Farewell To The Southern Lady

As a promising young writer of Southern Renaissance who anchors herself in the South, Eudora Welty witnesses the tremendous social transformations of the South throughout the 20th century, from which she sucks all the fodder for her fiction. Her works, especially the short stories, are considered as the treasure of Southern literature. Welty's works mainly concentrate on the ups and downs of the Southern families and the daily triviality, 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. Being apart from the blindly praise and nostalgic retrospect on the lost cause of some of her contemporaries, Welty turns a sober and self-conscious insight into the South, and further concentrate on how modern Southerners try to break away from the past historical shadow, and face up to the changing New South.This thesis intends to reexamine Southern cultural tradition through tracing back the disintegration of Southern Lady, the representative image identified in the Southern mind with the closed region as a whole. Closely related to the "plantation legend" of ante-bellum South, the Southern Lady has been stereotyped as the angel of family, the complete embodiment of femininity who is supposed to behave in rigid accordance with the conventional sexual morality, the finest productions of masculine art. Tate ascertains that "Southern society ... was ... inclined to see life and history in terms of images rather than according to theory and abstraction." As the most distinguished region whose history is "his story", the South dominated by conservative Planter elites remains the closely-knitted community in which all know their places. Thus the Southern Lady, one important figure in the Southern collective fantasy, is constructed into a revered marble statue without earthly desires and personal pursuit.As for the Southern writers in the 1930s, the emergence of modernism and the decline of traditional values arouse their meditation in the ambivalent emotions toward their beloved homeland. Welty, as the second generation of Southern...