An Archetypal Study On Life, Death And Rebirth In A Curtain Of Green And Other Stories

Eudora Welty is one of the most eminent South American literary figures who enjoy world fame. As a short story writer, she won four Pulitzer Prizes and was welcomed as American’s best-loved short-story writer at that time. Her short stories show great concern on human beings’ inner world and their collective unconscious mind and have an immense influence on American South literature even until today. This is related to her personal experience. She had an elder brother who died young, which made her understand life and death at an early age. Her working experience as a news agent and photographer gave her a unique view which is reflected in her works.Eudora Welty publishes 4 collections of short stories, one novel and many essays and. Among them, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories is the most prominent one which depicts the provisional, closed, unsatisfactory inhabitants in the American South. It contains stories and images that Welty wrote when she traveled across Mississippi as a junior publicity agent from the year 1933 to the year 1936. These short stories either describe the eccentric country life in the American South, or the descending South American Aristocratic life, or the social problem that the North American industrial revolution brings to the south.The theory applied in this thesis is archetypal criticism which is one of the three major critical schools in the 20 th century, along with Psychological Criticism and Marxism. The representatives of this theory are the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Archetype initially means “the original form”. But in the literary critical field, it means the image and experience form in human beings’ collective unconscious mind during thousands of years. The first person who presented the idea of archetype was Plato. With the publication of the British anthropologist James Frazer’s Golden Bough, the theory of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, and Northrop Frye’s work Anatomy of Criticism, archetypal criticism has become one of the most important literary criticisms today.A Curtain of Green and Other Stories analyzes the collective unconscious mind of many characters and interpret their life, death and rebirth. Mrs. Larking in A Curtain of Green grew many green plants in her yard which isolated her from other people. The green plants seemed vigorous. But at the same time, it formed a curtain which symbolized death to her. Marjorie in Flowers for Marjorie was happy to receive the loving roses from her husband. However, the roses were also death signal to her. Bowman in Death of A Traveling Salesperson traveled 14 years for his work. He died on his way without realizing what happiness to him was. He was like Ulysses in the Greek Myth, traveling far to fine his home. Many characters in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories followed the form and event in archetypal criticism. And these forms and events are shared by the entire human race.This thesis is aimed to interpret the unconscious mind of the characters of Eudora Welty from the perspective of archetypal criticism and close-reading technique, offering a clue for readers to understand Eudora Welty’mind and her thought on the human race. The innovation of this thesis lies in that it was the first thesis to interpret A Curtain of Green and Other Stories from the perspective of Archetypal Criticism. Before it, there are many theses analyzing the characters from psychological criticism or other critical technique.This thesis is divided into four chapters. It starts with the study of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and Archetypal Criticism in the first Chapter. The second chapter explores the archetypes in Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories from the perspective of nature archetypes, character archetypes and process archetypes to interpret the Greek mythology and The Bible to trace the eternity. The third chapter discusses the rebirth of theses archetypes. The last chapter reveals the result and conclusion that Eudora Welty’s works is classic and eternal not only because of the unique language style, but also the deep concern of human beings’ life, death and rebirth which enrich the meanings of her works.