A Sprawling Tale of a Southern Wedding

A sprawling, messy, and affectionate story unfolds as a white southern family hosts a 1920s wedding in the Mississippi Delta. The narrative is filled with Welty's lush descriptive passages that draw the reader in and make them feel as if they are part of the scene. For example, "It was a soft day, brimming with the light of afternoon. The gold mass of the distant shade trees seemed to dance, to sway, under the plum-colored sky. On either side of their horses' feet the cotton twinkled like stars."

The wedding action takes place over just a few days, but Welty manages to pack a tremendous amount of family history and character study into those few days. She captures the cruelty and thoughtlessness that can exist within a family, but also records the considerable caring. However, her glancing mention of black characters is a flaw in this 1946 book, as she refuses to take a more honest look at that aspect of life in the Delta.

Nine-year-old cousin Laura, who attends the family celebration as a guest, craves the family togetherness like a drug. "The Fairchilds' movements were quick and on the instant, and that made you wonder, are they free? Laura was certain that they were compelled - their favorite word." The family's eccentricities, hopeless idealism, persistent belief in myth and magic, and unmovable sense of place in the Delta all add to the charm of the story. Each white character is deftly drawn and captivating, such as the slight and delicate mother who seems almost too fragile for life. I read the book as much for the beautiful pictures it painted as for the story itself.

I truly adored this book.

Welty's prose is one-of-a-kind, filled with nuances that draw you in and break your heart simultaneously. It has a distinct southern charm that is palpable on every page.

Although not a great deal occurs in terms of the plot, her writing has an uncanny ability to push the story forward, using metaphors and similes in a masterful way.

Surprisingly, it is also really hilarious at times. This book had such an impact on me that it made me dream of moving to a farm, baking delicious pies, and having a large group of children to dress up and celebrate with.

However, this is not at all what I envision for myself in real life. :)

This book was not my favorite.

You follow around a large family named the Fairchild's who live in the Mississippi Delta. The story seems to lack a clear direction, jumping from one event to another without a strong主线.

While the writing was descriptive, which is something I look for in a book, it wasn't enough to hold my attention.

I picked it up for a second time, hoping to give it another try, but unfortunately, this time wasn't much better.

The characters didn't seem fully developed, and I had a hard time connecting with them.

Maybe if you are really into Southern Literature and enjoy reading about the lives of large families in the South, you might like this book.

But for me, it just didn't hit the mark.

[A book completely out of the ordinary. I recommend looking for it in the library.]

The novel describes the life of the prosperous Fairchild family during the week preceding the wedding of seventeen-year-old Dabney and the days immediately following, in September '23. In this span of time, very few actual events occur. What interests Welty are rather the characters: she immerses them in a protected microcosm, separated from everything else, almost ecstatic, and observes them living. You won't find the fury and turmoil of Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor (who had read Welty and included her among 'the best Southern writers'): here the currents, the vortices, the backwashes have a smaller diameter, they are all internal to the characters, caressing their conscience, digging while remaining gentle. Welty manages to tell all this - among peaches in spirit, hyacinth bulbs, hair ribbons, and extremely fragile lampshades - without ever being maudlin and instead managing to avoid the rigidity or frenzy of the tiniest gestures by giving a circular movement to the narration: the centrifugal and centripetal forces from/towards the great family of the 'portentous Fairchild' and more gently from/towards the Delta; the continuous return to the pivotal episode of the train; the genealogy (less intricate than those of Faulkner!) that weighs on the living and the living who speak with the dead of the Civil War, as if they were present there. In short, an excellent novel.

Eudora Welty is truly one of my heroes.

I deeply admire the fact that her remarkable work emerged from her quiet life, which she lived almost entirely in Jackson, Mississippi.

Take, for example, "Delta Wedding." It is a homely yet shocking novel that delves into the life of a Southern family.

The setting of this novel, a farm in western Mississippi known as "the Delta," is so vividly and richly drawn that it makes me feel as if I can physically sense the atmosphere.

The details are so precise and the descriptions so evocative that I am transported into that world, experiencing the joys and sorrows of the characters along with them.

Eudora Welty's ability to bring this setting to life is a testament to her extraordinary talent as a writer.

Her work not only provides a fascinating glimpse into the Southern way of life but also explores universal themes of love, family, and identity.

She has left an indelible mark on the literary world, and her novels continue to inspire and captivate readers to this day.

I have an intense love for this book. I have read it no less than four times, yet I still find myself not fully grasping its entirety. However, on a visceral level, it is pure pleasure.

I embarked on a journey to Mississippi, visiting Eudora Welty's house, her grave, and the banks of the Yazoo River, all in an attempt to capture the essence of her writing. The story intricately weaves around the Fairchild family in the days preceding the second-oldest teenage daughter's wedding to a significantly older man, who also happens to be the white working-class overseer of their cotton plantation. It not only tells the tales of the present-day commotion but also delves into the family's history of both sadness and joy.

The humidity is so palpable that it seems to coat the air. The land and the houses are as much characters as the people themselves. The racism depicted is truly startling. And Welty's ethereal prose has the remarkable ability to capture what I envision as the essence of the old South like no other writer. Any moment spent inside or outside the minds of these characters is an absolute delight.

You can discover a family tree that I created here. There are numerous characters with many of the same names, and the Fairchilds expect you to keep track of them, as they do. They couldn't care less if you become confused.

Finally, the audiobook narration by Sally Darling is simply enchanting. It is truly gorgeous and adds another layer of beauty to this already captivating story.

Eudora Welty undoubtedly has a remarkable gift for words.

She has an extraordinary ability to capture fleeting moments and breathe life into them through the power of the written word.

However, one area where she seems to struggle is in crafting a story that flows seamlessly.

Perhaps she should have focused her talents on writing poetry, where the emphasis is more on the beauty and rhythm of language.

Leaving the realm of prose to those who are more adept at writing simple and engaging dialog.

In this way, she could have truly shone and made a greater impact with her unique writing style.

Nonetheless, her work still holds value and offers insights into the human experience through her masterful use of language.

This book truly resonates with me on numerous levels.

The Fairchild's story is almost identical to my own family's. Delta Wedding is set in the 1923 South, essentially signifying the end of plantation days, with the long-term impacts of Reconstruction taking their toll.

The heart of the tale is the event of a Fairchild daughter, Daphne, and her impending marriage to the plantation overseer.

For me, the exquisitely detailed daily interactions, the introduction of the automobile, the family size, the names, the surroundings, the seasonal changes, the food... all evoke many memories.

It's much like dusting off one of my old family photo albums and having the past come alive.

The size of the family, my grandmother always dressed in a dress and heels, her hair styled in the Gibson manner, a fresh flower tucked behind her ear.

Family names for me, like Aunt Pallen, Uncle Gentry, Uncle G.P. (Gabriel Pleasant), Uncle Hardin, Aunt Sister, etc.

The early 20's marked the end of our family plantation. They transitioned from growing crops to operating a turpentine factory, then to bankruptcy... and finally moved to Pasadena, Ca. All of them.

Eudora Welty definitely has the magic. Her words transcend time. I listened to this story as an audio book, and the reader made the experience even more intense for me.

The Story Of Shellmound

I have recently been engrossed in reading some long and ambitious novels that strive, with varying degrees of success, to encapsulate a vast historical era or place. Simultaneously, I have also delved into novels that are radically distinct in style and scope. These novels focus on small scenes, discrete places, times, and characters, and endeavor to develop them. In the words of the poet George Oppen, such novels "write the great world small". Among the latter type of novels are those of Eudora Welty (1909 - 2001).

Welty spent her entire life in Jackson, Mississippi. In her five novels and numerous short stories, she wrote about places she knew intimately. Her novels unfold gradually into works of significance. Overall, I find this type of novel, with its restricted scope, more successful than the larger type.

Welty's second novel, "Delta Wedding", originated from a short story titled "The Delta Cousins" that was initially rejected by three magazines. She expanded the story into a novel with the working title, "Shellmound", after the Delta plantation where most of the story takes place. "Delta Wedding" first appeared serialized in "The Atlantic Monthly" and was published as a novel in 1946.

The book tells the seemingly simple story of a large, close-knit family, the Fairchilds, their plantation, Shellmound, near Fairchilds, Mississippi, and the wedding of 17-year-old Dabney Fairchild to the 34-year-old overseer of the plantation, Troy Flavin. The story is set over approximately one week in September 1923. It unfolds slowly and deliberately as Welty painstakingly describes the plantation, the Delta fields, the Yazoo River, the town of Fairchilds, the wedding and its elaborate preparations, the Yellow Dog train, and the Fairchilds themselves, as well as their relationships with family members and others.

Much of the story is told through the eyes of nine-year-old Laura McRaven, whose recently deceased mother was a Fairchild. As the book begins, Laura travels on the Yellow Dog from Jackson to attend Dabney's wedding. She is unaware at the time that the Fairchilds are considering asking her to live with them at Shellmound. However, Laura is not the sole focus of the novel. As the story progresses, many members of the large Fairchild family are closely described, and many of them speak in their own voices.

Although many stories and people are developed in the book, the most interesting member of the Fairchild family is George, the younger brother of Battle Fairchild. Battle lives on Shellmound with his wife Ellen, from Virginia, and their many children, including Dabney, the second-oldest daughter. Ellen is pregnant again as the wedding takes place. Battle's brother George is a lawyer who lives in Memphis with his wife, Robbie. The Fairchilds tend to look down on Robbie due to her background and have never fully accepted her. Similarly, the Fairchilds have some dissatisfaction with Troy due to his status as their overseer, his "slowness", and his origin in the Mississippi hills, outside the Delta. Thus, when George comes to Shellmound to participate in Dabney's wedding, Robbie has briefly left him. The incident that led to Robbie's departure occurred two weeks earlier when, on a fishing trip, the family carelessly walked on a right-of-way trestle of the Yellow Dog. The train came while feeble-minded Maureen, the only daughter of Dennis Fairchild, was trapped on the trestle. The free-spirited Dennis was a family hero, killed in World War I. George rescued Maureen, and fortunately, the Yellow Dog stopped just in time. Robbie was jealous of George's apparent devotion to the family at her expense. However, she knows of George's love and reminds the family that "he begged me" to marry.

Welty portrays George as different from the other members of the Fairchild family and describes him through the eyes of other family members. When George Fairchild is first introduced, we see him through Dabney's eyes: "She saw Uncle George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for that butterfly inside his sleepy body. It was very strange but she had felt it. She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then -- that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made a sort of house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny." A few pages later, Dabney expands her understanding of George: "George loved the world, something told her suddenly. Not them! Not them in particular."

As the story develops, George, with his wisdom, warmth, impulsiveness, and ability to live in and respond to the world around him, becomes, for me, the dominant presence in this book. George's ability to see value in the ordinary world of the everyday mirrors Welty's writing, as she piles detail upon detail in telling her story. The details somehow manage to show how a seemingly mundane story of a wedding and a place has a human, and even almost metaphysical, significance.

"Delta Wedding" is a slow-paced book that requires patience to read. It features many characters in a relatively short space. The Delta and its people are described with love and care. For all its simplicity, this is a difficult book due to Welty's presentation of her material from multiple points of view. Welty goes beyond simple factual descriptions to invest the book with a sense that life is unique and precious in finding love and meaning in the everyday.

Robin Friedman

In "Delta Wedding", Eudora Welty employs multiple female perspectives to explore the hidden meanings and peripheries of life on a Mississippi Delta plantation in the early 1920s.

The novel's surface details the preparations for Dabney's wedding and the associated minor dramas. However, the deeper narrative unfolds within and is presented through the eyes, minds, and hearts of the women, namely Ellen, Laura, Shelley, Dabney, and Robbie. Their collective thoughts form a complex web of interconnected observations, unfulfilled desires, past memories, and closely held concerns, which contrast with the sequential and relatively formulaic events in the world around them.

The fun, gallantry, action, violence, and honoring of heroic ancestors are what the reader "sees", while the novel's message is what the reader "hears" when listening closely to the women's inner voices. Although these voices often clash and contradict, they ultimately emerge from within and below, revealing that the surface events and seemingly important things in their world are distractions. The essence of life lies in what runs through the mind and spirit. Status, heroes, land, and pride do not hold a family together; rather, it is the spiritual connection that creates and sustains a family.

Several passages in the novel express the women's longing for a deeper connection with their family members. Dabney, after receiving a night light from her aunts, wishes she could reach out to them on a deeper level. Ellen loves her family but desires a more profound connection and awareness among them. Laura attempts to find acceptance among the Delta Fairchilds, longing for a connection to replace the loss of her mother. Shelley, the oldest daughter, writes in her journal about the loneliness and the need for individual cherishing within the family.

George Fairchild is a central figure for the novel's main female protagonists. Each of them sees something in him that sets him apart from the other Fairchild men. He is a complex paradox, capable of tenderness and withdrawal, deep love and improper behavior. Despite his contradictions, George is the kind of man that the women cherish and love. Ellen realizes her connection with George is deeper than friendship, and Shelley annotates in her journal about her expectations and fears regarding George. Laura, in her childish romantic love, wishes to rescue George from a burning Shellmound. Robbie's love for George is the most intense and possessive, and she resents the rest of the family for pulling him away.

The women and their thoughts revolve around George, just as they orbit around the novel's core story of a family planning a wedding. The wedding forms a union, but the most significant union occurs within each woman as they realize and embrace their longings, emotions, and thoughts. They embrace themselves, much like one would embrace a lover.

A bucolic and communal book, full of children and elderly aunts, and vivid landscapes that almost become characters (the bayou!). It reminded me a bit of the Cazalet saga (which I loved), but in a "Southern United States" version.

This book seems to transport the reader to a charming and idyllic world. The presence of children adds a touch of innocence and vitality, while the elderly aunts bring wisdom and a sense of tradition. The description of the landscapes, especially the bayou, is so vivid that it comes alive in the reader's mind.

It's interesting how it can be compared to the Cazalet saga, yet with its own unique Southern flavor. One can imagine the warm and close-knit community, the daily life filled with simple pleasures and perhaps a few challenges.

This book has the potential to be a delightful read, offering a escape into a different time and place, filled with rich characters and beautiful scenery.

Eudora Welty's books often give the impression of being about the ordinary, with few astonishing events. Instead, they are all about life. In this particular novel, there is a significant event on the horizon. Dabney Fairchild is getting married, and the entire family is gathering for the occasion. Aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, and in-laws are all assembling to see Dabney off from the family home to her own.

As we journey through the story, we encounter a diverse cast of remarkable characters, each one a vivid embodiment of their Southern heritage. This way of life, I imagine, has largely disappeared. However, it evokes so many memories for me that it almost brings me to tears. Of course, I was never one of those Southern belles with their grand portico porches, land wealth, and stores. But I can easily remember the days when five generations of a family would come together in a similar family gathering, which sometimes brought ease and sometimes strain.

Welty has an intimate understanding of people. Every word they speak in her stories feels true and genuine. You have the sense that you have met these characters, that you are there on the porch with them, sipping iced tea, swinging the children, and kissing the uncles. You feel safe, just as they do, because you have family, you belong, and someone cares.

It has taken me a long time to finally read this wonderful story. But now, I can add it to my list of Eudora Welty's masterpieces that I have come to love.