Death of the Author: Eudora Welty's Canonical Status, The

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Ford, Sarah

A HEADLINE in the 24 July 2001 Washington Post reads, "Eudora Welty, Grand Lady of American Literature; A Southern Writer Whose Themes Were Universal." This obituary's headline portrays a certain idea about Welty and her position in the canon. The particular words used-"Grand Lady," "Southern," and "Universal"-point to a complex operation of codification in which the complexity of an author's life and work are simplified into keywords that point obliquely to the person who is absent. Here Eudora Welty the author becomes a "Grand Lady," a phrase that has connotations of gentility and domesticity, and her large and complex body of work is supposedly captured by the descriptions "Southern" and "Universal." I will examine this particular codification of Welty and its corresponding positioning of her in the canon of American literature as a lady and a Southern writer. Welly's position in the canon is hotly debated, and her recent death will only fuel attempts to find her appropriate resting place. In fact, examining the debate over Welty gives us a glimpse of how the canon works, who gets in, and where.

The writer of the Washington Post obituary, Linton Weeks, shares his view of Welty as a Southern lady with Claudia Roth Pierpont, whose 1998 New Yorker article, "A Perfect Lady: How a shrewd storyteller became the patron saint of Mississippi," has Welty critics on the defensive. Pierpont argues that Welty had the potential to be a great writer but wanted instead to be accepted by her conservative Southern culture. She writes, for example, of Delta Wedding, "This might have been the greatest plantation novel of all had Welty had the courage of Margaret Mitchell's convictions, or the courage to expose the lies and fears that lay beneath them. Instead, she spread fairy dust over the cotton fields and refused to confront, or even explore, any of her pretty characters. She couldn't afford to" (100). Pierpont is not alone among critics in her dismissal of Welty as the "perfect lady." She follows in the footsteps of Diana Trilling, who in a 1946 review of Delta Weddingalso complains about Welly's apparently conservative stance on Southern culture. She claims that Welty "leaves her honest cultural observations in rosy poetic solution exactly because she does not want to precipitate them as moral judgment." Trilling then writes her off as 'just another if more ingenious dreamer on the Southern past" (578). Recent literary critics have certainly been working to counter this view of Welty. Axel Nissen in his review, "Welty Studies at the Millennium," argues that to "get Welty off the porch," i.e., to change the public image of her as a Southern lady, critics need to "begin actively to resist allowing our readings and understandings of Eudora Welty's fiction to be limited by our idea of who we think Welty is as an individual, as a woman, as a Southerner, as a Southern, unmarried lady of the upper-middle class" (318). Other critics share Nissen's particular concern. In the recent collection of essays entitled Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? editor Harriet Pollack argues of Pierpont's article, "This riskily ventured, entirely unjust, and damaging as well as insulting view is not shared by the critics writing here. Yet in its misguided condescension, it makes startlingly, even achingly, clear the need for this collection, and for clarification of the controversial subject of Welty and the political" (18).

Given the polarity of the critics' views on Welty, I wanted to gauge the larger public's view of her as one measurement of her current canonical status. I picked as the object of my study the obituaries published in newspapers at the time of her death. This is admittedly an odd subject for a literary critic, but the obituary proves a useful form for examining the larger public's view of an author because it is in the public space of newspapers instead of specialized literary journals available to laymen only in libraries. Obituaries also do the work of codification in that in the short space of a column or two they attempt to provide a complete picture of a person and his or her work. The timing of this piece of writing is also significant in that with the death of the author, the possibility of future prose, perhaps even prose that would revise earlier views, no longer exists. Because the obituaries are all written and published within a couple of days, they provide a snapshot of the status of the author in the popular imagination. My examination is not meant, then, to be a comprehensive study of canonicity, but simply one view. I am speaking of "Eudora Welty, " the author, in the abstract sense and not Eudora Welty, the person and writer, who will certainly be missed by friends and readers.1 My perspective here is a more distanced look at the author, what Michel Foucault calls the "author-function," which is not the flesh and blood writer but the role the public persona plays in shaping a reader's engagement with a text.2