A Study On Cultural Implications Of Body Images In Eudora Welty’s Novels

Eudora Welty(1909-2001)is a much-lauded American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1973.A native of the South,Welty is very concerned with southern society,family and community relations.Meanwhile,having witnessed social changes during her ninety-two-year-long life,Welty tends to focus on the southern transition.In her novels Delta Wedding,Losing Battles,and The Optimist’s Daughter,Welty presents the collision of old and new values as well as southern people’s attitudes towards the social transformation.Employing theories proposed by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,this thesis examines the body images in Welty’s three novels.By interpreting the body images in cultural contexts of the transitional South,it reveals different life trajectories of tradition-defenders,defeated subversives and successful rebels in the face of body discipline,as well as the changing cultural implications behind different body images,and shows Welty’s thinking on social transformation in the South.This thesis consists of five parts.The first chapter provides an introduction to Welty’s life and works,the reviews of her works,as well as Foucault’s and Deleuze’s notions of the body.Chapter Two focuses on the disciplined bodies of tradition-defenders.Clinging to the Old Myth,these people not only voluntarily confine their own minds and bodies,but also fanatically discipline other people’s bodies.By exploring the ways in which they are trapped in social discipline mechanisms,it reveals the oppression of traditional southern thoughts on individual bodies.Chapter Three analyzes defeated subversives’ bodies that fail in resistances against old norms.Although they are aware of the inappropriateness of the old values,these subversives become lost in the resistance to the powerful cultures since they,as insignificant individuals,are neither fully prepared nor supported.By examining how they engage in unproductive struggles against disciplinary norms,it exposes the predicament of bodies caused by deep-rooted traditional values.Chapter Four centers on successful rebels’ bodies without organs.The rebels,in their determined and constant resistances against the traditional ideas,achieve deterritorialization through the "body without organs," thereby escaping the self-enclosed old world.By analyzing how they successfully get rid of restrictions imposed by traditional disciplines on the body,it unveils the revolutionary potential of the body to break through the confinement of traditional norms.Chapter Five is the conclusion.Based on the previous analyses,it concludes that these characters’bodies not only demonstrate their varying attitudes towards old norms and social changes,but also reveal Welty’s own thinking on the social transformation and her echoing with Foucault and Deleuze.Welty criticizes the blind adherence to old values as she exposes the restraint and oppression of the individual body by some traditional norms.By pointing out the way of flight through liberation of the body for people who feel lost in the transitional period,Welty also suggests the necessity of embracing changes for southerners in order to adapt to a world of constant changes,keep pace with the times and promote the development of southern society.