery about Phoenix's eventual success on her journey; a visible constancy in the woman convinces that she will succeed. For the reader, it is her goal that is the mystery until near the story's end—a mystery which probes and examines the reader's own ability to discern, while accompanying Phoenix, the habit of love that impels her mission.

To test the reader, Welty has planted several obstacles to recognition, such as the stereotypical features of Phoenix, common prejudices represented in the hunter and the medical attendant, and Phoenix's amnesia almost making her appear, at times, a confused and foolish old woman. As it turns out, however, while Phoenix remains steadfast in her purpose, the reader of Welty's story is made to experience, at a certain moment of the action, a revaluation of interpretive assumptions and mental habits that may have contributed to misreading. Phoenix's constancy in her role, her indefatigable charity of purpose, inspires in the reader a change of attitude, away from presumption and toward receptivity to new meanings. This kind of reading effect is clearly described by Wolfgang Iser [in "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," New Directions in Literary History, 1974]:

The efficacy of a literary text is brought about by the apparent evocation and subsequent negation of the familiar. What at first seemed to be an affirmation of our assumptions leads to our own rejection of them, thus tending to prepare us for a re-orientation. And it is only when we have outstripped our preconceptions and left the sheller of the familiar that we are in a position to gather new experiences. As the literary text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous formation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, reading reflects the process by which we gain experience.

Iser's phenomenology of reading describes an experience like the action of interpreting Biblical typology (and perhaps reveals the extent to which interpretive procedures borrowed from Biblical exegesis remain a key element in the reading of Western literature): past events first understood under the aspect of law are revisioned, in the illumination of grace, as prefigurations of present events themselves prefiguring a more perfect fulfillment yet to be enjoyed. That Phoenix displays and inspires a faith that reads created signs as prophecy of a divine intention in the world coheres, I believe, with the essentially Christian vision expressed throughout Welty's fiction.

The story of Phoenix does not end, however, at her journey's end, since there is a special reward for her constancy and her readiness to make good use of time. The nickel she wins from the medical attendant is only the profane token of her reward; its sacred element, reminding us of the profounder meaning of the Christmas event whose celebration nears, comes as a gift to her spirit:

Then she gave a tap with her cane on the floor.

"This is what come to me to do," she said. "I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I'll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand."

The gift Phoenix imagines in her responsiveness to a providential prompting in time will be perfect for the child, who is confined to bed with a throat injury that vexes his breathing. If the "little windmill" will not provide literal breeze to help the child's respiration, the windmill's bright revolutions will provide the child a small share in the big turning world and a child's satisfaction in its life. It will be a reflection of that good proportionality between need and provision so clear in the life Phoenix makes for herself.

The windmill, of course, repeats the motif of temporal revolution that structures this story. The journey of Phoenix, which seems to be coextensive with a larger arc of time from creation to resurrection, suggests the circularity of nature, as did the earlier comparison of her to a grandfather clock. Phoenix persists in her temporal journey because she has faith that natural processes disclose a spiritual truth. Strangely, in accepting the limitations of her physical place and time she gains in her imagination a world whose ultimate coordinates are love and eternity. Small as her world may appear, she finds it sufficiently large for her complete enactment of human responsibility.