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

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Patterson, Laura Sloan

In essence, Ellis resists the glorification of war as a necessary or "natural" event. Further, he resists the mascnlinization of war and the feminization of peace, as well as the call to support one's country through sexual reproduction within marriage. In the light of Ellis's politics (which were some of the most influential in the sexology movement), Welty's choice of setting her novel in 1923 can be seen as more than a simple desire to avoid the larger, "masculine" trope of war and to concentrate on a smaller, domestic, and intrinsically "peaceful" sphere. Welty's notion that "a sheltered life can be a daring life" (One Writer's Beginnings 114) clearly resonates with Ellis' idea of "daring and endurance" within peace-time. Welty furthers this questioning of wartime sexual and gender politics by her portrayal of Denis's "fineness" and of his death in the war as a wastefid tragedy: "the fineness could look so delicate-nobody could get tireder, fall sicker and more qnickly so, than her men. She thought yet of the other brother Deuis who was dead in France holding this look; from the grave he gave her that look, partly of hurt: 'How could I have been brought like this?'" (28). I,ike Ellis, Welty questions the hyper-masculinity of war, as well as the notion that war breeds fertility and moral and physical strength. For Denis, war castrates rather than bolsters; war fells a sensitive man (one who might have flourished as a "refined" Delta character) and marks him-"brought like this"-as infertile, unable to carry on the family line, despite his heroism.

Beyond his scope as a popular wartime essayist, Ellis ~nade his greatest inroad in the field of sexology with his publication of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a massive seven-volume work collected and published in installments between 1897 and 1928. The work marked two major changes from the field's former conception under the heading ofgynecolog7. First, in his treatise ou sexology, Ellis claims that gynecology goes beyond the purely physical; there is a psychological aspect of the physiological that has been largely ignored. Second, he disdains the current medical training which offers only "an unqualified warning against what would now be called contraception" (v). Here, Ellis notes the newness of even the term "contraception." The remaining content of Ellis's work, including basic notions of anatomy and biology, Freudian "erotic symbols," homosexuality, and "the sexual impulse in youth' was considered somewhat revolutionary in his day, particularly because it was intended to be used in the training of future physicians.

Despite the progressive nature of his work, Ellis did not intend to ofter purely amoral, psychological and biological information and advice, nor did he feel that such was the proper role for the general practitioner. He writes:

Certainly the sexnal impulse may, within limits, be guided and controlled at will to a much greater extent than some are willing to admit. But the sexual impulse is, to an incomparably greater degree than the nutritive impulse, held in certain paths and shut out of other paths, by traditional influences of religion, morality, and social convention. There are a few physicians who hold that these influences should be ignored. The physician has nothing to do with morals or with conventions, they argue; he must consider what is for his patient's good and advise him accordingly, without any regard to moral and conventional dictates. That, however, is a short-sighted course of action which leads to many awkward positions, to all kinds of inconsistencies, not seldom to a greater evil than the evil it is sought to cure. For it is the special characteristic of the sexual impulse, as distinct from the nutritive impulsive, that its normal gratification involves another person. (5)