The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1972)A MIDDLE-AGED daughter, on learning that her father is worried about difficulties with his sight, hurries to New Orleans to join him as he consults an eye specialist.
Some eighteen months earlier, the father, Judge McKelva, who still lives in the old family home in Mississippi, had remarried. His new wife, many years younger, in fact younger than Laurel, the judge's daughter, is also at his side. The ghost of Laurel's mother remains a defining presence and the antagonism between the daughter, herself a war widow, and Fay, her unlikely stepmother, is obvious. Equally apparent is Fay's additional irritation; being trapped inside a doctor's office is not her idea of visiting New Orleans, especially during carnival time.
Initially written in 1969 as a story for the New Yorker, this perceptive tale was brilliantly revised and extended by Welty, winning the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Although there are abundant flourishes of her characteristic social comedy and feel for Southern speech; there are also festering resentments. Many of the exchanges are as sharp and punchy as a stage play. Deceptively rich in Jamesian symbolism, particularly of restraint, it is a dark, ironic study about what happens when a grown child begins to look beyond the known surface of the marriage that produced her.
The narrative begins in the doctor's examination room, a room without windows. The specialist knows the judge and Laurel, but must be introduced to this new wife. Beneath the friendly banter there is also an emerging doctor- patient relationship. It appears that the judge may have scratched the surface of his eye while pruning his late wife's roses. But it is more serious; the damage is inside the eye.
While the doctor is discussing treatments, Fay wails from the sidelines, intent on having no further time wasted on an injury that she believes will heal itself. Welty establishes Fay's petulant nature before looking more closely at the other characters. Fay, half child, half monster, and approaching forty, has infiltrated a closed society. Early in the story when asked by Laurel about her family, she retorts, "None of 'em living. That's why I ever left Texas and came to Mississippi. We may not have had much, out in Texas, but we were always so close. Never had any secrets from each other, like some families." Implicit in her remarks is her hostility towards Laurel. Fay remains abrasive and wary.
Throughout the narrative Welty continually surprises the reader. Having heartily opted for surgery, the judge, the self-proclaimed optimist of the title, slides into an unexpected passivity. His daughter and wife take turns at his hospital bedside but he withdraws further into a paralysing lassitude.
Shrieking "it's my birthday", Fay loses patience and beats him into rising from the bed. Her attack has disastrous results.
Back in Mississippi, family and friends gather in the judge's home and attempt to re-instate Laurel in their old circle. Further layers of truth filter through the small talk. The wake and funeral sequence allow Welty to balance the drama with comedy.
The arrival of Fay's allegedly dead clan, including little Wendell whose curiosity is impossible to contain, not only exposes Fay - it also consolidates Welty's theme that nothing is what it seems. Meanwhile, mourners are recalling a Judge McKelva that bears little resemblance to Laurel's father.
In the closing pages an outstanding, fluidly written narrative becomes Eudora Welty's finest achievement. Left alone in her childhood home, a home soon to be claimed by Fay, Laurel attempts to retrieve the past, remembering her mother's courageous girlhood and the sorrows that followed. She recalls her father lighting a fire, thinking "Then he was young and could do anything."
Another ghost is that of Laurel's dead soldier husband. Into an atmosphere of emotional collapse enters a bird whose frenzied flight through the house terrifies Laurel before releasing her, if not quite fully, from an ambivalent past.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon
