Delta Wedding : the return of Laura to Jackson

Maria Teresa Castilho In “Wandering in the City”, Jan Gretlund says that “in interviews Welty has repeatedly expressed great pleasure in big-city life; but this fondness has not found a voice in her heart. On the contrary, her attitude in fiction is unrelentingly critical of the city, in the Agrarian mode.” (GRETLUND 1994: 78). Although I partly share Gretlund’s point of view, I don’t totally agree with this critic, who has greatly contributed to the critical appraisal of Welty’s work. I think that an understanding of the South in line with what is stated by John Crowe Ransom in “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” emerges from Weltyan fiction. But in my opinion, Eudora Welty is a writer who, and above all in her long fiction seen as a whole, apparently tells simple stories with mainly women (southerners) at their centre. In those stories she revisits the history of the southern frontier, celebrates and recovers a past that was myth and is “old” and she sets it against the present, which is “new” and means change. All this is done with her eyes on the future. She is also the writer whose fiction questions the present of her region as well as its relation with the past. This is the way she thinks of (her) South. Above all, I maintain that Eudora Welty is a writer who follows a path which takes her away from the beliefs of the Agrarians, as she shows signs of embracing the time and the winds of American Progress, which had been invading the South. It is this path that Delta Wedding announces in the return of Laura to fictional Jackson. As the writer mentions to Bill Ferris in an interview, Jackson is itself a city that show signs of all the changes that gradually reached the South: