ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037
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Vol. 08, Special Issue 01, (IC-STSS-2023) January 2023 IMPACT FACTOR: 8.20 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) 32 THE DUAL VISION OF EUDORA WELTY IN THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM
Vipul Parmarthi
Sr. Lecturer, Government Polytechnic College, Shajapur Dr. Gopa Dua
HOD, Dept. of English, M.K.H.S. Gujarati Girls‟ College, Indore
Abstract - Eudora Welty is normally associated with the description of human relationships in her short stories. In these stories she presents the intricacies of inner thoughts which engender emotions for maintaining different set of relationships at one and the same time.
This is articulated in the serene atmosphere of Mississippi. The stories appear to be effusion of lyricism in prose. The paper is an attempt to show how Welty has adopted the dual style to show these complexities in human relationships which are a result of dualities in humans with or without their realization of it.
The significance of Southwest humour for the reader of The Robber Bridegroom lies in the humourist‟s essentially dual vision of the frontier world, his blending of the humorous and the serious, his comic treatment of a new-vanished era. The "lost fabulous innocence" that Kazin had spoken of in 1942 finds its chief exemplar in the person of the frontiersman planter Clement Musgrove, "an innocent of the wilderness" (p. 182) who "had trusted the evil world" (p.102). That he realizes the time of innocence has passed is clearly evident in his musing that "the time of cunning is of a world I will have no part in" (p.142).
Even the delightful tall tales of Clement's daughter Rosamond and of the riverboat man Mike Fink reinforce the reader's sense of separation from this fabulous world. As Cohen and Dillingham put it, "the effect of the tall tale comes from the reader's delighted appreciation of the exaggerations and of the comic character and his language in juxtaposition with the sad realization that the events of the tale, the accomplishments of the protagonist, could never really happen.”(p xiii) Thus, Mike Fink's hyperbolic accounts of his own exploits amuse while simultaneously removing irrevocably his gargantuan world from reality:
I eat a whole cow at one time, and follow her up with a live sheep if it's Sunday Ho!
Ho! If I get hungry on a voyage, I jump off my raft and wade across and take whatever lies in my path on shore. When it come near, the good folk take to their heels, and run from their houses! I only laugh at the Indians, and I can carry a dozen oxen on my back at one time, and as for pigs, 1 tie them in a bunch and hang them from my belt (p 9)
The dual nature of the Southwest humourist‟s attitude toward his material is heightened by a deliberately established distance between himself and the world he is depicting. As Walter Blair notes, recounted from a distance, "even the most harrowing episode of a frontier tale might become comic.” Looking at the sketches from the standpoint of reader, Pascal states that the total effect “is to insulate him [the reader] from any emotional involvement or identification with events humorists, or region.” (p 92) Miss Welty, like the Southwest humorists establishes a distance between herself and story. Allen R Jones describes her attitude toward her material as "detached, even ironic...." Such an attitude allows Miss Welty to treat the horrors of murder, decapitation, torture, and rape at least on the surface as comic. The humorous depiction of death and decay and of cruelty and sadism that is so much a part of the tradition of Southwest humour, is amply evident in The Robber Bridegroom
In one of the most insightful reviews of the work, Michael Kreyling identified the conflict between America's pastoral dream and its capitalistic reality in the work's blending of fairy tale and history. It is possible, however, to view the work in a larger metaphysical scheme. In this reading, we can see the collision of history and fairy tale as rising out of the human impulse to simplify life, to explain it in either or terms, while life's insistent complexity keeps demanding a way of looking at reality that transcends both fairy tale and history.
The child's desire for simplicity is the basis of the folk fairy tale that Welty incorporated into her narrative. As Bettelheim writes:
The figures fairy tales are not ambivalent not good and bad at the same time, as we are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child's mind, it also dominates fairy
ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037
Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE
Vol. 08, Special Issue 01, (IC-STSS-2023) January 2023 IMPACT FACTOR: 8.20 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) 33 tales. A person is either good or bad nothing in between. One brother is stupid, the other is clever. One sister is virtuous and industrious etc. (p9)
Because the child cannot handle the grandmother's irritable outbursts, she is portrayed as the wolf, and when the grandmother is in a good mood, she is the recipient of Red Riding Hood's charitable visit. The characters in The Robber Bridegroom struggle to hold onto a child's innocent understanding of human nature as life inevitably reveals its complexity to them. In this sense, Welty's book is about the lesson we must learn to transition from the world of childhood to adulthood, from a fairytale perspective on life to a perspective that has been corrected for philosophy, psychology, history, and metaphysics.
The journey that Clement Musgrove makes from his idyllic home in Kentucky to the wilds of Mississippi is itself a journey from a fairy tale to reality. Clement's relocation fits Anthony Steven's analysis of the Garden of Eden expulsion. The loss of paradise, Stevens says, is "a parable of the emergence of ego consciousness, and the replacement of harmonious unity with the conflicts born of awareness of opposing categories of experience (eg, good and evil, love and hate, pleasure and pain." (p94) However, Welty's characters learn a lesson opposite to Adam and Eve's. While life in Eden was possible only in the presence of one of the paired opposites (good, love, pleasure), in the world Welty describes, life can be lived fully only with the acknowledgement of the harmony to be found in the co- existence of the contraries. The natural world in The Robber Bridegroom bears witness to the cosmic reality of unified opposites, contrasting vividly with the human desire to see everything in either or terms. After failing to recognize the girl who caught his attention in the woods in Clement Musgrove's daughter Rosamond, Jamie Lockhart (the gallant who is also the robber) leaves Clement's house and enters a natural world whose complexity allude to the reality he is trying to escape. He rides "in the confusion of the moonlight, under the twining branches of trees...." (p.75)
The next day when Rosamond, who has likewise failed to recognize in Jamie the bandit she found so charming, sets out to join her highwayman, she enters the same forest, that old literary symbol for a mind on the threshold of self-knowledge and, hence, knowledge of the reality into which that self fits. On the image, Bettelheim said that the image of Man trying to gain the light of self-knowledge and surrounded by darkness in a forest can be seen in many literary writings.This image reinforces the idea which Dante had evoked of man caught in a moral crisis, of man having to meet a developmental deadlock as he wishes to move spiritually to a higher level.
Although Rosamond does not realize it at the time, the perceptual confusion she experiences as she penetrates the forest (mistaking the gentle for the cruel, the animal for the human, the hunter for the unprotected) hints of the overlapping and intertwining nature of reality. “On and on she set, deeper and deeper into the forest, and the sound was all around. She heard something behind her, but it was only a woodpecker pecking with a weary bill. She thought there was a savage them but it was a deer which was looking…….”
By the end of the tale she learned that other categories that she had also thought to be mutually exclusive are, after all, not so clear cut. Jamie Lockhart experiences a similar illumination. He is The Robber Bridegroom's best exemplar both of the human impulse to simplify one's sense of self and one's responses to others, as well as of the need to move toward acceptance of the self's polar reality. Clement desires for life without complexities as is revealed in his initial conversations with Jamie. Jamie replies to Clement when he confesses of his guilt before his wife Salome that: "Guilt is a burdensome thing to carry about in the heart.... I would never bother with it." To this Clement replies: "Then you are a man of action,.... A man of the times, a pioneer and a free agent. There is no one to come to you saying 'want' what you do not want" (p. 27).
At the start of the story Jamie has tried neatly to partition his life, seeing himself as alternately the bandit or the gentlemen, never admitting that his reality includes simultaneously both identities. When, at their first formal meeting, he fails to recognize Rosamond the same beautiful girl he met in the woods, it is not only because she is now ragged and dirty, but also because his either-or vision interferes with perception of the real."...It was either love or business that travelled on his mind, never both at once, and this night it was business" (p.69).
ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037
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Vol. 08, Special Issue 01, (IC-STSS-2023) January 2023 IMPACT FACTOR: 8.20 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) 34 However, when Clement offers his daughter as a reward if Jamie captures the bandit who stole her clothes, Jamie is repulsed by the dirty, stupid young woman. Clement presents to him (Rosamond in her own disguise). In spite of the attraction of the dowry that is an unspoken part of the deal, this "man of enterprise" actually incarnates (without being aware of it) within himself the qualities of the romantic and the materialist which are contrary to each other and dualistic. Welty writes that "in his heart" Jamie "carried nothing less than of true love-something of gossamer and roses, though on this topic he never held conversation with himself, or let the information pass to a soul...." (p.74) Later, when his band harasses him for spending time with Rosamond during the day because earlier Jamie used to devot daytime to robbery and used to romance in the night, he protested in self defence: "For he thought he had it all divisioned off into time and place, and that now the world had just begun" (p.87).
Jamie's faces the challenge of conversing with his two sides, and accept his complex reality. Ironically, the innocent Clement voices most clearly the truth of this polarity, in his by-now familiar declaration to Rosamond when she visits him after her "marriage to Jamie.
If being a bandit were his breth and scope, I should find him and kill him for sure.
But since addition he loves my daughter, he must not be the one man but two and I should be afraid of killing the second for all things are double, and this should keep us from taking liberties with the outside world, and acting too quickly to finish things off." (p.126)
It is strangely fitting that the good-hearted Clement shares this awareness of doubleness with the antagonists of the story in a world where it seems like opposites attract. In fact, while the innocent planter has an abstract and non-specific intuition about the mingled identity of Rosamond's robber lover, the evil Salome and the Little Harp have specific evidence that Jamie Lockhart and the outlaw are one. The distinction is probably significant: Salome's and Little Harp's knowledge of doubleness exists only on the rational love, it is not a lived experience, illuminating their own lives and actions as it does Clement's. They see but do not feel the reality they have encountered.
With both the relationship between the Southwest humour sketches and The Robber Bridegroom and the primary significance of that relationship established, the complexity of Miss Welty's vision of the frontier in this novel becomes more apparent. The doubleness of all things, the inextricable co-mingling of the pathos and the absurdity of life, allows man to see and comprehend very little either of him-self or of the world. Neither Jamie Lockhart nor Mike Fink can effectively establish and maintain a single identity. Clement Musagrove is confounded by events that occur, apparently without his volition, in his own life; Rosamond Musagrove is forced to fantasize because the reality of her existence with her stepmother is intolerable, all the characters are helpless before the forces of time and change. As the detached narrator of these events, Miss Welty suggests through the entanglements of the personal lives of her characters the monumental task that confronts the twentieth-century mind that attempts to piece together and interpret the general history of a region.
The essential doubleness of all things most certainly includes man himself. Every man has, on the one hand, a private self-what Miss Welty calls a "who I am"---that he presents to the world. Only when he is in his proper time can he effectively unite these two selves. Mike Fink, for example, thinks of himself as a heroic part of the frontier, and as long as that frontier remains a reality, he insists upon his complete identity who and what he is.
When he first meets Jamie Lockhart, he declares with relish that he is none other than Mike Fink, champion of all the flatboat bullies on the Mississippi River. (p. 8) Jamie's pretended refusal to believe him outrages Mike, who reacts with a violent threat "Say once more that I am not Mike Fink and, peace or no peace, that will be your last breath" (p.12) Like Mike, the notorious outlaws, the Harp brothers, identify completely with the wilderness, and they insist at the end of every robbery upon calling out as they ride away,
"We are the Harps-" (p.155) As long as the frontier remains wild and free, people like Mike Fink and the Harps can follow their natural inclinations, but when the frontier begins to disappear, to become civilized, they are lost. The Harps, of course, die their deaths corresponding to the closing of the frontier. But Mike lived, and unable to assimilate himself into the changing world, he becomes a man out of his time. When we last see him, he is, of all things, a mail rider, a position which places him as a link between person and person, between town and town, as a representative of civilization and communication. Unwilling to
ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037
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Vol. 08, Special Issue 01, (IC-STSS-2023) January 2023 IMPACT FACTOR: 8.20 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) 35 accept this new position forced upon him, he insists upon being "an anonymous mail rider"
(p. 169). He tells Rosamond, "I won't say who I am" (p.174) and sadly reflects that "in the old days" he was a "big.... Figure in the worldp.175)
While Mike and the Harps immerse themselves totally in the life of the frontier, the bandit Jamie Lockhart feels a distance between himself and the wilderness. That is, his identity as a common mam must remain separate from his identity as a bandit. Jamie leads a double life in the woods with his bride, Rosamond: "The only thing that divided his life from hers was the raiding and the robbing he did, but that was like his other life, that she could not see, and so she contented herself with loving all that was visible and present of him as much as she was able" (pp.85-86) Not until his total identity is threatened with extinction does Jamie cry, late in the novel, "Not a man in the world can say I am not who I am and what I am, and live!" (p.157). Despite this statement, however, Jamie continues to feel that his place is not in the frantic world. This fact is most obvious when he is given the opportunity to divorce himself completely from his old life as a bandit. The severed head of the outlaw Big Harp has been incorrectly identified as that of Jamie Lockhart. Having therefore lost his old identity. Jamie can incorporate himself with impunity into the new civilized world of the city and become known as Jamie Lockhart, merchant.
REFERENCES
1. Alfred Kazin, Review of The Robber Bridegroom, in New York, Herald Tribune (25 October 1942); p. 19.
Hereafter referred to as 'Review".
2. Allen R. Jones "The World of Love: The Fiction of Eudora Welty", in The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons city : Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1963),p.184.
3. Anthony Stevens, Archetype: A Natural History of the Self (London. Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).p.94.
4. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978.p.9.
5. Carson, Barbara Harrell. “Eudora Welty‟s Dance with Darkness: „The Robber Bridegroom.‟” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 1988, pp. 51–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077928. Accessed 01 Jan. 2023.
6. Eudora Welty, The Robber Bridegroom (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1942)
7. Eunice Glenn "Fantasy in the Fiction of Eudora Welty" Southern Vangaurd ed. Allan Tate (New York:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1947), pp.85- 87.
8. Henning Cohn and William Dulligham, Humour of the Old Southwest (Iroston: Houghton Miffin Co, 1964) p.
xiii.
9. Michael Kreyling, "Clement and the Indians: Pastoral and History The Robber Bridegroom", Eudora Welty. A Form of Thanks, Ed. Louis Dollarhide and Ann. J. Abadie (Jackson; University Press of Mississippi, 1979), p.27.
10. Michael Kreyling. Eudora Welty (Jackson: Mississippi Library Commission, 1976), n.p.
11. Robert Dániel "The World of Eudora Welty" Southern Renaissance ed. Louis Robin and Robert Jacobs (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press 1968), p. 307.
12. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978.p.9.
13. Walter Blair Native American Humour (New York: American Book Company, 1937), p.92.
