Sexing the Domestic: Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and the Sexology Movement

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Patterson, Laura Sloan

This pattern of case histories melded to present a unified whole serves to normalize a variety of sexual behaviors that might be considered "deviant" by conservative twenty-first century standards, as well as criminal in some cases. Dickinson further naturalizes a wide variety of sexual behavior-including premarital sex, "auto-erotism," child-to-child incest, homosexual sex, and celibacy-through his reliance on the sexual history's ability to speak for itself. When the history does not speak for itself, rather than offering medical commentary Dickinson takes the unusual step of supplementing his research with quotations from literary sources. These quotations do not serve as epigraphs or chapter subtitles; rather, they are fully integrated into the text of the case histories, often with little or no introduction and no explanation. In a section of his introduction to The Single Woman entitled "Unity," Dickinson comments on his methodology:

The exposition quotes from poetry, letters, autobiographies and other studies by the single [person]. This is because literary material is from the raw stuff of case histories; literature only projects case material clarified and arranged in design. The violent and casual remarks of the sick about sexual life and desire often differ from poetry only as the latter has superior thought and form.

The juxtaposition of poetry with the most extreme sexual statements and with detailed descriptions of the sexual organs is a way of saying that expression is from one origin; words and muscular movement are from the same impulse; poetry is heart-beat and music is the nervous system. The loose verbiage, cruder sexual manifestations, possible local inflammation and general illness of the patient are best understood if related in source with all human expression. (xvii)

This methodology typifies the interdisciplinary aspects of sexology. In an ideology akin to late twentieth-century postmodernism, Dickinson valorizes the case history, Freudian psychology, a personal letter, and passages of poetry equally in terms of their commentary on human sexuality. Dickinson also remarks that "'Fact' and fiction each properly labeled may even be used in combination. . . . Witnesses of the ideals and standards of behavior of the past are ephemeral and in time fiction about them is the only fact that remains" (xvii). Like Welty (who uses songs, poems, slogans, newspaper articles, advertisements, and other cultural materials in her writings), Dickinson draws on a wide range of cultural artifacts to craft a full picture of feminine sexuality. A further similarity in the methodology of Welty and Dickinson lies in their tendency to meld and fuse narratives together. If the reader is confused about the identity of a given narrator, the border between one narrative and the next, or the boundary between narrative and cultural artifact, then all the better. Because of the necessity of documenting changing conceptions of sexuality, both in medicine and in fiction, new narrative forms are born, and the new types of narratives are made to correspond to the nature of the sexuality they document. The enclosed narrative of earlier twentieth-century Southern domestic novels cannot encapsulate a freely formed, fluid sexuality. The new narrative patterns reflect a sense of changing American mores: specifically, the notion that perhaps one type of sexuality, and even one type of specific sexual practice, is just as valid as another. Yet Dickinson pushes the point even further in his speculation that the literary artifact is a case study; it tells a sexual history that can be said to represent its cultural milieux.