Delta Wedding is
Eudora Welty's beautiful 1946 novel about a family wedding. A wedding is one of
those fundamental events in the life of a family that brings (or can bring) all
the members together in a moment of peace and harmony and discord. Welty treats
it as a moment that opens up the deepest consciousness of a family. The wedding
is the superficial topic of this novel. The real topic is more complicated.
I love this novel, but it's deep and detailed and difficult.
I can't claim to have understood it, at least not completely, though I began by
the end to grasp what it is about. Welty is vastly underrated, even though she
continues to show up in lists of the great Southern writers. Some people
dismiss her, I think, because they see her as a genteel relic of an old South
best forgotten. Not so. She was a keen critic of her life and times, not an
apologist. At the same time she was a person of her times, and in writing about
them she uncovered the deeply held beliefs of the mid-century American South.
Welty narrates this novel in an impressionistic, dreamlike,
lyrical style that is more indirect than direct. In some ways we might think of
it is an emotional style of narration, in which we come to know the characters
more as emotional beings than as intellectual ones. My friend Hubert McAlexander
compares Delta Wedding to a Virginia
Woolf novel, and I wonder if he has in mind To
the Lighthouse which also has at its center, at least in the first half, a
woman who is the head of a family.
Delta Wedding is
about the Fairchild family of Shellmound Plantation near a small town called
Fairchild, Mississippi. The Fairchilds seem to be an upper-class family, not
incredibly wealthy, but at least well-off enough to maintain a fairly large
house and farm with servants and hangers on. Their importance to the community
is reflected in the name of the town. We learn a great deal about them, the wars
they have fought and sometimes died in, the people they have married, the
places where they live, the occupations they pursue.
There perhaps are similarities between the family history of
Ellen and Battle Fairchild and Eudora Welty's own family. Ellen Fairchild is
from Virginia, as was Welty's mother. She moved to Mississippi to marry Welty's
father. To a certain extent Ellen feels like an outsider, although after
bearing nine surviving children by the time of the novel that's not a strong
force in her thinking.
The novel opens with a focus on the 9-year-old Laura McRaven,
and at first it seems she is going to be the narrative focus, the center of
consciousness. In fact, although she surfaces frequently, and though we often
are with her when important scenes occur, she's not always present. She's not
the dominating center of the narrative. Instead I would say it's all the
members of the Fairchild family, and perhaps more precisely it's the women
members of the Fairchild family, especially Ellen Fairchild, the mother of the
nine children and the wife of Battle Fairchild. Another key figure is George
Fairchild, brother of Battle. He's much beloved by the family, is regarded as
sensitive and giving and attractive, and also perhaps is a bit too sure of
himself, also perhaps a bit arrogant.
As in her other writings, Welty uses objects and creatures of
the outer world – in this case flowers, plants, and birds – as indicators of
the inner life of her characters, especially of Ellen Fairchild.
The plantation's name, Shellmound, is a reference to Native
American mounds somewhere nearby that signify in a loose way the people who
used to live on the property that the plantation occupies years before white
settlement. Similarly but more directly, the African-Americans who work for the
Fairchild family and who live in the surrounding area are immediate descendants
of the slaves who at the time of the novel had been free only for around 60
years. Probably the Fairchild servants are the children of African-Americans
who were slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. Welty is not directly
concerned with issues of civil rights or the treatment of African-Americans,
but she does make clear the complicated history of the Fairchild family and the
land they live on. African-Americans are important secondary characters: they
observe but do not actively participate in the action. Interestingly, the only
person in the novel who is heard to use racist language is Troy, overseer of Shellmound
and the fiancé of Dabney Fairchild.
Certain plot motifs interweave: one is the impending
marriage of Dabney to Troy. The Fairchild family regards this marriage as
beneath Dabney because Troy is not of their social class. They are polite
enough for the most part not to talk openly about this perceived social inequity,
but it's clearly an issue, and it comes up in subtle ways. Another motif is
that Laura McRaven's mother has died, some nine months before the time of the
novel. Laura’s mother was the sister of Battle Fairchild. And her father, who
seems to be a distant and uninvolved man, has sent her to the Fairchilds to attend
the wedding. Near the end of the novel Ellen Fairchild invites Laura to come
live with the family. It's not clear whether she will decide to do so—she thinks
to herself that she will return to her father. Everyone is aware that Laura's
mother has recently died, but they rarely talk about the fact, though it is
alluded to now and then. We are also told that Laura herself has never wept over
her mother's death though she occasionally thinks about her mother and at one
point she and other members of the Fairchild family go to the cemetery and
visit the Fairchild plot where she is buried.
Another interwoven plot motif, an important one, is the
marriage of George and Robbie. George married Robbie sometime before the time
of the novel. The family also regarded that marriage as beneath George, and
Robbie is conscious of their opinion. She seems to be emotionally unbalanced and
her sense of social inferiority governs her behavior. When we first learn about
George he comes into the Fairchild house and announces that Robbie has run off.
She does appear on the day before the wedding.
Most women in a social class and time such as that occupied
by the Fairchild family would expect to be headed towards marriage. Some of the
younger girls in the novel talk about who they will and won't marry. At one
point Roxie and Laura vow that they will never marry. The fraught marriage of
Robbie and George gives us the darker side of marriage, perhaps suggesting an unsettling
future for Dabney and Troy. Although the marriage of Ellen and her husband Battle
has been productive biologically (she is pregnant with a tenth child at the
time of the novel), it perhaps is not the marriage Ellen would've chosen for
herself, as a scene late in the novel implies. Welty uses marriage to comment
and meditate on the freedom or the lack of freedom of the women in the
Fairchild family and of others to choose their own destinies. It's also a way
of commenting on the fact that those women who are already grown such as Ellen and
who have already entered middle age are not free to determine the course in
life they might take.
Delta Autumn is a
lyrical stream of consciousness tone poem. Other than the fact of the impending
wedding, it has no real plot. Small narrative entanglements previously
commented on work themselves out. The wedding takes place without incident. The
guest who have arrived depart and the family members who don't live at Shellmound
disperse and the story concludes. This novel is about the life of the Fairchild
family, the consciousness of the family as a group together, and as a group of
individuals apart. I had thought this would be a difficult novel to teach. However,
when my Southern literature class read and discussed the novel in the spring of
2017, they found it fascinating.
