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Genre and Revision:

The Example of Welty's
The Optimist's Daughter
Donna E. lAndry
Princeton University
In an interview in the Washington Post in 1972,justafter the appearance
of The Optimist's Daughter to critical praise, Eudora Welty claimed Jane
Austen as her chief literary mentor. Throughout her career Weltyhas tried to
achieve a measure of literary artistry and of discovering irony imitative of
Austen. That she has succeeded more consistently in achieving these aims in
her many short stories than in her several novels should not be surprising.
Welty herself has admitted that her novels always begin as stories that
somehow grow beyond even long short story proportions. They often begin
with significant images. As Jack says to Judge Moody in Losing Battles,
"Start with her (the purple marten) and you may remember it all in a grand
rush." Generic' theory, however, tells us that the relations between the short
story and the novel are more complicated than mere difference of length
would suggest.
To come back to Austen's influence on Welty we must identify what the
"natural" story writer so admires about the "instinctive" novelist. And in
isolating what Welty admires about Austen, we should recall that Welty has
named other novelists as influences at other times, in other
interviews--Tolstoy and Woolf are as frequently mentioned as any. To
Austen's other admirable qualities, then, we should perhaps add her
portrayals of representative communities within a roughly contemporary
social milieu. Tolstoy and Woolf, in their separate ways, strive for a similar
sense of totality; they try to render the lived experience of characters held
together by birth, proximity, and various forms of socio-economic
dependence. As we know, the focus of the short story is both much narrower
and more individualized. One might say that a story concerns itself with
epistemology, while the greater scope of a novel pushes it into perpetual
confrontation with ontology. In a short story a central consciousness not only
filters but experiences the whole of the narrative. Hence short stories tend to
be about socially detached characters--solitary wanderers, onlookers,
outcasts, brought into discomfitting proximity with a social group which is

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far from seeming their natural home as the organic communities of Austen,
Tolstoy, and in a more vexed way, Woolfs are. In a modern novel we should
expect some degree of dislocation and social conflict in even the most
arcadian representations of so-called organic community. The totality of the
modern novel partake:- of the alienation of the short story. But each aims to
play upon the cC';],entional expectations of a particular audience, and those
audiences can be described partly by the form of the text they will be
receiving. The emphases, even the final pronouncements, which the same
narrative core is capable of delivering if rendered serially in two different
genres can be radically different.
In the case of The Optimist's Daughter, the narrative core was not only
written but published as a story before the writer's need for novelistic
elaboration, for progressively greater claims upon time, space, and
readership, took charge. "The Optimist's Daughter" first appeared as a long
New Yorker story on 15 March, 1969.Its fifty pages dominate the issue. It is
primarily a story about loss as a precondition for a right relation to memory.
Uneasy relations between classes in a small Southern town-indeed, the
difficulty of talking about class at all in such a place-and the sexual
problematic which tends to give Welty's female characters more than they can
graciously put up with while the men blunder complacently along, are
secondary but important themes. Laurel, whose father's optimism is shown to
be a cowardly defense against difficult but hardly unusual circumstances,
comes to know herself as her father's daughter after his death. She has been
something of a blind optimist too. But to see through our own self-delusionsis
to gain power over our powers of observation, at least. The story is
epistemological in both form and concern. Hence, the typical obliquenessand
frequent ellipses of the New Yorker story themselves take on added meaning
in the text. Against the shiny whitespace, punctuated by professional doodles,
smug self-criticismin the form of cartoons, and seductive advertisements,the
distinctive black type itself becomes a sign of the staccato pronouncements
.and labored silenceswe have come to expect of literary representations of the
self-consciousness of modern life.
When we pick up The Optimist's Daughter in the Random House
version, published three years later and longer by ten thousand words, its
textual effect is quite different. Here is substance rather than significant
silence,detailed recreation of a fictiveworld in which one can lose oneselffor
the duration. Novelistictime and space adumbrate each other here. The New
Yorker was for idling with between drinks and dinner. It was designed to
haunt readers by its significant omissions, which readers in their relative
superiority to periodical print might be expected to elaborate, if not
competently fill. The novel by contrast offers completeness, shelter, many
hours of absoprtion in particular revelations about lives as real-seeming as
one's own. The faded-looking dust jacket is ornamented by a sketch of a

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parlor clock sprouting roses-an emblem: the cozy, domestic stoppage of time
from which some inner blossoming can occur. It is a literary novel about
family relationships; somehow the optimist's daughter will achieve heroism
even if, like the ancient Greeks, she keeps close to familiar shores as a means
of navigation in a localized, domesticated odyssey of the American South.
The Fawcett Crest paperback version is no less a novel than the
Random House hardcover, but its literary qualities bow to the demands of
mass marketing. We have been, until now, implicitly speaking of both short
story and novel as realistic in Eric Auerbach's sense of a literary
representation of reality which may be more or less elaborately formalized
but which presents experience as tragic, problematic, not easilycompensated
for by the mere manipulation of conventions, whether aesthetic or social. The
paperback novel, barring macho sexual odysseys, most thrillers, and some
detective fiction, is aimed primarily at an audience of women on the run.
Women who pick up novels in grocery check-out lines and drug stores, at
train and bus stations and airports. Women on the move, with neither time,
money, nor literary inclination to read weightier hardcovers. And they are
women on the run from what many of them perceive as mundane reality,
women escaping into an easily digested version of what they think their lives
ought to be like. On the cover of the Fawcett Crest edition of 1972, an
unexceptionally attractive woman of twenty-five-to-fortytoys with a sprig of
blossom, perhaps mountain laurel. Both toys and caresses, explores and
admires. She does not look at it, however, but glances down and away, raptly,
at the nothingness below the margins of the picture. She is musing, rapt in
memory, while the bloom she holds she offers to the onlooker in spite of
herself. We look on in perpetual anticipation of the man who willmaterialize
from the shadows and seize her. Clearly, we have left realistic conventions
behind, in their tragic and pro blematic essence,and entered the realm of wishfulfillment. In this version, one would expect the heroine to achieve not only
independence from her past but romance. The traditional romantic closure is
marriage, of course.
One may say that Welty had nothing to do with either cover, and that her
novel is far from a typical drugstore romance. When asked about her reasons
for revision, she has said simply that there wasjust more ofthe story to come.
In the same Washington Post interview, she alludes to the autobiographical
roots of the story. Laurel's mother and father have much in common with her
own. Autobiographical material often requires distancing through time and
increasingly detached acts of revision. Perhaps there is that pressure behind
the novelistic transformation the first version was made to undergo. But the
generic change within the narrative must be accounted for, as such, before the
questions of success or failure, improvement or misguided tinkering can be
answered. By rewriting the story using novelistic conventions of scope and
representative social linkage, Welty is aiming for a wider and essentially

different audience from her New Yorker public and so enters the more
"popular" domain of romance. Concession to romantic conventions,
especially those in "women's" fiction, centered in courtship and marriage,
should remind us again of Welty's acknowledged debt to Austen. These
pressures of readerly expectation and generic precedent should be examined
since they may have influenced Welty's reproduction of her text in particular
ways.
By 1972, The Optimist's Daughter has been significantly alteredsignificantly, because in ways that are aligned with some of Welty's principal
preoccupations and artistic strengths. Among these, I would list: first, a
general preference for poetic over posaic techniques; secondly, sociological
commentary which varies in tone between social comedy and satiric criticism;
and finally a continual conflict between emotional dependence and
independence, often cast as a formal contrast between difficult marriages and
the diffidenceof unmarried observers. What the New York versionachievesisa
suggestive rendering of the experience of bereavement and its implications
for a particular personal history. Laurel has lost, successively,her childhood
in Mount Salus through marriage, her husband in war, her mother and father
to illnesses connected with blindness or obstructed sight. Yet, and here is
where Welty's deft but easily exaggerated use of myth comes to bear, she has
remained sealed off from any real comprehension of these losses until her
father's death. Her name becomes meaningful as we see her, Daphne-like,
eluding erotic if not literally sexual experience despite several months of
marriage and imminent middle-age. Coming to terms with her propensity for
self-delusion necessitates a readjustment of vision. The epistemological
nature of the short story makes it something of a riddle for the reader, just as
the experience of epiphany within the story becomes problematic for the
hero. In transforming story into novel, Welty eliminates several important
images which contribute to the New Yorker version's mysterious force. When
Laurel visits her father in the New Orleans hospital on the night of his death,
she notices the design in the corridor tiling for the first time:
Laurel had never noticed the design in the tiling before. To
go and inquire after her father was like walking into a
diagram of perspectives, or taking a test in optical
illusions.
The hallucinatory effect is appropriate to the suppressed hostility of the
hospital scenes as Mardi Gras rages outside and Laurel's tough and selfish
step-mother, Fay, tries to skake Judge McKelva into a quicker recovery and
ends up killing him. The image itself emblematizes the scheme of the narrative
as a whole-a journey of inquiry, an attempt at separating truth from false
seeming. Why Welty substitutes the cliched, "Laurel had never noticed the

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design in the tiling before, likesome clue she would need to follow to get to the
right place," is itself a puzzle. The implied relation between optics and false
optimism, vision and insight, which gives the story metaphoric unity is
eliminated.
But it is no stranger an omission than that of the cemetary angel Laurel
glimpses at her father's burial:

ludicrous attempt to defend her mother's memory against Fay's sneering

resentment:

As Dr. Bolt assumed position Laurel did turn her head to

search the profile of the hill, until among the monuments,
all with their backs to her, she found a certain child angel.
It scattered a star wired to its marble hand; the star had
rusted and looked like a biscuit. She could see from here
only the back heel lifted and the division between its wings,
but she had found a landmark.

Such self-righteousnessin a comic setting-the kitchen-serves to distance us

ironically from Laurel. We may sympathize with her because the story has
been largely told from her point of view. But her moment of awakening, the
story's conventional epiphany, has not magically transformed her into a
perfect, nor even particularly likeable, heroine. She is a woman verging on
middle-age, rather frigid and not especially prone to hysteria, who has just
stopped herself from doing something hysterical and absurd. Meditation
upon this sequence of discrete images-the marble angel the child frozen in
fear of the birds, the more abstract metaphor of ministering angel, among
remembered dead-is required of the reader in order to establish these
patterns as anything more than furtive, even subliminal suggestions of
meaning. Welty, I think-and we shall return to this notion in a moment-is
anticipating the demands of a less sophisticated, more "popular" reader in
revising toward novelisticform. She eliminates metaphorical strategies which
might be lost upon such a reader, or, worse, which might irritate her as
excessively"literary."
Laurel's revulsion from Fay, as from the aggressivefeeding practices of
pigeons and married couples, of course has social as well as sexual origins.
What The Optimist's Daughter in both versions offers is a potted sociologyof
the Deep South. But the New Yorker version's ironic distance between reader
and characters points the grotesquely satiric aspects of the social comedy
toward buried social criticism. We grow steadily more aware of the
underlying irony of the name Mount Salus, Mississippi-is it a mountain of
health or of hypocrisy?The social prejudices of Mount Salus are neverclearer
than when Fay's Texan family, the Chisholms, intrude on Judge McKelva's
funeral, bringing Baptist enthusiasm, emotional frankness, and frontier
humor into Laurel's smug parlor. Fay's grandfather and young nephew
Wendell, especially, have a pastoral superiority to the snubs and slights being
aimed at the Chisholm clan by Mount Salus society. Grandpa Chisholm and
Wendell absorb something of the grotesque comedy of the rest of the family
and let us see them as offering democratic innocence in place of snobbery and
fierce, clannish loyalty in place of Mount Salus' combination of the
repression of deep feeling with petty rivalries. For the progress of generations
in Mount Salus is implicitly viewed as a constant rising from one class to
another. "Class" in Welty's Deep South can be variously determined by
family history, especially in relation to land holdings, and by money,

This is a portenteous scene, and the imagegains in meaning during the story's
climactic sequencewhen Laurel remembers the blockedyears of her childhood
and both grieves for and forgives her parents. She remembers her West
Virginian grandmother feeding birds and encouraging a timid Laurel to feed
them:
Laurel had stood panic-stricken, holding a biscuit in a
frozen gesture of human generosity. . . . But Laurel had
kept the pigeons under eye in their pigeon-house and had
already seen a pair of them sticking their beaks down each
other's throats, gagging each other, eating out of each
other's craws, swallowing down all over again what had
been swallowed before: They were taking turns.
Laurel's revulsion from this spectacle of natural voracity is in keepingwith the
apparent snug complacencyof her widowhood. Her marriage was too short to
be anything but perfect, especially in memory. She recalls it only briefly in
the first version: "Her marriage had been of magical ease, of ease-of brevity
and conclusion, and all belonging to Chicago and not here." She does see
herself as a ministering angel coming to her father's aid and let down by the
unseemly circumstances of his death, so bound up with his undignified,
frankly sexual marriage to Fay: When Laurel tries to wake Fay up on the train
ride to Mount Salus, she responds automatically with "No more." In the first
version, Laurel's silence about her marriage to the unfortunately named
Philip Hand reinforces our sense of her as sexuallyaloof, nearly untouchable.
The intimations of angelism-in Walker Percy's sense of an unbalanced
transcendance of low desires-recur in the first verson when Laurel confronts
the determined vulgarity of Fay at the end of the story. In a lurid serio-comic
scene, Laurel nearly strikes Fay with an old breadboard of her mother's in a

For as long as she could hold the board where she had
raised it, Laurel was on the other side. She was safe on the
side of the ones she honored, remembered; back on the
side of the angels, to whom she belonged.

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education, religion, or even regional ties. In the world of this novel, at least,
New Orleans French society is superior to Mount Salus society, which is
superior to backwoods Mississippi "society," which is marginally more
refined than frontier Texas "society," if indeed society it can be called.
Virginia, a state older and better educated than Mississippi, and, because
Protestant and English in origins rather than Catholic and French, has the
most superior of all. It also borders the feared yet secretly admired-by the
bookish, at least-Yankee states to the north. Here we may remember that
Welty's own father came from Ohio, and her mother from West Virginia. The
best families in Mount Salus appear to be the McKelvas and the Courtlands.
Judge McKelva impressed everyone by marrying a Virginian, Laurel's
mother, who had the shabby-genteel advantage of penurious circumstances,
and, as a result, had had an austere mountain childhood in frontier-pastoral
West Virginia. Thus she represents genuine good-breeding that is without
pretense. Becky's Virginia blood and literacy, now embodied in Laurel, make
the Judge's second marriage to Fay positively sacrilegious, especially at his
age. In fact it renders his own good breeding suspect, despite the generations
of Scots missionaries, ministers, and lawyers in his family tree. We must
ourselves decide whether the Chisholms' claiming of him as their own is true
or not: "Whatever he was, we always knew he was just plain folks."
Having risen from backwoods Mississippi origins to social prominence
in the town in one generation, the Courtlands can now afford to marry into
the foreign exclusivity of New Orleans. Young Dr. Courtland's leap to the
French wifeand the expensive New Orleans medicalpractice is a striking one.
The price of rising has been paid, it would seem, by his sister Miss Adele, the
good-looking, ironical schoolteacher who remains a spinster evidently
because there is no one good enough for her in Mount Salus and no family
means for her to look elsewhere. Laurel's luck consists primarily in having
escaped the stifling safety of Mount Salus. As Miss Adele says: "Nate's
adorable French wife would agree with Laurel perfectly: There's not enough
Mount Salus has to offer a brilliant mind." It makes Laurel laugh but is in one
sense true-Laurel has no intention of staying on in Mississippi longer than
she has to.
The question remains, however, of just what Mount Salus is, or stands
for, and in its portrayal lies another crucial difference between the two
versions. In the New Yorker version, there are rivalries and petty quarrels of
long-standing within the supposedly impenetrable set to which Laurel's
parents used to belong. In the McKelva garden the day after the funeral, old
hostilities emerge-Baptist against Presbyterian, the priggish against the more
broad-minded, belief in crude economic determinism against more liberal
"spiritualized" free will. When Mrs. Bolt, the Presbyterian minister's wife,
leaves the garden, Miss Tennyson chimes in:

"That serviceof his wasn't up to your father, either. To my

notion," Miss Tennyson said to Laurel after she'd gone.
"At the time, I liked it; the catch was in thinking it over
later. It lacked fire. Seemed a letdown," she added
vaguely.
"The Lord had no further use for Clinton on earth.
That's why He took him. You Presbyterians are so much
comfort to each other, and besides you're always right,"
said Miss Adele. "That could hardly be improved on."
"The worst Baptist funeral I ever had to go through
with was the one they gave your very own father. Bar
none," said old Mrs. Whitman, a Presbyterian.
In the second version these conflicts are reduced to a mere "You can't curb a
Baptist" said by the oldest woman in the group and therefore the most
intractable and excusable. Mount Salus is shown to be a social formation
whose functional unity is achieved at great cost and within which various
forms of injustice and just plain meanness are taken for granted. The
Chisholms' point about the superiority of kinship receives strong support
from this scene. Its bitchiness is funny but discomfitting. The ironic distance
imposed between reader and characters in the New Yorker version permits
this uneasiness. The novelistic version, by contrast, is milder, kinder,
sentimentalized. Miss Adele becomes self-critical spokeswoman for the town,
disarming us by admitting to Mount Salus's and her own pettiness and
hypocrisy. "I give myself as bad a mark as anybody," she said. There is
something unsatisfactory about this technique; Miss Adele comes off as
unbelievably large-minded and witty, Mount Salus as too easily excused for
its contemptuous reception of Fay. Most strikingly, sexual jealousy deprived
of its class associations emerges as the principal factor in Fay's failure to elicit
sympathy from the women of Mount Salus. Here, I think, Welty makes
another unfortunate concession to the demands of "women's fiction." Weare
given an implicit equation between Fay's obvious sexuality and the other
women's dislike on some primitive, instinctual level. Once again weare asked
to move from the conventions of social realism to those of romance. The
novel blurs the class prejudices which the short story so glaringly exposes.
The most obvious difference between the two versions, finally,lies in the
obligatory romantic closure that Welty's totalizing and "popular" notion of
the novel imposes. Laurel recalls in commonplace detail her brief marriage to
Philip. The burden which these flatly conventional memories must bear is
precisely that of romantic convention; Laurel's recollection of her perfect
marriage offers, in retrospect, the traditional pattern of courtship and
marriage inherited by the novel from romantic stage comedy. The result is
embarrassingly melodramatic and unconvincing:

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She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding
to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had
found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered
itself, and it began to flow again.
If Phil could have UvedWhat would have been their end, then? Suppose their
marriage had ended like her father and mother's. Or like
her mother's father and mother's? Like"Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!" Phil's voice cried.
She wept for what happened to life.
"I wanted it!" Phil cried. Hisvoicerosewiththe wind in
the night and went around the house and around the
house. It became a roar.
"I wanted it!"
After the frenzied pitch, the final serio-comic encounter with Fay in the
kitchen seems a double deflation. One's sense of the absurd is aggravated by
Welty's making the already clumsy device of the breadboard even more
oversignified, as a gift from Phil to Laurel's mother. The burden of sentiment
is increased, intolerably. In her desire to represent Laurel more fully as a
novelistic heroine and to close the distance betweenher and the reader, Welty
goes too far. She violates her own principal paradox of the impossible, yet
devoutly wished for, reconciliation between love and separateness, to use
Robert Penn Warren's terms. At the risk of arrant sentimentality, we are
asked to believethat in the course of the novel Laurel finds a measure of both,
in accordance with romantic convention. The ironic silences of the New
Yorker version, however, carry more conviction, for its form is generically
better suited to the representation of the narrative's original verdict: Such
reconciliation is possible only in dream. Waking life consists instead of
difficult, though sometimes comic, compromises.
.