The Evolving Of Sense Of Place In Eudora Welty's Short Stories From The 1930s To The 1950s

From the 1930s to the 1950s,the American South witnessed rapid urban expansion,industrialization and nationalization which resulted in the disappearance of the rural South.This historic transformation is termed by Southern historian C.Vann Woodward as the "Bulldozer Revolution",during which the Southern regionalist writer Eudora Welty published three short story collections:A Curtain of Green and Other Stories(1941),The Golden Apples(1949)and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories(1955)..In these three works the evolution of Welty's sense of place and expansion of her vision could be seen as the writer's strategic adjustment as a literary regionalist to the disappearance of regional features.Welty's sense of place concerns itself primarily with the relation between Southerners,between Southerner and rural place and society,as well as place as an aspect of fiction writing.At first Welty,"conscious of borders," pitted the rural South against the industrial and commercial North and advocated the Southern Agrarian values.However with the decline of the rural South Welty revised her original dualistic view and began exploring the complex relationship between Southern rootedness and non-Southern attitudes of individualism,mobility and enterprise,without making clear-cut judgments.At last,faced with the disappearance of the Southern region,Welty chose to celebrate the ever-changing and mysterious nature of reality,accepting and embracing the coexistence and blending of opposites.It is fair to say that during her career Welty's sense of place is a "continuous thread of revelation,"growing more open and sophisticated with time.In a number of reviews,criticisms and her autobiography Welty also discussed the relation between place and fiction and developed a highly original theory of place which has informed this thesis.The accurate reproduction of linguistic features of Southern speech and reflection of Agrarian values in the 1930s make A Curtain of Green and Other Stories a local color fiction.On the other hand Welty maintained a critical distance from the South she intimately knew by portraying the parochial insularity of fellow Southerners.Published about a decade after A Curtain of Green and Other Stories,The Golden Apples examines two generations of Southerners' responses to the disintegration of the traditional Southern community.While "wanderers" leave behind their home place for fulfillment,ordinary southern townsfolk tenaciously defend the old ways and seek to confine the wanderers.The dichotomy between wandering and rootedness is ultimately falsified by the artist protagonist Virgie,who stays connected to the community without forsaking her independent spirit and inner strength.She is at last set free to pursue her art when the constricting community itself has crumbled.The Golden Apples is a finely wrought regional fiction,exploring the complex machinations of the Southern society in a time of change.The motif of "land's end" becomes increasingly significant in Welty's fiction.In"No Place for You,My Love," theme,plot,process of story writing and the genre of regional writing all employ this motif.In the 50s,the geographical rural South has indeed come to its end,leaving the Southern regional fiction more and more irrelevant.Welty took pains to transcend the paradigm of regional writing,realizing that her "real subject" is the ever-changing human relationship and the inscrutable,mysterious reality.She turned "land's end" into a "jumping-off place" by exploring possibilities of place as a fluid and flexible literary device.As she concluded in "Place in Fiction," instead of disowning their heritage(place),it is possible for regional writers to reinvent regional writing by changing their visions.