African Americans In The South:Intertextuality Between Eudora Welty’s Photography And Short Stories

Eudora Welty (1909-2001), an outstanding female southern writer and one of the second generation writers of Southern Renaissance, is best known for her short stories, some of which have been regarded as excellent works. However, what deserves our attention is that except for her literary career, Eudora Welty is also famous for her brief but significant photographic contributions. After her college years in Wisconsin, she worked as a photographer and journalist for the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a part of the New Deal economic package to generate jobs for people during the Great Depression. During her travels in Mississippi, she was exposed to a world totally different from her "sheltered life" since her childhood, that is, the world of African Americans. She took a lot of photographs, most of which were eventually included in her book of photos named One Time, One Place:Mississippi in the Depression in1971. These photos are significant in that they provide insights into the South. Besides, Welty’s WPA job assignments provided subjects and backdrops for some of her short stories, although in her first collection of short stories A Curtain of Green and Other Stories there are only four stories involving African Americans.This thesis analyzes the intertextual relations between Eudora Welty’s One Time, One Place and her early short stories in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. From the research, we can see Welty, as a white manipulator, shows the lives of African Americans in the Mississippi areas during the30s and40s, in both her photographs and short stories. Welty also makes some rewritings of the snapshots in her short stories. She adds African Americans’ symbolic roles and their sufferings under the oppressions of the white community. Welty’s choices in her snapshots and fiction reflect her standpoints as a white female manipulator. Although she pays much attention to African Americans in Mississippi, she holds ambivalent attitudes to racism. Besides, humanity writing is prevalent and obvious in both her photos and short stories. However, as a middle-class white woman, Welty has her own limitations, such as stereotyping African Americans and being over-optimistic about the black people’s sufferings and future. To study Eudora Welty’s photography and short stories from the perspective of intertextuality is a meaningful and original attempt in analyzing Welty and her works, especially when we focus on African Americans in the South. It not only enriches researches on Welty and her written and visual works, but also probes into the reality of African Americans in the1930s and Welty’s standpoints as a white female manipulator.