Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart: A Southern Journey
Imagine that while you're traveling in the South, you develop car trouble in the small town of Clay, Mississippi. You find a room at the Beulah Hotel, an old establishment that sits downtown right across the street from the courthouse. After you check in, it becomes clear to you that the Beulah doesn't get many guests these days; in fact, you're the first person even to enter the building in three days. Almost immediately you become the target of Edna Earle Ponder, the hotel's proprietor, who is eager to talk. You try to escape with a book, but Edna Earle will have none of that. She goes so far as to tell you, "And listen; if you read, you'll put your eyes out. Let's just talk." Even at this early stage of the game, you know who's going to do all the talking, don't you?
What's more, Edna Earle lets you know right off the bat that she's "sizing you up," but she then launches into a story that will captivate you and keep you laughing all the while. To be sure, you'll learn a great deal more than you'd expect about Edna Earle, the rest of the Ponder family, and many other inhabitants of Clay.
What a yarn it is that Edna Earle tells in Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart. Her story revolves around the escapades of her Uncle Daniel, but in hearing about him, you'll hear—through Edna Earle's incessant gossip—almost all there is to know about the way the rest of the town behaves.
"[Edna Earle] assumes you want to know everything about everybody in town, and starting on that basis, she pushes you right into the middle of it," Welty says in an interview with Patricia Wheatley (Prenshaw 132).
You'll find yourself caught up in a comical story that gives insight into a way of life of the early-20th century South, told through Welty's rich use of Southern dialect and subtle details about social strata and social nuances in Clay.
Starting with the title and its play on definitions of "heart," you see and hear the story of Edna Earle Ponder's Uncle Daniel, whose main purpose in life seems to be to give things away (as we would say in modern times, "he's all heart"). Through Edna Earle (the name of many Southern women of that generation, taken from the heroine of the popular 19th century book St.
The authors in the story “The Tell Tale Heart” and I Know What You Did Last Summer use a description of the character’s fears and anxiety in
roles that have been available to her (4). While this seems to be a reasonable
She loves to have her “senses stirred,” and her imaginative desires enact these sensations for her when the objects of the desires themselves cannot. Consequently, Edna realizes early in her own life that she is not satisfied with her role as a mother enslaved to humdrum domestic life with a husband to match. However, she does not consciously realize and choose to pursue her own desire for an exciting, passionate, courageous lover until after the novel opens upon one summer vacation at Grand Isle.
May, Charles E. "The Tell-Tale Heart: Overview." Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
how quickly women succumb to their "roles", and how easily people can. be shaped to consider a different and all too meaningless set of morals. The sexy of the sexy. Edna is strategically alienated in the novella so as to be the
Phoenix’s journey is a little long just by walking alone in the middle of the
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Tell-Tale Heart." Skwire, David and Harvey S Wiener. Student's Book of College English: Rhetoric, Reader, Research Guide and Handbook. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2012. 402-405. Print.
Another example of how Edna¡¦s immaturity allows her to mature is when Edna swam like a baby when she went swimming for the first time, and she had over estimated her power. ¡§Once she turned and looked toward the shore, toward the people she had left there. She had not gone any great distance¡Kshe made no mention of her encounter with death and her flash of terror, except to say to her husband, ¡¥I thought I should have perished out there alone.
The thoughts and actions of Edna Pontellier are solely determined by her manic depressive state, her apparent repressed abuse from her childhood, and her abandonment of Christianity. Throughout the novel, the reader gets a clear sense of Edna Pontellier's peculiar mind and her manic depressive state. She is continually plagued by the moment. Her mood shifts from highs to lows show the reader that sadness is perpetually within her. We are told there are days when she "was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with sunlight."
Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path' is a story that emphasizes the natural symbolism of the surroundings. As the story begins, we are introduced to our main character, Phoenix Jackson; she is described as a small, old Negro woman. I believe that the name Eudora Welty gives our main character is very symbolic. The legend of the Phoenix is about a fabled sacred bird of ancient Egyptians. The bird is said to come out of Arabia every 500 years to Heliopolis, where it burned itself on the altar and rose again from its ashes, young and beautiful. Phoenix, the women in the story, represents the myth of the bird because she is described as being elderly and near the end of her life. Phoenix can hardly walk and uses a cane made of an old umbrella to aid her. Her skin is described as old and wrinkly, but yet with a golden color running beneath it 'Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath?(55). Her skin tone represents the golden feathers of the Phoenix and her grandson represents the next Phoenix that will be given life when she dies. The trip to the city to get the medicine represents the mythological trip that the Phoenix takes to the sun to die. Most likely this journey along a worn path through the woods, will be one of her last.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is suspenseful, gory and fearful. The narrator tells the reader about the old man's eye. He talks about how much he dreads the mysterious eye. The eye is a curse to the narrator. The narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is guilty of murder because he knew what he was doing, explained what happened in detail, and was not ashamed of what he did.
Poe, Edgar A. “The Tell-Tale Heart”. American Literature: Volume One. Ed. William E. Cain. New York: Pearson, 2004. 809-813. Print
Her memory of running away from her Father and church when she was a young girl living in Kentucky shows how desperate she is to be free. However, Edna gives up her hopes of freedom for marriage in the hopes that all will fall into place afterwards. Edna’s expectation that marriage and children is proven false when she still is not happy with her life afterwards. She feels that life is worthless and that there should be more to what she is. Edna is not like the other creole mothers; she holds an affection for her children, but it comes and goes. Occasionally she will hold them fiercely to her chest and yet others she will forget them. Her husband disapproves of her lack of maternal instinct and rebukes her when he discovers one of their children, Raoul, sick in his bed. Edna is not alarmed by it, but his harsh words make her burst into tears on the front porch, after he has fallen asleep. Mr. Pontellier does not care about his wife much as a person, only as something he owns. He views everything this way, new lace curtains, glassware, furniture. He is disappointed in his wife because, in his view, she does not function well as a mother. Edna’s lack of
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
In his essay “Race Over” Orlando Patterson spoke of a shift in the underclass that will include more whites or “European Americans” if one wants to use the politically correct vernacular. He wrote of the middle class exodus to gated communities or rebuilt inner cities and an intermingling of the races (Patterson). I believe this to be true not only in the northeast but all over the country due to shrinkage of the middle class. The decimation of the once prosperous backbone of American society cannot be blamed on any one element. I do believe that the contributing factors are: corporate America’s practice of union busting, a poorly educated younger generation and ensuing inadequately skilled workforce, and the real estate housing bubble and subsequent foreclosure scam that followed.