William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. 45Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the, . As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. They all carried their classic illustrations. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. 32But I digress, drifting with the memory. Backus, locally known as Beanie. 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love,, (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. . No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth. 180). This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth. Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. bio notes: born: 4/13/1909 died: 7/23/2001 born as: Eudora Welty nationality: USA American short-story writer and novelist whose work is focused with great precision on the regional manners . I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. But they remain children, and act their age. We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. Print. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Neither does Eudora Welty in her autobiography, and she is one of the most southern writers who ever existed. Published in ACM SIGCOMM 83. Vergil. After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). His name was Patrick Duval. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. Print. Me and Benz tight as a pair of shoes. The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. There is Virgil of course, living up to his name (but only in the mind of the reader, we need to remember) in that he is there to guide William on his quest, to keep him on the track, as he says. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. 22There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. It syncs contacts, emails, and events from email tools to Salesforce. Even the trees have bones that crack when lightning strikes. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella, . Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. He walked on. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. Word Count: 385. The pounding is musical, given that Eudora Welty is playing the instrument, but it can be felt all through the story, from the ironic chord of the first three words all the way to the final throb of the last line. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. She is one of Hazels cousins. Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. This paper reviews the history, the goals, the organisation and the components of CSNET (the Computer Science Research Network). I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. May 1942 issue Download PDF From the Archive. It was, however, filled with southerners. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, Collected Stories 176). In the end, they seem happy and content again. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. A reality that is, perhaps, a level or two beneath the conventional mode of realism. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. 28What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. The Pearl River is the prime example in The Wide Net and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. The Wide Net. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. date the date you are citing the material. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. Foots was in charge. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. When he returned to his house, he found Hazel was not there, and she'd left a note saying that she had gone to drown herself in the river and that he'd be sorry for his behavior. It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. Jump-start your essay with our outlining tool to make sure you have all the main points of your essay covered. I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. 2 Virgil of course is Dantes guide in The Divine Comedy through the Inferno and most of Purgatory. Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty, Collected Stories 181). Trans. It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved (Welty. The Internet started off with research into what was then known as packet switching as early as the 1960s. eNotes Editorial. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty, Collected Stories 179). One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. He himself would have been too modest to mention it. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. in Marrs 70-71). Learn about student-produced podcasts by reading and discussing the article "Students and Teachers, From K to 12, Hit the Podcasts.". Other people join in too. We bought ice cream at the same shop even though there were white and colored water fountains outside on opposite sides of the shop. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Print. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. For one thing, I think I would have trouble arguing to myself, or to my wife and family, that I never existed, even as a boy, yet Eudora Welty is writing in the tradition of the modern folk tale. , and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusWhen Eudora Welty read at 92Y on April 22, 1985, it had been 32 y. Beginning as a folktale of the barely possible innocence of a perennial boy with a cow-lick, at a loss and turning in circles, the story right in the middle changes skin, and the boy and the narrative miraculously transform themselves into a one-of-a-kind human triumph. I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). He surely died the poorest judge in all of Florida, but he did leave me his gold Hamilton watch which had been given him when he retired from working on the railroad as a young man in Georgia. Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. Robert Fitzgerald. I am ready to plead, however. Ben Forkner was a Professor of English at the University of Angers where he taught Southern and Irish literature, directed the English Department, and founded the Journal of the Short Story in English. Missisippi Delta in 1923. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. The wide net. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. Twain, Mark. The second half of the story is rich in events, but the outcome is never in doubt. 171). If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original Geographically, I had lived outside as a boy in the steamy heat of southern Florida. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. He was a big man, steady and straight despite his age, and must have been a formidable force in making an arrest. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats.
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