The Grotesque In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green And Other Stories

Eudora Welty is a prominent and prolific southern writer in America,and her works consist of novels,novellas,short story collections and photography collections.Published in 1941 and with high artistic value and elusive quality,A Curtain of Green and Other Stories is her very first short story collection that depicts the life of southerners mainly in Mississippi.Previous studies have concentrated on the characters,narrative strategies and themes of this short story collection;however,few studies have made a thorough analysis of the grotesque and modernity in it,leaving some space for this thesis to explore.This thesis has studied Eudora Welty's presentation of grotesques in her short story collection A Curtain of Green and Other Stories with the help of Geoffrey Harpham's definition of the grotesque,and of Anthony Giddens' theory of modernity.According to Geoffrey Harpham,the grotesque refers to southern people who assume physical deformity or endure psychological misfit,and people who betray the rules or code of behavior of the southern community.Besides,Anthony Giddens explicitly elucidates the social transformations and the consequent social problems in his book The Consequences of Modernity and proposes that a new mode of life brought by modernity has swept away almost all the traditional social orders in an unprecedented way.He further points out that modernity represented by industrialization and commercialization indeed gives rise to some negative ramifications,like alienation and detachment,a sense of loss and disorientation,or other psychological problems in a transitional society.By applying Giddens' theory to the study of the southern grotesque,this thesis discovers that modernity has a profound influence upon southern families,the southern economy,and southern communities,correspondingly bringing about the psychological misfit and the grotesqueness of southern women,southern men and southerners as community members.Therefore,this thesis mainly focuses on three aspects,namely the fall of southern belles,the disorientation of southern men,and the southerners' betrayal of their community.Through a systematic analysis of the relationships among the grotesque,the American south and modernity,and a detailed explanation of modernity's attack upon the family relations,the economic mode and the communal rules in the south,this thesis reaches the conclusion that modernity and its impact upon the south result in the grotesqueness of southerners.Then,this thesis to some extent complements the previous studies of Welty's very first short story collection,and by offering a different perspective to decode the bizarre behaviors of the characters,it also helps to deepen our understanding of the grotesque in Welty's genius writings,and may be conducive to the future studies of this short story collection.