a solid wall of too much love
by Douglas Messerli
Eudora Welty Delta Wedding (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1946)
As a group, however, the Fairchilds resist time and, for that matter,
anything outside of themselves. Like the Renfros of Losing Battles, the Fairchilds are one of those large Mississippi
families of Welty’s fiction whose love is boundless to those within the family
structure, but who simultaneously use that active love as a shield to protect
themselves from the world at large. The Fairchilds of Delta Wedding have almost succeeded in realizing Sutpen’s dream in
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! of
creating a cosmos peopled by sons, daughters, uncles, aunts and other relatives
who in their similarity of appearance, ideology, and emotional temper repeat
one another over and over again, insuring in that repetition—in the complete
oneness—a sort of immortality for each member of the clan. In their insularity
death is not observed. In the homes of Shellmound and the Grove, portraits of
the Fairchild great-grandparents, the Delta settlers, hang imposingly, seeming
as alive for Laura McRaven and Robbie Reid as is all the past for the Fairchild
Aunt Shannon, who in her dialogues with the dead confuses past names and events
with present, and for whom
Boys and men, girls
and ladies all, the old and the young of the
Delta kin—even the
dead and the living…—were alike—no gap
opened between
them.
But the Fairchilds are not primarily a family which remembers the past,
for that would entail the recognition of change and of difference, and would
destroy the type of immortality made possible by the uniformity of the family
and its descendants. For the most part the Fairchilds live without a past or a
future. They are a people caught up in present action to such a degree that the
flux of time seems to stand still. As Laura, the newly motherless cousin who comes
to live with them, observes:
They were never too
busy for anything, they were generously and
and almost serious
of the moment: the past (even Laura’s arrival
today was past now)
was a private, dull matter that would be for-
gotten except by
aunts.
Laura from her
earliest memory had heard how they “never
Seemed to change at
all.”
However, as Laura suspects, the
Delta family is not free in its actions (“Laura was certain that they were compelled—their favorite word”), and for
a young girl whose journey she must make mentally to partake of the insular
Fairchild love, this compulsion to act, this uncontrollable whirl of quick and
instant fluctuations which in its obliviousness to time seems to exclude her,
is rather frightening. Her times are not yet severed from the past. As Welty
suggests, unlike the Fairchilds, “Laura remembered everything.” As an outsider
Laura is very much aware of time and the separation from loved ones that time
can cause, a heavy burden of awareness for a nine year old. As she arrives at
the Fairchild home, she vomits, demonstrating her fears of the awesome struggle
to re-enter a world where she is loved. To Laura that love is still
unconditional, a love that she innately understands in the act of her mother’s
creation of her doll Marmion. Late in the novel, she recalls that upon
returning home from a summer vacation she had asked for a doll and her mother
had made it, racing against an approaching storm. The creation was an
immediate, unquestioned act of love which, because it was not dependent upon
time (“the time was the most inconvenient that she could have chosen”),
temporarily defeated time and the separation it causes (the doll was finished
before the first raindrop). Laura recognizes “that the reason she felt so
superior was that she had gotten Marmion the minute she wished for him—it
wasn’t either too soon for her wish or too late” (my reading here is based on
Robert Penn Warren’s essay “The Love and the Separateness in Miss Welty”). But
while her mother sewed the doll, her father wound the clock:
“I always like to know
what time it is,” he said, to which her mother
laughed. The loud
ticks and the hours striking to catch up responded
to hime and rose to
the upper floor.
Time has inevitably won and
separated Laura from love; her mother has died. Laura’s dilemma at the outset
of the novel is, then, very similar to the dilemma Welty poses in her story “A
Still Moment”: “How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never
thought of them….” In order for her to re-enter the loved state, Laura
instinctively recognizes that the Fairchilds must be made to understand time
and separateness as she does. Without that understanding, the Fairchilds—who
live a “life not stopping for a moment in deference to children going to
sleep,” a life which is attuned to the throb of the compress that never stops,
a life in which when the hall clock strikes two it means that it is
eight—cannot give Laura the acceptance she needs; they can only pity her, joke
with her and forgive her for her differences. Even as she rides the train to
the Fairchild home she knows that “when she got there, ‘Poor Laura, little
motherless girl,’ they would all run out and say….” And when, upon Laura’s
arrival, Battle, father to the Fairchild clan, puts a gizzard on her dinner
plate and calls to her, “Now eat it all!” she realizes “it was a joke, his
giving her the gizzard, for it was her mother that loved it and she could not
stand that piece of turkey.” Battle cannot resist teasing Laura for being separate
from her mother. Laura must find a way to make the Fairchilds aware of her
presence as an individual desirous of love; she must find a way to break
through that Fairchild “solid wall of too much love” in order to share the love
from the inside.
Laura’s dilemma is similar to the problem that faces another intruder,
Robbie Reid, who has married Battle’s brother George, who, next to the dead
brother Denis, is the favorite of the Fairchild clan. However, Robbie’s
solution is to draw George away from the intense family love so that she and he
may share in a relationship free from family. She adamantly responds to the
suggestion that it is a difficult process marrying into the Fairchilds, “I
didn’t marry into them! I married
George!” Unlike Laura, who thinks that “it was the boys and the men that
defined that family always,” Robbie believes that it is the Fairchild women who
“rule the roost,” and accordingly it seems to her that all the Fairchild women
wear a “pleading” mask, demanding of their men “small sacrifice by small
sacrifice.” Her desire is to free her husband from that demanding family love
and replace it with
a love that could be
simply beside him—her love. Only she could
hold him against that
grasp, that separating thrust of Fairchild love
that would go on and
on persuading him, comparing him, begging
him, crowing over
him, slighting him, proving to him, sparing him,
comforting him,
deceiving him, confessing and yielding to him, tor-
menting him…those
smiling and not really mysterious ways of the
Fairchilds.
Before the action of the novel begins, Robbie has left George and her
Memphis home because George has given in once again to those Fairchild demands.
The incident which has caused this reaction is central to the whole novel.
Briefly, George, Robbie, and most of Battle’s children are returning to
Shellmound from a Sunday morning of fishing. When they approach a trestle, all
except Robbie decide to walk on it rather than cross under through a creek
dried up for the summer. Robbie, dressed in high heels, protests by sitting
down and refusing to go any further. But the rest continue without her.
Suddenly a train appears, moving toward them. All of the children run from the
tracks except for Maureen, a mentally retarded cousin who lives with the
Fairchilds, who has caught her foot between the railroad ties. George stays to
free her, and together they fall off the trestle moments before the train
successfully stops. Robbie cries out, “George Fairchild, you didn’t do this for
me!”
To Robbie it appears that George has endangered his life unnecessarily
only to affirm his irrevocable commitment to family. Robbie is not selfish or
even jealous as much as she, like the Fairchilds, simply is unable to accept
separateness in love. But unlike the Fairchilds, she is acutely aware of the
separateness because she recognizes the past; she is aware of the time before
her marriage, her poverty-stricken youth, the time before George, when she worked for the Fairchilds in the local
general store where she “spent all of life hearing Fairchild, Fairchild,
Fairchild.” The Fairchild name in her past has instilled within her an
awareness of her own difference. She sees the Fairchild love, accordingly, as a
“separating thrust,” which makes George’s act on the trestle once again
something that pulls him from her. Her leaving George, in her mind, is only a
playing out of what has already occurred.
The Fairchilds, however, unwilling to recognize separateness, cannot
comprehend; they cannot explain Robbie’s departure. For family members such as
Tempe Summers, Battle’s sister who lives in Innverness, Robbie’s act is simply
a “mortification,” an event that reasserts Tempe’s opposition to “outsiders.”
When Ellen, mother to the Shellmound Fairchilds, suggests that Robbie be given
“just a little more time!” Tempe characteristically asks, “Whose side are you
on?” Indeed, because the Fairchilds are always ready to protect the love which
binds them, everyone must do battle. If Laura must battle her way into the
Fairchild hearts, and Robbie must battle to bring George out of the grasp of
their love, the Fairchild children must undergo their own struggles to become
individuals distinct from their family name.
Laura almost immediately perceives that the uniformity and
unchangeableness of the Fairchilds is only a fiction created by the family as a
group:
Laura could see that
they changed every moment. The outside did not
change but the inside
did; an iridescent life was busy within and under
each alikeness.
It is this inner individuality and
the process of coming to terms with it that is really the subject of Delta Wedding. Despite Battle’s
inability to accept time and separateness, despite his inability to accept
change or “anything alone,” his family is growing and changing. The event
around which the novel is centered, the event which brings together all the
family and the intruders, is the wedding of his second eldest daughter, Dabney.
Dabney understands that her upcoming marriage to the Fairchild overseer,
Troy Flavin, hyperbolically speaking, is “killing” her father, but she does not
perceive that in the breaking down of the family unity she may be literally
killing him as well because she is threatening the concept of immorality based
upon unchanging motion of the family in time and place. Dabney’s marriage
preparations represent the beginning of a new time, a time of discovery in
which she looks forward into the future, a time which often is represented in
Welty’s fiction as the time of the dream because it is a time which includes
the real and the imagined world, being and becoming and the present and the
future all in the same moment; grounded in daily action, it is, nonetheless, a
time touched with magic; it is the time of “double vision” where one sees a new
self growing out of the old. Simultaneously, Dabney’s marriage signifies the
beginning of a new place. After the honeymoon she will live in Marmion, the
decayed mansion across the Yazoo River. As Welty writes,
Sometimes, Dabney was not so
sure she was a Fairchild—sometimes
she did not care, that was
it. There were moments of life when it did
not matter who she was—even
where. Something, happiness—with Troy,
but not necessarily, even
the happiness of a fine day—seemed to leap away
from identity as if it were
an old skin, and that she was one of the Fairchilds
was of no more need to her
than the locust shells hanging to the trees
everywhere were to the
singing locusts. What she felt, nobody knew!
It is no wonder that Battle, Tempe
and Aunt Shannon view the whole affair as an impending disaster. Aunt Shannon
expresses that reaction best, again confusing generations but not events:
“Duncan dearie, there’s a scrap of nuisance around here ought to be shot….
You’ll see him. Pinck Summers, he calls himself. Coming courting her.”
Dabney’s vision, however, is no more complete than anyone else’s, for in
devaluing her Fairchild identity she devalues all of the past. Even if they do
not recognize it, the Fairchilds obviously do have a past, but it is evident
that Dabney may be no more sensitive to it in her own marriage than her father
has been in his. This is most clearly demonstrated by her treatment of the
night light given to her as a wedding gift by her aunts, Jim Allen and
Primrose, who inhabit the house at the Grove, a few miles from Shellmound. The
night light also presents a “double vision”; on its surface is the outward
world of “trees, towers, people, windowed houses, a bridge, and a sky full of
clouds and stars and moon and sun” which, when the candle inside is lit, glows
red as if “all on fire, even to the notion of fire which came from the flame
drawing.” It is a perfect gift, for the light, like Laura’s observation of all
the Fairchilds, has two aspects: on the surface it never changes, yet “an
iridescent life” exists within it. It combines the real and the imagined world,
the present and the future, as Dabney does in her new happiness. But most
importantly the light should suggest to Dabney something which she is missing,
the past. As Aunt Primrose says of the light, “...It’s company. That’s what it
is. That little light, it was company as early as I can remember—when Papa and
Mama died.” “As early as I can
remember,” adds Jim Allen, her older sister. The light symbolizes a
completeness of vision that the Fairchild family is missing, for with the
joining of the past, present, and future, the closed family love would be
joined with all of time, with the world at large. Since Dabney, through her
love of someone outside of the family circle, has come already to a “double vision”
of present and future, the potentiality for this transcendent vision is within
her. She need only come to recognize the importance of the past for giving
meaning to the present which shapes her future. But that requires that she come
to terms with pain, loss and death as well, and that is something that few of
the Shellmound Fairchilds have been prepared to do. For Dabney, as for most
young people just beginning a new life, the past seems to have little to do
with her. When she returns home with the gift, she drops the night light upon
seeing Troy, breaking it into pieces, and runs into the house. Only India, her
younger sister, observing the destruction of the light, begins to cry
uncontrollably, comprehending what the act signifies. Dabney will not fulfill
her potential for a more complete vision of life. Like Miranda in Katherine Ann
Porter’s “Old Mortality,” who, assuming that at the very least she can find the
truth about what happens to her, leaves home in “her hopefulness, her
ignorance,” Dabney goes forward blindly and proudly, “her eyes shut against
what was too bright.”
Dabney, however, is not the only one
of the Fairchild children to make new realizations. Shelley, Dabney’s older
sister, seriously questions the family perspective. Through her diary one
discovers her struggling, like Laura and Robbie, with the problem of her
family’s “solid wall of too much love”:
We never wanted to be smart,
one by one, but all together we have a wall,
we are self-sufficient
against people that come knocking, we are solid to
the outside. Does the world
suspect that we are all very private people? I
think one by one we’re all
more lonely than private and more lonely than
self-sufficient.
Shelley comes to perceive what few
in her family can, namely that their wall of family identity does not truly
protect them, that imposing group action upon the world does not prevent the
world from acting upon each member of the family; and she understands the need
for accepting separateness, the necessity for recognizing time which causes
separation:
...we can be got at, hurt,
killed—loved the same way—as things get to us.
All the more us poor people
to be cherished. I feel we should all be
cherished but not all
together in one bunch—separately, but not one to
go unloved for the other
loved.
Shelley’s comprehensions include more than Dabney’s mere acceptance of a
modality of time different from her family’s presentism. Shelly intimates that
she comprehends how time affects
people. She appears to understand, for example, the connection between the past
and the present, the way in which one affects the other. Writing of her Uncle
George’s “trouble” with Robbie, Shelley suggests that Troy, Dabney’s fiancé,
sees that George has something on his mind because Troy is the type of person
who
Gets the smell of someone
studying, as if it were one of the animals in
trouble. Trouble acts up—he
puts it down. But I know, trouble is not
something fresh you never
saw before that is coming just the one time,
but is old, and your
great-aunts not old enough to die yet remember little
hurts for sixty years….
Shelley recognizes that the past is not
completed, finished, dead, but is something living and forceful because it
shapes the present, defines it. In that awareness, Shelley, like Dabney, has a
“double vision,” but she too has difficulty accepting the whole of reality.
Shelley’s vulnerability lies not in the past, but in the future. She is
hurt by having her sister “walk into something” that she (Shelley) dreads. She
dreads the future because, unlike Dabney, she is not blind to it, and she is
troubled by the contradictions that she sees in it. The problem she is faced
with is at the heart of the problem that Welty poses concerning time. If the
past affects the present, if a past hurt gives pain to people in the present,
then one must define people as in time.
However, time separates people from one another; time brings back individual
pain and brings about loss and death. How, then, can people love one another
knowing separateness in time? How can love occur between people separated by
the gulf of time, each with different pasts and, therefore, with different
presents? Shelley cannot conceive of a life which would not “fight the world,”
that would not fight against time by creating its own time-present to stand
opposed to the flowing time of the world, as her family has done. Yet she sees
that she must then ask who is loving and being loved? For without a past the
individual is indefinable and non-existent and there is no one to stop the
world from entering, just as Troy has entered Shellmound, to lead the loved one
away. Shelley’s fears only bring her back to where she has begun, locked in
family love. It is no wonder that she resists the idea of future love and
marriage. She claims that she will “never” marry, and certainly she may not
unless she solves the problem of time and separateness, unless she finds the
“key to the clock” for which she is seen searching early in the novel.
Of the Fairchild children it is perhaps only India who intuitively
resolves the contradictions that trouble Shelley. For India, who at nine is the
same age as Laura, is still able to partake of the amazing childhood
consciousness wherein the family and the outside world exist as one. As Ellen
says of this daughter: “I can’t imagine how India finds out things. ...It’s
just like magic.” And clearly India’s world, like her name, is magical.* India
emotionally comprehends the meaning of the night light, and she imposes that
meaning upon physical space by making a “circle” with her fingers and
“imagining” that she holds the little lamp “filled with the mysterious and
flowing air of night.” The key words are “circle” and “imagination,” for in her
childhood vision India is able to break through the separateness between people
and make of the world a circle in the imagination; by creatively acting and
perceiving, she is able to transcend the barriers of time and is able to
connect the past, present, and future in a “magical” moment wherein all of
Shellmound is joined with the world, wherein each man and woman is linked with
one another. India “finds things out” because through her imagination she is
able to join the world around her and experience its joys and sorrows. In the
imagination, time is not at all a severing force. As India says to Laura upon
seeing her for the first time in a year, “We never did unjoin.” However, India
is yet a child surrounded by love in the present. She has not yet known
separateness.
The Fairchilds are as threatened as Robbie by George’s act of saving
Maureen on the railroad track for it represents another act of separateness.
George has risked his life to save the daughter who, as the child of Denis and
his now-insane wife, is a living symbol of the danger of interaction with the
world outside the family: that fact astounds them. In his willingness to
sacrifice his life for hers George has asserted an individuality separate from
family love which endangers the whole Fairchild concept of life. Because they
recognize this, the Fairchilds attempt to nullify George’s act by repeating
stories about it, by embodying it in family history, turning it into something
at which they can laugh. Throughout the novel the incident is repeated and
referred to again and again (pp. 56-61). Dr. Doolittle, the train’s conductor,
Maureen, and George all become figures in a tall tale instead of people
involved in a dangerous series of events. The Fairchilds purposely refuse to
recognize the happening on the trestle as a series of events because events
occur in time, but a tale—as Welty writes of children’s tales in “Some Notes on
Time in Fiction”—is “not answerable to time.” “The tale is about wishes, and
thus grants a wish itself.” The wish of the Fairchild tale is simply that
George’s individual act be converted into a comedic family story which stands
against difference, change, and time.** George simply took the “path of least
resistance,” beams Battle; “Path George’s taken all his life.” Even George himself
scoffs at Robbie’s fear: “Mr. Doolittle wasn’t going to hit me!” But Robbie
“knew all the time that George was sure Mr. Doolittle was.” And Shelley
perceives that it is only the fact that the engine came to a stop, that it is
only the “tumbling denouement,” that permits her family to laugh. Later, when
the wedding photographer mentions that the train has hit and killed the young
girl seen near Shellmound, one is made to see just how absurd is that family
laughter. Shelley knows this, and she sees that in risking death George has
manifested his respect for individuality. “That is love—I think.” But Shelley’s
perception of George’s love, because of her vision of time, is incomplete. She
recognizes in his risking death that George loves members of the family
individually, that George loves and is devoted to the family which he has known
from birth and, therefore, represents his past, but she cannot understand
George’s connection with the world outside the family, with a time outside what
is already known; again Shelley cannot make sense of the future. She is at a
loss to explain why George “wants”
Robbie Reid. It is, understandably, Dabney who feels sympathetic to this future
aspect of George’s love.
Dabney remembers another incident which involves George from which she
first learned that her uncle loves people individually. She recalls a childhood
occurrence in which George broke up a fight between two Negroes only to ask
their names and release them. As in the occurrence on the train tracks, George
had dangerously taken a chance with his life in wrestling a knife away from one
of the Blacks. Dabney realizes that her cry had been uttered because the act revealed
to her that George was separate, that George was not just a Fairchild, that
“all the Fairchild in her had screamed at his interfering—at his taking
part—caring about anything in the world but them.” Now, thinking back upon that
incident, Dabney comes to understand that George, like herself, loves not just
the Fairchilds, that his love of family is just the surface.
Sweetness then
could be the visible surface of profound depths—
the surface of all
the darkness that might frighten her…. George loved
the world,
something told her suddenly. Not them! Not them in
particular.
Dabney does not comprehend, however,
what loving the world requires. She loves not the world, but Troy, a
representative of the world, and in looking ahead to her marriage with Troy she
does not foresee a separation that would wrench her from family love. Troy is
brought into the Fairchild world, she is not brought into his. Troy invites
only one person to the wedding, Robbie Reid, who has been hiding out from
George at the general store. And, other than himself, the only representatives
of his identity at the affair are the dozen patch-work quilts that his mother
has sent down from the mountains as a wedding gift. In other words, Dabney has
no reason to associate love outside the family with pain, loss, or death.
Separateness to Dabney merely means selfhood, albeit a new selfhood. When Troy
reports that, having sent them all her quilts, his mother will “freeze all
winter,” Dabney responds (referring to a note attached in the quilts), “Your
pretty bride…. How did she know I was pretty?” Dabney has simply passed over
what is perhaps the key to time which Shelley seeks, the full meaning of
George’s act, the secret by which George has come to be able to love the
Fairchilds and the world simultaneously.
Just before the wedding rehearsal, with the whole family and the outside
participants gathered together, George reveals that secret of his love. To
Robbie, who has just returned, George speaks quietly across the room:
I don’t think it
matters what happens to a person, or
what comes….
To me! I speak for
myself…. Something is always coming, you know
that…. I don’t think
it matters so much in the world what. Only,…
I’m damned if I wasn’t
going to stand on that track if I wanted to!
Or will again.
Robbie’s reaction—“But you’re
everything on earth to me”—is so plainly limited that even Tempe realizes that
“Robbie was leaving out every other thing in the world with that thing she
said. That vulgar thing she said!”
For George’s words make clear that his love takes in everything in all of time,
and that includes death—his own death. Because he recognizes his own death,
perceives that “something is always coming,” George is made free to live, to
devalue his own life enough that he can risk and sacrifice it, giving his love in action to the world
at large. Because he accepts exactly what everyone else in the family so fears,
George is able to bridge the gulf between himself and the surrounding world; he
is able to resolve the conflict between man and time. With that bridge gapped,
ultimately, George is able to reintegrate himself with all of mankind and find
a true immorality that lies not in the specific but in the universal family
which includes everyone in all of time.
The Fairchild family mother, Ellen, alone perceives the full
“miraculousness” of George’s act; only she fully comprehends just how amazing
is George’s resolution of love and time. But then Ellen is herself an extraordinary
character. Even after raising the Fairchild family she is still considered by
Tempe to be an “outsider,” is still Battle’s bride from Mitchem Corners,
Virginia. Yet Ellen has borne, nurtured, and loved the Fairchild clan, and if
she is an “outsider” one is convinced that there is really no inside to the
Fairchild front. Ellen loves the world also, and in a novel of family yarns,
the tale which tells of this love shows her to be George’s spiritual mate.
After the wedding, Ellen tells her own tale of the time her mother came from
Virginia to stay with her while she was pregnant with Shelley. When Ellen had
pains the day before the birth, her mother sent for the doctor. But when the
doctor arrived he sneered at her and insisted that Ellen had “all the time in
the world.” The mother decided to cook the doctor such a fine breakfast that
“he wouldn’t dare go,” and, being from Virginia, she cooked him a Virginia
breakfast which meant “everything in creation from batter bread on.”
Inevitably, the doctor became ill from eating; when the time came for the birth
he was incapacitated, and when he was finally roused by the mother, he ended up
putting himself out with gas instead of the patient. Ellen told her mother to
leave the room and had the baby herself (pp. 215-16).
Here again is a story of risk and sacrifice, of a love of living and
people that transcends the fears of pain, loss, and possible death. Ellen, like
George, is able to laugh with the Fairchilds:
They laughed till
the tears stood in their eyes at the foolishness, the
long-vanquished
pain, the absurd prostrations, the birth that wouldn’t
wait, and the
flouting of all in the end. All so handsomely ridiculed
by the delightful
now!
Like George, Ellen is able to see
beyond that ridicule, however, beyond the “delightful now” and recognize that
pain, loss, and death are not just in a tale or even just in the past, but are
also in the future; she knows that since they are inevitable, risk and
sacrifice must always be a part of living and loving as well. Even Robbie
finally comes to see that “things almost never happened, almost never could be,
for one time only! They went back…started over….” Love is a process, not a
static thing. Despite the Fairchild assertion, their pretense, there can be no
“solid wall of too much love” since even “too much love” must exist in the
larger context, within time.
The young outsider, Laura, finally comes to discern this. Despite her
loss in the past, Laura is brought into the Fairchild present and is caught up
in its action by being made a member of the wedding party when Tempe’s
daughter, Lady Clare, comes down with chicken pox. Just before the wedding,
with her cousin Roy, Laura has a vision of the future as George and Ellen
perceive it. Together the children explore Marmion, the decaying mansion across
the Yazoo River in which Dabney will soon begin her married life, and which,
through inheritance, will someday belong to Laura. The children soon discover
that the future which Marmion holds is far more portentous than Dabney forsees.
The mansion is “a green rank world instead of a play house.” Inside, Aunt Studney,
an old Black woman, stands Pandora-like over a bag which Roy believes to
contain his mother’s future babies, and for which Aunt Studney appears to be
“not on the lookout for things to put in, but was watching to keep things from
getting out.”
The Pandora metaphor is extremely suggestive, for in the next moment Roy
climbs to the top floor of the house where he sees “the whole creation,” a
vision which is purchased by pain: upon descending, Roy stoically announces to
Laura that he has been stung by a bee. Laura, meanwhile, has suspected that the
bees have escaped from Aunt Studney’s bag. The connection is evident; the bees
are symbolic of the escaped evils of the world. The vision of creation requires
that one accept pain. Intuiting that the bee sting is connected with the
vision, Laura suddenly wishes that she had also been stung. But she soon
achieves a similar vision as she finds a “treasure” (Ellen’s lost jeweled rose
pin), and she discovers that she must accept worse evils for the vision which
her “treasure” symbolizes: while rowing back to Shellmound, Roy throws her into
the Yazoo (the “River of Death”) where she loses the pin. Laura has thus been
baptized into a new awareness that there are frightening aspects of the future,
that the future holds not just the sublime “happiness” that Dabney anticipates.
Together Roy and Laura have metaphorically experienced pain, loss, and death in
their visions of the world. In glimpsing the vision, moreover, the children
have also seen why the future is worth the risk and sacrifice. What they have
seen is the world in triplicate. As Roy shouts down to Laura from his point of
observation atop Marmion, he shares in a view of the world with three
modalities of time:
I see Troy! I see the
grove—I see Aunt Primrose in her flowers! I
see Papa! I see the whole creation.
He witnesses Troy, the
representative of the outside world and his future brother-in-law, he sees Aunt
Primrose, a closer blood relative who by her age connects him with the past,
and he sees his father, with whom he naturally identifies himself in the present
existence, all in three successive moments which permit him to see “the whole
creation.” When the family, self, and the outside world come together with the
past, present, and future, a vision occurs which transcends all, which presents
the individual’s connection with all the universe in all of time, which is as
magical as India’s imaginary light.
Now that Laura has been shown the vision, she must repeat the process by
which she can come to the vision herself. Since she still seeks love and
acceptance from the Fairchilds, she must act out that newly discovered process
of risk and sacrifice. She risks stealing George’s pipe and presents it to him
as a sacrifice after he has missed it for a time. That gift bridges for Laura
the separation she has previously felt. In that act she perceives herself as
finally joined to the Fairchilds and the world outside her father and past. Had
she India’s imagination, Laura might have known that she had been loved from
the start. Early in the novel Ellen observes that Laura’s wish to be “taken
into their hearts” is “steadier than the vision and that itself kept her from
knowing.” Perhaps it is because, as Ellen suggests, Laura’s father—so bound by
clock time—has “no imagination” that Laura has not previously had the
opportunity to develop her imaginative powers. But by the end of the book, when
Laura is asked to stay on permanently at Shellmound, and Laura and India join
arms around each other’s waist, one sees that imagination and action have been
conjoined, that together they have broken down that Fairchild wall, letting
that love spill out into the world around it, into the “radiant night.”
From George and Ellen, then, it is clear that at least some, if not all,
of the Fairchild children have learned to participate in that awareness of time
which connects them to the universe; it is clear that, unlike their father,
they will live a life attuned to the present, but not exclusively of the present, that they will accept
the flux of time and will partake of the legacy of the past, of the future’s
hope.
___
*One may conjecture that Welty, in the naming of India, was
thinking of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to
India; in that novel, Forster, a writer whom Welty greatly admired, is
concerned with just this magical ability of some people to transcend human
barriers.
**Welty is concerned with this same process to a greater
degree in her Losing Battles.
Washington,
DC, 1973
Reprinted, in different form, from Studies in American Fiction, V (Autumn
1977).
No comments:
Post a Comment