Settings in Eudora Welty
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Settings in Eudora Welty's stories are their mise-en-scFne, the place where things happen to characters and where characters behave in thus-and-so ways. But the fact that Welty's characters take their personalities, mind-sets, assumptions, speech, and all the rest from the physical place they inhabit is especially important to her fiction because the place--the vicinity of the Natchez Trace, a 400-mile-odd stretch of land running generally southwest to northeast from Natchez, Mississippi, which is on the Mississippi River, to Nashville, Tennessee, and touching the Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers--itself has a personality. One aspect of this has to do with topography. The Trace was a centuries-long trade route for Native Americans. Another is that the Trace cuts a diagonal across Mississippi, which is to say across a big portion of the Deep South. Although eventually abandoned as modern transportation routes were added to the region, the Trace continues to resonate as an idea of a specific region of North America. Wilderness forest and rolling-hill croplands give way to delta swamplands along the river--all punctuated by rural towns and smaller cities that are identified with the American South (Crutchfield 19ff).Eudora Welty is determinedly and decisively a Southern writer, which makes her decisively American but also decisively a recorder and observer of an idiosyncratic environment out of which arise multiple characters whose personae are shaped in part by that environme
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d to be "everywhere" in Welty: "She has always a there and a then, always a they and a you. Idea as such can take a back seat: they're not what literature is about" (294).
Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a native of Oregon or London of any era, let alone 1941 Natchez, saying anything like this: "I declare, I forgot my hair finally got combed and thought it was a stranger behind me" ("Petrified" 19). Such a locution belongs only to a small-town beauty operator in the South who in turn belongs to the South. The integration of place with character is to be noted for what sounds peculiar enough to have been heard in real life and recorded as an index of that reality.
Not all of Welty's narratives are mid-twentieth-century records of life and times. Even so, they take personality from the Natchez Trace setting and rely on that setting for the mood that they create. Critics have noted several interlocking features of setting and narrative in The Robber Bridegroom. It is set in the early 19th century, the earliest years of American expansionism and settlement along the frontier. It utilizes or at least refers to historical persons from those years, notably the quasi-legendary keelboatman Mike Fink, and the dominant story arc h
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Approximate Word count = 2387
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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