Golden Apples And Sliver Apples--An Analysis Of Female Protagonists In Welty's The Golden Apples

Golden Apples and Sliver Apples An Analysis of Female Protagonists in Welty's The Golden Apples Eudora Welty<1909-1982>, the first woman writer of Southern Letters for nearly forty years, has presented the Southern society something most memorable in her works. She learns from the Southern literary traditions and modernist movement and writes a series of masterpieces. The Golden Apples is one of her most distinguished and experimental works. With unequaled fictional art and with delicate, incisive social perception, she has blended fantasy and realism in her masterpiece and has created a chronological saga of self and collective memory in the twentieth-century South. In Welty's view, the Southern past becomes a culture of memory struggling against modem history and a resource of the recovery of traditionalist qualities values. The contradiction of Welty lies in the contradictions of the Southern Renaissance. Welty avoids writing a deterioration of a big family in the South, but she presents how love among the members of the family pulls them together through all kinds of difficulties. This is a characteristic feature of an agrarian society in the South and is a soil of development of conservatism. Welty criticizes modern mechanical civilization by traditional values and her ideal, which is close to nature, is a harmonious relationship between man and man, and is a traditionally easy-going way of life. This shows Welty's historical consciousness of backward glance and the essence of conservatism. By applying modern literary criticisms, the author analyses Welty's feminine ideas and her complicated attitude in her masterpiece The Golden Apples . In order to discuss the significance and value of Miss Welty's fiction and understand the Southern Renaissance better, this thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter Ⅰ serves as an introduction. It describes a survey of the Southern Renaissance, the influences of the writer's personality and experiences upon her career, the theoretical basis and the critical modes of the thesis. Chapter Ⅱ explores the Southern literary traditions, modernism and their influences on Welty. Then it supplies the readers with a brief introduction to The Golden Apples. Chapter Ⅲ is a detailed discussion on three female protagonists梀irgie Rainey, Miss Eckhart and Cassie Morrison. Chapter Ⅳ focuses on the world of the women in The Golden Apples. It reveals the essence of Welty's conservatism. The civilization of industry and commerce damages the harmony of human relationships. Welty's ideal is against the failure of communication and the failure of understanding in a mechanical society. Chapter Ⅴ deals with the writer's techniques and artistic achievements. The writer deliberately utilizes a series of symbols, images and myths to make the book an integrated whole and to express her view about the modern world. Chapter VI gives the conclusion of the whole thesis.