Lyric strategies in the short fiction of Eudora Welty: 'A Curtain of Green and Other Stories', 'The Wide Net', and 'The Golden Apples'

Eudora Welty proclaimed that "the source of the short story is lyrical," and many critics have commented in passing on the "lyrical" quality of her fiction. Yet rarely have they attempted to explain the nature or cause of her lyricism in any substantive way. This study attempts to define Welty's lyricism and to elucidate her lyric strategies.;Understanding Welty's lyricism and how it operates to create the meaning and effect of her short stories is complicated by the inherent difficulties in defining the 'lyric' and by the common assumption that lyricism implies poetry not prose. In fact, Welty's short fiction embodies and implies the two, primary definitions of lyric: (1) the expression of the state of mind of a speaker and (2) a musical form. Her short stories de-emphasize narrative and call attention to perceptual processes through cadenced highly figurative, musical language. Russian formalist theory illuminates how Welty tries to self-consciously achieve lyrical language as a defamiliarizing device that transforms ordinary experiences into extraordinary ones and removes one from the plane of realism to the sphere of the imagination.;Many of the features associated with Welty's lyricism---her de-centering of plot, her focus on atmosphere, her literariness---were condemned by such early critics as Isaac Rosenfeld and Diana Trilling. In contrast, Robert Penn Warren defended Welty by saying that her fiction should be evaluated on its own terms, not on some preconceived ideas about the short story.;Welty's theories about writing---and in particular, the function of the lyrical---are explored and treated most systematically in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (1978) and One Writer's Beginnings (1984). There, she elaborates on the importance of place in sparking emotional connections, the emphasis on a character's awareness of events rather than the events themselves, the epiphanies that heightened perception can bring, the transforming power of the artist, and the primacy of feeling and intuition in the creative process. In enunciating these principles, Welty echoes the theory in Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In practice, her short stories share much with the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Rather than striving for clarity of literal representation when it comes to fiction, Welty's lyrical style created works that defy easy classification. By calling attention to language itself, she creates an obstructive literariness that, as Viktor Shklovsky explains, destroys habitual modes of thinking and opens the way to "recover the sensation of life...to make one feel things...";Welty's application of romantic principles begins in her first short story collections, A Curtain of Green (1941) and The Wide Net (1943). Even at this early stage in her writing career, one can see that the prominence of the lyrical impulse in close readings of these stories reveals her fascination with the inner life of her characters. Her hieratic style serves as one of the principal instruments for defamiliarizing effects identified specifically in "A Piece of News" and in "The Key" (A Curtain of Green) and in "First Love" and "A Still Moment" (The Wide Net). The Golden Apples (1949), a collection that shows the culmination of her lyric strategies with the foregrounding of allusions to myth, poetry and music is also highlighted. Again, close reading of "Moon Lake" and "The Wanderers" reveals the stylistic and structural devices that remove the stories from the everyday and create their emotional intensity. In The Golden Apples, Welty's lyrical impulse is highly articulated.;In summary, this study explores the implications of Welty's commitment to "the lyrical impulse" and shows how it is a key to understanding her fiction in theory and practice.