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Issue 2: March 2006.
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Home > Issue 2: March 2006 > Criticism

Laughing the Way to Social Change: Welty’s Curtain of Green and McPherson’s Elbow Room
by Elizabeth Stark

Separated by race, gender, and some thirty five years, Eudora Welty (b. 1909) and James Alan McPherson (b. 1943) both write within the tradition of American protest fiction, employing comedic techniques to rip the veil of ignorance from their readers’ eyes. McPherson’s characters in Elbow Room deal with racist America, and many of his characters maintain DuBoisian double-consciousness[1] As a black writer, McPherson himself has this double consciousness, and in stories such as “Problems of Art” and “A Loaf of Bread” he shows how and why a racist system produces the DuBoisian consciousness in the oppressed. Aesthetically, Welty espouses a similar view in her essay “Place in Fiction.” She writes:

The writer must accurately choose, combine, superimpose upon, blot out, shake up, alter the outside world for one absolute purpose, the good of the story. To do this, he is always seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world’s, a fact that he constantly comprehends; and he works best at a state of constant and subtle and unfooled reference between the two. It is his clear intention – his passion, I should say – to make the reader see only one of the pictures – the author’s – under the pleasing illusion that it is the world’s; this enormity is the accomplishment of a good story.[2]

A writer must be able to clearly distinguish between reality and fantasy, between the story and real life if she is going to manipulate real world conditions to achieve her vision. Welty’s concept of double vision mirrors the DuBoisian one – just as black people must view themselves through the eyes of their racist white oppressors, so too must writers view their stories with the eye of a reader.[3] Unlike DuBoisian double consciousness, Welty’s double vision, the writer’s double vision, may be voluntarily acquired.

In Welty’s A Curtain of Green, and McPherson’s Elbow Room, both writers project their double vision into their fiction by highlighting the difference between social ideology and practice in American society, using humor to call attention to this gap. Both employ the same comedic tactics – garrulous narrators, isolated individuals who experience reversal, and satirical dialectics where a character must choose between two undesirable outcomes, to pleasurably expose this distance to the audience. Welty and McPherson criticize social norms through comedy, which implies that their writing is an impetus to social change. Here, their vision diverges. As Merill Skaggs has argued, Welty frames some of her stories so that, “the detached position of the reader, […] actually enhances the comic perspective as it permits the reader to feel exempt from the censure of, yet included in the observation of, the satirical exploration of human frailty and absurdity.”[4] Welty’s primary purpose is the amusement of the reader, amusement in which social critique plays an important and instructive role. In contrast, McPherson uses comedy to compel the reader to reconsider pre-conceived notions, by inviting readers to enter into and complete his stories. Welty calls attention to social problems, and McPherson builds upon the techniques of his predecessor, calling for revolution.

The loquacious characters of Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” and McPherson’s “The Story of a Dead Man,” provide a good overview of where their comic visions converge. In “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Sister’s humorous exaggeration undercuts the very serious business of leaving her family to live at the Post Office. As critic Diana Pingatore states, “The autonomy Sister claims for herself as mistress of her own fate is juxtaposed against the isolation to which she has subjected herself in order to assert her hard-won independence.”[5] Ironically, Sister demonstrates her independence by leaving her family but fails to recognize her profound connection to them. Without her family, Sister has no story to tell – she may have left her family, but she can’t stop talking about them. Her unreliable narration reveals her isolation to the reader, even though she is not explicitly aware of it herself.

In “The Story of a Dead Man,” the narrator’s illusions about himself are similarly hidden. Also framed as a defense of action, an account of what “really” happened, William, an upwardly mobile black young man, feels he must compete with the colorful narration of his ne’er do well cousin, Billy Renfro. Billy clothes himself in the illusion of myth – he tells tall tales about his lost eye and his gunshot wounds. As a consequence, his identity is protean and adapts to the situation and listener at hand. William, on the other hand, wants to live the American dream, and feels he must hide the poor, southern part of his heritage that Billy represents – he dresses Billy up in a nice suit for dinner with his in-laws. When Billy pulls off the suit and tells a shady anecdote, William must choose between Billy and his in-laws. William’s identity is not adaptive – he cannot expand his sense of self enough to contain his poor southern roots and his yuppie pretensions at the same time. As McPherson critic Herman Beavers puts it, “The story’s reversal […] centers, then, on the ways upward mobility leads to the collapse of identity rather than to the discovery and assertion of self-awareness.”[6] William and Billy are doubles – William’s intellectualism is as much a show as Billy’s colorful anecdotes.

Welty and McPherson use isolated individuals – Welty’s might be called “southern grotesques,” while McPherson’s are upwardly mobile, disenfranchised black men – to criticize the society which has isolated them through comic reversal. For example, Welty’s “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and McPherson’s “Problems of Art” present disenfranchised black people that must confront inaccurate representations of themselves. The joke of “Keela,” is that Keela is neither outcast, Indian, nor maiden, but a club-footed black midget, Little Lee Roy, whom the circus entrapped and forced to eat live chickens. Welty frames the story as a journey of discovery for Steve, a young white man who took tickets for the Keela sideshow, unaware that the circus had entrapped Little Lee Roy, and who has now sought him out to make amends. Steve did not begin feeling bad about the exhibit until a local man proved that Little Lee Roy was a sentient human being, actions that reveal the barbarity of a racist establishment that is willing to chain up anyone who is “other” to make money. Furthermore, Steve must live with his complicity in the enslavement of another person. Critic Alfred Appel writes that in “Keela,” “conventional patterns are reversed and seemingly defenseless characters become superior to the tangibly superior characters, who are not revealed to be truly unfortunate, due to a more basic failure or deficiency in themselves.”[7] Little Lee Roy may not be smart, rich, or normative, but at least he’s morally pure.

Appel’s comment also applies to Mary Farragot and Corliss Milford in McPherson’s story “Problems of Art.” Mary Farragot, accused of drunk driving, is convinced she needs a white attorney, Corliss Milford, to represent her in court and translate her black experience to one that the white court system can understand. The story opens with Corliss waiting in Mrs. Farragot’s apartment, and McPherson uses this setting to highlight his preconceptions about Mary. McPherson writes, “the neatness [of Mrs. Farragot’s living room] did no damage to the image of Mrs. Farragot he [Corliss] had assembled, even before visiting her home.”[8] Corliss identifies the room with Mrs. Farragot. The portrait of Jesus seems “cheap” (95) and conveys “the poverty of the artist’s imagination,” so too does Corliss view Mary as a poor pious teetotaler. The end of the story produces an ironic twist – Corliss discovers that Mary “don’t drink nothin’ but Maker’s Mark” (116). This information disrupts Corliss’ stereotypical picture of Mary as an upright black church woman, and in doing so reveals that although Corliss thought he was in charge of her trial, that in fact Mary has manipulated him through his racist ideology. Corliss’ basic deficiency is his racist naiveté, just as Steve’s is his complicity with racism (perhaps also racist naiveté). Little Lee Roy has the moral high ground while Mary Farragot has the upper hand.

The visions of “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and “Problems of Art,” diverge with their ending twists. Both endings add depth and complexity to the stories. In the ending to “Keela,” Little Lee Roy tells his children that two white men came to the house and talked to him “about de ole times when I use to be wid de circus.”[9] Little Lee Roy’s speech rounds out his character by informing the reader that he is a family man and that the circus is part of his life but not its totality. This assertion contrasts with Steve’s equation of Little Lee Roy and exploitation, thus forcing the reader past the rather two dimensional realization that “exploitation is wrong” into “exploitation is not the most important fact about Little Lee Roy.” Critic Carol Manning interprets Little Lee Roy’s words as a mechanism for coping with racism. She writes, “Little Lee Roy does not simply glamorize or exaggerate the past […] he, in fact, remolds the past, blocking out its horror.”[10] Little Lee Roy may revise his history, but within the story this is his only power – ultimately, he, Keela, depends upon the humanity of white men to live. In contrast, Mary Farragot adapts to racism – she figures out how to manipulate people through their own racism, through careful control of her own image. Little Lee Roy, as Keela, is an art object for the white establishment, an object of gaze, but Mary Farragot manages to be an artist.

In “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,” Welty uses satire to expose and undermine Christian propriety. The three ladies care for Lily Daw, a mentally deficient young woman in small town Mississippi – Aimee Slocum, the spinster postmistress, Mrs. Watts, a fat widow, and Mrs. Carson, the preacher’s wife, who rescued Lily from a father who “tried to cut her head off with the butcher knife” (7), and have cared for her ever since. The inherent violence of the patriarchal rule, suggested by Lily’s father, is symbolically balanced and mediated by the multiplicity of women, who care for Lily physically (they give her food, clothing, and shelter) and spiritually (they take her to church and baptize her).

However, if the patriarchal rule is one of violence, then in Welty’s view the women’s rule is one of meaningless propriety – neither is in Lily’s best interest. At the beginning of the story, the three women receive news that the Ellisville institution has accepted Lily, but their plan goes awry when they learn that Lily has become engaged to a circus xylophone player. At first they believe Lily is making it up, but their alarm becomes palpable as soon as they learn Lily’s virginity is at stake:

“Did he – did he do anything to you?” In the long run, it was still only Mrs. Watts who could take charge.

“Oh, yes’m,” said Lily. […]

“What?” demanded Aimee Slocum, rising up and tottering before her scream. “What she called out in the hall.”

“Don’t ask her what,” said Mrs. Carson, coming up behind. “Tell me, Lily – just yes or no – are you the same as you were?”

“He had a red coat,” said Lily graciously (11).

The ladies urgently want to know if the xylophone player took advantage of Lily, but instead of asking her about it in simple terms that she is capable of understanding, they use the euphemisms of propriety. To the reader, the potential miscommunication amuses – the ladies assume the worst, but they don’t recognize that Lily may not understand what they are asking – their extreme worry is potentially a needless worry. Later, Mrs. Carson states that the xylophone player “was after Lily’s body alone and he wouldn’t ever in this world make the poor little thing happy, even if we went out and forced him to marry her like he ought – at the point of a gun” (12). Mrs. Carson’s speech presents a bleak view of marriage for a preacher’s wife – she envisions Lily’s marriage, and perhaps all marriages, not as ones of affection and happiness, but as shotgun weddings. As Appel writes, “they [the trio] not only patronize Lily and fail to understand her real needs, but manipulate her in a way that denies her humanity. She has become the vessel into which all their sexual repressions are channeled.”[11] Mrs. Carson is out to preserve propriety, not to ensure Lily’s happiness.

Lily’s ultimate options – institutionalization or marriage, also suggest a critique of male power on Welty’s view. Women who are not useful to the patriarchal order, women who are not marriageable, may be safely marginalized, stashed out of sight at an institution, are treated as insane by the dominant power structure. Lily’s three ladies may not represent women’s rule at all, but rather women’s accommodation of the male patriarchy – after all, they force Lily to become currency within the patriarchy when they push her into a hasty marriage with a man who does not know her well, and who does not seem to realize she is feeble minded. Whether “Lily Daw” presents a woman’s world gone wrong, or patriarchal accommodation, Lily’s choices of mental institution or the institution of marriage are unsatisfactory ones. Lily may cheerfully accept either option, but Welty’s satirical tone suggests that she is neither feeble minded, nor convinced that the choice is a necessary one.

Similarly, in “A Sense of Story,” McPherson uses dichotomy to lay bare the racism inherent in the legal system. The prosecution and defense rely on competing racial stereotypes during Robert Charles’ trail for the murder of his white employer, Frank Johnson, a murder Robert has confessed to. The prosecution’s picture of Robert Charles states that he was “a loner” (235), “an employee whose talent does not match his ambition” (240), who acted “like he thought they thought they was something better than black and white, and he already had it” (245). This view of Charles as a shiftless, uppity black man is a stereotype. In addition, the prosecution valorizes Frank Johnson, Charles’ deceased boss. Johnson had “love in his heart for everyone in the world” (237) and suggested that the repair shop owner “add a black or two to the crew” (237). Beavers nicely summarizes the prosecution’s view: “the prosecution’s narrative agenda rests on the illusion of white paternalism and Robert Charles’ ungrateful response.”[12] The defense’s case is hardly less racist. The defense lawyer, Mr. Grant, paints the defendant as “an illiterate Southern black, socialized in an environment of violence, who possesses a single skill” (239). This is the dark joke of the story, that within the courtroom where he is supposed to receive “blind justice,” Robert Charles can only be a stereotype. Charles attempts to disrupt this dichotomy when he interrupts his own attorney during the summation to reiterate his confession. Beavers insightfully writes, “what Charles’s ‘outburst’ is intended to stave off, is the reconfiguration of the black working body into a fragmented object.”[13] In speaking out of turn, Charles refuses to participate in the legal farce that offers the judge and jury either an ungrateful beneficiary of white paternalism, or an ignorant black man, socialized to kill.

McPherson’s framing of “A Sense of Story” invites the reader into the narration to pass judgment on Charles and on the legal system. McPherson frames the story with a judge, who selects and reviews portions of the transcript in search of the “sense of story” that will help him to pass judgment. The judge is a reader who wades through the narrative to get a complete chain of events. Any reader of this story must do the same thing, must become the judge of the events as they unfold. The story cobbled together from the two accounts of Charles is one of Frank Johnson exploiting Robert Charles’ labor, denying him personal dignity, and stealing his idea for a new engine lubricant. The reader judges the story, may disagree with the judge in the story, and in doing so is forced to judge the legal system, is forced, perhaps, to concede that there are some crimes not appropriate to be tried in a courtroom, is forced to conclude that judges are subjective individuals and that, sometimes, the court system is not just. In this respect McPherson’s writing radically departs from Welty’s. Where Welty is content to reveal unsavory truths about the social structure, McPherson invites the audience into the story, asks participation as a means to instigating the social change he desires. Welty’s writing reflects moral disapproval of a strong-willed, but privileged middle class white woman, where McPherson’s invitation to the audience reflects a man deeply and personally affected by racism

*********

[1] Derives from W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois writes, “the Negro is […] born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (1903) Bartleby Online, <http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html> 10 December, 2005.

[2] Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” qtd. in Suzanne Marrs, One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002) 16.

[3] It might be argued that Welty also has female double vision, that Welty writes from the position of “other” within a white patriarchy, just as McPherson is also “othered” by his blackness.

[4] Merrill Skaggs’ position, as described by Diana R. Pingatore, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 7.

[5] Pingatore 73.

[6] Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995) 60.

[7] Alfred Appel, Jr., A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1965) 38.

[8] James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room (New York: Fawcett, 1975) 94. Future references to this book will be made in text, by page number only.

[9] Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968) 88. Future references to this book will be made in text, by page number only.

[10] Carol S. Manning, With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985) 72.

[11] Appel 45.

[12] Beavers 219.

[13] Beavers 220.

Works Cited

Appel, Alfred. Jr. A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1965) 38.

Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels Into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Bartleby Online. <http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html> 10 December, 2005.

Manning, Carol S. With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985.

Marrs, Suzanne. One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002.

McPherson, James Alan. Elbow Room. New York: Fawcett, 1975.

Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Welty, Eudora. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt, 1968.