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the optimists daughter essay
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Eudora Welty’s novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, portrays the story of Laurel McKleva coping with the recent loss of her father while also accepting her past. Laurel McKleva, a widow from Chicago, returns to Mississippi to assist her also widowed father, Judge Clint McKleva, when he must undergo an eye surgery for a scratched retina. While dealing with the stress of staying calm and collected for her father, Laurel also tries to deal with her new stepmother Fay. Fay is much younger than Clint and acts like it as well. She is extremely rude and selfish, and shows no concern for Clint in his time of need. Slowly but surely, Clint digresses more each day and eventually passes away. Fay and Laurel made no progress in their relationship and are left in an awkward state after Clint has passed away. Laurel and Fay return together to Mount Salas for Clint’s funeral. Upon her stay in her childhood house, Laurel must make sense of her past and accept the death of her loved ones including her husband and mother. Welty uses themes such as vision, death, and memory to help Laurel to better understand her past in order to move on into her future.
Vision and more importantly lack of vision, gives the reader a deeper sense of the situation at hand. While getting older does come with a weakening vision, for Clint, it also represents his failing sense of reality. Becky, Clint’s first wife is described as a free-loving spirit, which is ironic due to the constant negative description of Fay. Although Laurel tries to diminish it, she is aware of the annoyance that Fay contributes. There is no similarity between Becky and Fay, which is unusual considering the deep love Clint had for Becky. It is uncommon for a person to be blind to a situation because ...
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...s actions and ideas she was unaware of that perplexed her. Laurel had to open her eyes and accept the man her father was by listening and acknowledging the stories told by her father’s friends. In order to see Clint for the man he was and recognize the part of his life that Laurel missed, she has to allow for the truth of the man he was not the man she saw him as.
Clint’s death is not the first death that Laurel has had to cope through; Laurel has also lost her husband and her mother. Because Laurel seems to be surrounded by death, it is hard for her to truly grasp the true meaning of life and death.
Works Cited
Images of Memory in Eudora Welty's the Optimist's Daughter. Contributors: Arnold, Marilyn - Author. Journal title: The Southern Literary Journal. Volume: 14. Issue: 2
Welty, Eudora. The Optimist's Daughter. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
On the actual trip to Bountiful, it was Thelma, the young lady whom Mrs. Watts exchanged memories and confidences that provided a more meaningful companionship that would last long after the trip. When Thelma was gone, it was the country Sheriff who would see through the heart of Mrs. Watts, her long desire to go home to Bountiful. The car ride to the town and the few moments outside the deserted and empty house, would be witnesses to the act of kindness and understanding of the Sheriff towards an old lady, whose only wish was to see for the last time her home in Bountiful.
Although Eudora Alice Welty’s work is sometimes compared to that of Faulkner or Poe. She is by far not as unusual. Throughout her lifetime Welty uncovered the secret of how people treat others. She took a simple subject and turned it into an ongrowing topic. She took the isolation issue and made it aware to her readers. The way she wrote has her readers stopping and thinking about the subject. An underlying message is constantly being weaved throughout the pages of her stories. Eudora Welty showed that, no matter how alone you may feel in a world of people, there is always someone there or something worth fighting to achieve. Whether it is a slave fighting for freedom, a person wanting to committ suicide realizing they will be missed, or even just someone trying to find a place in this world. Therefore isolation is a major influence in Eudora Welty's writing.
Welty, Eudora. "A Worn Path." The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. 142-49.
Eudora Welty’s short story “A Worn Path” emphasizes the unselfish love that inspires courage, sacrifice, and love through her use of symbolism.
In the story A Worn Path, Eudora Welty shows an old woman living in a time period where racial prejudice is rampant and out of control. Phoenix Jackson is a grandmother whose only motivation for living is to nurture her grandson back to health. The strength of love may make people do or say unusual and implausible things. The central idea of this story is that love can empower someone to over come many life-threatening obstacles. The idea is shown when an old woman conquers all odds against her to show her everlasting love for her grandson. Throughout the story Phoenix Jackson has to overcome many types of obstacles that hinder her in her devotion to help her grandson.
Eudora Welty is not merely a brilliant writer, she is a brilliant and gifted storyteller. A product of the South's rich oral tradition, Welty considers the richness of local speech to be one of the greatest gifts that her heritage has to offer (Vande Kieft 9). Southern speech is characterized by talking, listening, and remembering. Welty, a great listener, based many of her stories on bits of dialogue overheard in her everyday life. However, Welty makes the most of the southern propensity for talking. Her stories are rich in dialect and often take the form of dramatic monologues, as in "Why I live at the P.O." and "The Petrified Man."
Skloot, Floyd. “In the Shadow of Memory.” Intersections: An Introduction to the Liberal Arts. Ed. Peggy Fitch. Littleton, MA: Tapestry, 2011. 79-84. Print.
Noelle M. “Symbolism in Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’” Study mode N.P., Oct 2012. Web. 17 Mar 2014.
In “Models for Memory” by Mary Carruthers, the concept of recollection as memory explores how visual memory has the ability to create a place where things can be stored. As in the House of Fame, there are visual storehouses used to compile all of the texts, traditions, and words that the dreamer encounters. For example, the glass temple of Venus acts as a storage place for important texts, such as Dido and the Aeneid. Additionally, the foundation of the House of Fame holds the names of those who have claimed their fame, though their fate is uncertain as it rests in ice. Furthermore, within the House of Fame, spoken and unspoken words are collected and placed into groups, only to be termed by Lady Fame as famous or infamous. Finally, the House of Rumour acts as a visual storehouse, thus providing a place of a visual transformation for truth and untruth to combine and depart out into the world. These models for memory work to showcase how fame functions throughout the House of Fame.
Ferguson, M. (1994). A lot f memory an interview with Jamaica Kincaid. Kenyon Review, 163-188.
In this story, Mrs. Hopewell constantly criticizes the way her daughter looks and acts. Even to her, Joy is not beautiful. For example, O'Connor states that, "Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not" (133). Mrs. Hopewell says this in reference to her daughter's poor attitude. She believes that even though her daughter is not pretty, Joy can compensate for her ugliness in the ways that she interacts with others. However, even Joy's mannerisms prove unsatisfactory to her mother. Mrs. Hopewell thinks that her daughter is rude. Consequently, she feels obligated to offset Joy's poor behavior by being extra hospitable and courteous to visitors. Also, Mrs. Hopewell refuses to take any pride in her daughter, even though Joy has become an extremely accomplished woman by going to college and earning a degree in psychology. As a result, the relationship between Joy and her mother beco...
Isaacs, Neil D.. Life for Phoenix.? The Critical Response to Eudora Welty(tm)s Fiction. ed. Laurie Champion. London: Greenwood, 1994. 37-42.
In Eudora Welty’s, “A Worn Path” Phoenix Jackson went great lengths risking her own life for her grandson, who couldn’t help himself. On her worn path she faced the world with courage. Although she faced difficulty in her early life, her faith remained the same to help those who were dear to her heart. She walk a worn path relentlessly facing obstacles along the way with a mind that is diminishing overtime. Through the problems that she is faced with, she remains humble. She is admirable because considering her old age, weakness and loss of memory, she is determined. Welty’s details of character, symbolism, conflict and theme creates a compelling and fierce Phoenix Jackson. The moral message in this short story is to show the setting and characterizations
Hanson, Carter F. "The Utopian function of memory in Lois Lowry's The Giver." Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 45+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.
Most people are very convinced that they have memories of past experiences because of the event itself or the bigger picture of the experience. According to Ulric Neisser, memories focus on the fact that the events outlined at one level of analysis may be components of other, larger events (Rubin 1). For instance, one will only remember receiving the letter of admission as their memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia. However, people do not realize that it is actually the small details that make up their memories. What make up the memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia are the hours spent on writing essays, the anxiety faced due to fear of not making into the university and the happiness upon hearing your admission into the school; these small details are very important in creating memories of this experience. If people’s minds are preset on merely thinking that memories are the general idea of their experiences, memories become very superficial and people will miss out on what matters most in life. Therefore, in “The Amityville Horror”, Jay Anson deliberately includes small details that are unnecessary in the story to prove that only memory can give meaning to life.