“A Circle Was Ugly Without You”: Rethinking the Politics of Othering in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding
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This essay intervenes in the critical controversy surrounding the apoliticality of Eudora Welty’s early novel Delta Wedding (1946). To achieve this, I read the work as a serious response to the mid 1940s’ political milieu calling for the urgency to confront the problematic of race. Coupled with the novel’s setting in the Deep South, long reputed for its insularity and resistance to modernity, the renowned ambiguity with which the author related to coeval sociopolitical events has solidified the impression that the novel is ahistorical and escapist. In line with recent criticism, which has newly illuminated the novel’s approach to the problem of race, this essay examines how Welty works around her limited view of black lives to depict oppressive structures governing racial relations in the South. Rather than focusing on and construing black characters, this study turns to the novel’s depiction of non-black characters to scrutinize how Delta Wedding reconfigures the problem of race by raising more fundamental questions on ethical relationships with otherness. Through variegated musings on and manifestations of otherness, the novel radically estranges and unsettles accepted conceptual structures of hierarchy. While the novel may be far from tackling the political issue of racial discrimination in the South head-on, it crucially highlights the imperative for change by enabling imaginative ways of engaging with the moral problem of relating to otherness.
Abstract
This essay intervenes in the critical controversy surrounding the apoliticality of Eudora Welty’s early novel Delta Wedding (1946). To achieve this, I read the work as a serious response to the mid 1940s’ political milieu calling for the urgency to confront the problematic of race. Coupled with the novel’s setting in the Deep South, long reputed for its insularity and resistance to modernity, the renowned ambiguity with which the author related to coeval sociopolitical events has solidified the impression that the novel is ahistorical and escapist. In line with recent criticism, which has newly illuminated the novel’s approach to the problem of race, this essay examines how Welty works around her limited view of black lives to depict oppressive structures governing racial relations in the South. Rather than focusing on and construing black characters, this study turns to the novel’s depiction of non-black characters to scrutinize how Delta Wedding reconfigures the problem of race by raising more fundamental questions on ethical relationships with otherness. Through variegated musings on and manifestations of otherness, the novel radically estranges and unsettles accepted conceptual structures of hierarchy. While the novel may be far from tackling the political issue of racial discrimination in the South head-on, it crucially highlights the imperative for change by enabling imaginative ways of engaging with the moral problem of relating to otherness.
참고문헌 (26)
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