The Marginalized People And The Social Structure Of American South In Delta Wedding

As one of the predominant Southern writers in the twentieth century,Eudora Welty(1909-2001)had dedicated to the thrive of the American Southern Renaissance in the past decades.Her works,especially the short stories mostly fall on the topic of family relationship and its vicissitude,in which way to reveal the great influence on Southern culture brought by the social changes.Delta Wedding(1946)is one of Eudora Welty’s earliest try in novels,which was set against the background of American Southern plantation in 1923.It employs a third-person omniscient narrator who could look into the internal feeling and thoughts of female characters which were hidden beneath,and tells about the events happened before and after Dabney Fairchild and Troy Flavin’s wedding,which vividly shows the life on a typical plantation in South America.This thesis works on the marginalization of Southern women,black people and outsiders and explores the reason of their marginalization which is a more comprehensive research from the perspectives of gender and race.At the same time,through the previous analyses,it will continue to reveal the social structure of the Southern society and its dominant values,which could help understand cultural conflicts caused by different reasons,and provide prompt to face and deal with them.What’s more,it will help find out and decode the messages Welty intended in her works,and hopes to provide more perspectives to rich the research on Southern literature.The thesis includes three parts:Introduction,four chapters of argumentation and conclusion.Introduction consists of a comprehensive introduction to Eudora Welty and the novel in discussion Delta Wedding,literature review,and research task,method and structure of this thesis.The second part is comprised of four chapters,in which the first three analyze and interpret the marginalization of the three groups separately.The second chapter devotes to analyzing the phenomena of the marginalization of Southern women including white and black in different ways with concrete examples both economically and culturally,the next,discuss the cause of it,which in this case is patriarchy.The third chapter works on the marginalization of black people in South including the phenomena and the cause such as racism.The fourth chapter focuses on the outsiders in South about how they were marginalized economically and culturally because of the prejudice received from the society and the family.Drawn from the details in the text,the cause underneath the phenomena will be discusses such as class solidification,exclusiveness of other classes,limitation on the sharing of resources and so on.The first three chapters elaborate on the different ways and causes for their marginalization.The fifth chapter mainly discusses the construction of the social structure and its values in South based on their marginalization,and the value system and ideology that support it.Besides that,the changing factors that would threaten the vested interests and social structure would also be discussed.At last,the attitude shown in the book towards the social structure will be summarized as well.The last part draws the conclusion that patriarchy,racism and localism lead to the marginalization of the three groups.In a male-dominated society,they had lost their social and economic right they deserved.They were pushed to the margin of the society in which way they altogether formed an onion-like social structure.However,under the influence of two wars which are civil war and WWI,the structure was constantly shaken and endangered,and it also leads to the inner struggle and transformation of characters in the novel.