Leaving Southern Family Romance To The Past

Eudora Welty grows up in the New South where modern consciousness pervades and is one of eminent American contemporary women writers. As a promising young writer of Southern Renaissance, Welty inherits the tradition of Southern literature, and develops the artistic style and writing technique of William Faulkner. Her works, especially the short stories, are considered as the treasure of Southern literature. Welty's writing is mainly about Southern family, and she intends to expose the great negative influence the Southern culture deals modern Southerners, which enables her critique of Southern culture to have more realistic significance. She doesn't carry on Faulkner's tradition of focusing on describing the tragic fate of young Southerners who are caught in the lost Southern traditional culture and can't free themselves. Instead she is concerned how modern Southerners try to break away from the past historical shadow, and face the changed New South.This thesis intends to reexamine Southern cultural tradition through tracing back the dissolution of Southern family romance. Tate asserted that the "center of the South was the family." The smallest, but perhaps most significant mythmaking unit is the family. Therefore, family romance has become the essential constituent of Southern romance. Closely related to the "plantation legend" of ante-bellum South, the family romance refers to "inter- and intra-family graphing or hierarchical structuring on the basis of myth as perpetuated by the Southern family" Closed geographical environment and backward economic life contribute to the idealized and conservative tendency inherent in the Southern mind, which rejects modern thoughts and civilization. In order to prevent the traditional Southern values from changing, the conservative Southerners try to idealize their homeland and construct the Southern romance. "Every culture lives inside its own dream," Lewis Mumford once observed. The Southern family romance is the South's dream, and it is the collective fantasy that constitutes the values, attitudes, and beliefs that white Southerners expresses in theirattitudes toward the region, the family and the traditional culture. Moreover, Southern family romance has become the essential structure of Southern hierarchical system. As for so many Southern writers of the 1930s, the father and the family romance became the mediating symbols by which they can understand himself and his past. Therefore, the study of the creation and disintegration of family romance, which has become the focus of Southern Renaissance, contributes to have a penetrating perception of the Southern tradition.Welty, as the second generation of Southern Renaissance, has broadly come into contact with the modern ideas, which enables her to treat her homeland—the South in a critical way. Welty gradually makes out the fundamental reason of Southern defeat in the Civil War: the crime and defects of the Southern society, and also that the Southern inherent conservatism and moral decadence cannot confront with the modern industry and civilization, which will inevitably bring about the collapse of Southern traditional society. Therefore Welty makes a comprehensive and deep probing into the Southern family including its life style, moral value and family relationship. Welty intends to probe into Southern family that is the essential institution of the South. Most of her works focus on disintegrating Southern family romance by deeply analyzing the family relationship, thus ultimately enabling the modern Southerners to shake off the restricts of traditional values and facing the changed South.It is clear that the writers since the Southern Renaissance have deeply explored and criticized the Southern culture. This kind of exploration of deeply loved South is actually also a harrowing process of self-analysis. Among the contemporary works, though the trace of tradition is still faintly visible, but most of them have or are trying to cast off the constraints of Southern tradition and historical shadow, and are objectively faced with the developing South, no longer obsessed with the nostalgia to the "heroic" past romance.The Optimist's Daughter, Welty's last novel, was written in the 1960s, which was an era of rejecting the inheritance of the old South—the family romance. And it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Most critics have commented that this novel focuses ondescribing the family relationship. However this work doesn't arouse sufficient attention among the critics in reflecting the theme of historical transformation and social evolution of the South through the disintegration of the family romance. This thesis begins with this point and holds that this work deserves more attention in covering the disintegration of family romance. This thesis also intends to elaborate the awakening process of the heroine's self-consciousness through the disintegration of family romance, and her ultimate shaking off the shattered dream of family romance and facing the changed reality. The main body of this thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 first applies Freud's collective psychoanalysis to clarify the psychological and historical causes bringing about the formation of Southern family romance: the traditional over-idealized Southern mind and the "plantation legend" as the prototype. The family romance is the essential feature of Southern historical and cultural tradition and is the key to the following creation of the McLelva family romance in the novel. The funeral for Judge McKelva provides the soil where the family romance revivifies and operates. An attempt is made to clarify the creating process of family romance from two points of view: the public myth about the McKelvas within the Mount Salus community and the personal myth within the McKelvas. This chapter intends to hint that the family romance as a historical consciousness handed down from Southern tradition is still faintly visible and even working in the modern South.Chapter II discusses the disintegrating process of the McKelva family romance from two aspects: the personal myth and public myth. The dissolution of family romance deals a heavy blow to the heroine's mind: witnessing the "perfect" family romance handed down from history being cruelly destroyed and facing the sharp contrast between the past family myth and present "blundering", the heroine will be hard to avoid ambivalence, helplessness and confusion. Meanwhile, through the disintegration of family romance, Welty holds that modern South and Southern mind are experiencing radically historical transformation.The dissolution of personal myth is showed through the second marriage of Judge McKelva with Fay Wanda, a selfish lower-class woman, and the sequent deathsof family members. Especially Fay's arrival not only destroys Laurel's perfect image of family romance, but also threatens the strict hierarchical system of Mount Salus as a lower-class woman. And the disintegration of public myth is mainly demonstrated through the growing of individualism and misperception about Judge McKelva within the community at the funeral.Chapter III shifts to the reexamination of the past family romance by resorts to memory. Laurel retreats to the past in order to evade her confusion and dissatisfaction to the present reality. Just as Welty mentioned, in her essay " On the Time in Fiction", "Memory is a fundamental part in keeping vitality of life, and it possesses the energy of life and strength of art." However, the heroine isn't lost in memory of past, but reexamine the past via memory and ultimately accept the cruel reality of the disintegration by comprehending the inevitable "blundering" or imperfection. As a modern Southerner, Laurel realizes that the family romance as the by-product of traditional Southern culture will succumb to the passage of time, which shows the preliminary awakening of her self-consciousness.Chapter IV further demonstrates that the heroine, as a Southerner with modern consciousness, achieves a self-renewal and self-consciousness of the present reality. And finally she frees herself from the past memory and decides to return to her own new life in Chicago. Welty argues that Laurel's choosing to live outside her hometown is essential to the novel's theme. Laurel's final release of the breadboard which is symbol of the happy family romance of past, clearly shows that her casting off the constraints of past romance, and also the complete awakening of her self-consciousness.All in all, my study shows that Welty has reexamined and reoriented the traditional Southern family values through the description of the Southern family romance. Laurel, the heroine, isn't obsessed with the fantastic dream the family romance constructs, but makes resorts to memory in order to reexamine her past family. And Laurel gradually realizes the "blundering" and defects her family romance possess itself, which enables her to face the cruel reality of shattered family, not to idealize her parents relationship. The dissolution of Southern family romanceindicates the receding Southern historical consciousness and meanwhile the progress and awakening of self-consciousness, and also that the modern Southern mind and society are going through historically radical changes and transformation. The history of the South becomes a burden in a new way. For most of the writers in the Southern Renaissance, it is the content of the tradition-the family romance-as a historical consciousness which has become burdensome to the modern South and should be thrown off. Family romance of that time still evokes a restrictive influence over the development and progress of young Southerners.This thesis intends to disclose the defects inherent in Southern tradition by discussing Southern family romance which is the essential structure of Southern hierarchical society, and points out the negative influence Southern traditional culture deals on modern Southerners. This thesis introduces the creation and disintegration of the family romance from two aspects: the public myth within the community and the personal myth within the family. Different from the early criticisms on this novel, this study holds that it isn't tied down by the rise and fall of one family, but mainly tends to reflect the historical transformation of Southern traditional society, which fully shows that Welty isn't a writer unconcerned about Southern history and politics as the early critics have commented.