Matters of Life and Death: Teaching Welty in a Course on Death, Dying, and Funerals in Southern Literature Purchased

Death is both profoundly personal and extremely social. It is one of the most prominent literary themes, and through literary depictions of death, we can explore aesthetic issues of symbolism and narrative, emotional issues of grief and memory, cultural issues of burial practices and religious customs, and economic issues of estate succession and the funeral industry. As a critical lens, death reveals how people live. In 2013, I heard Victoria Bryan, then a graduate student at Ole Miss, give a fascinating paper about the funeral industry and cremation in Absalom, Absalom!, and by the time she was done with her talk, I had begun to imagine a course about death in the South. The potential discussion topics and reading list unfolded quickly, and since I was already scheduled to teach a course on southern literature since 1900 for the next semester, I proceeded to design a syllabus. Eudora Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter, published in 1972, was one of the texts that came immediately to mind because it raises issues of family, memory, modernity, migration, and death in the South.

My students are traditional, capable students at a small liberal arts college, and most of the students who enroll in upper-level southern literature classes at Mercer are English, history, or southern studies majors. With this in mind, I developed a reading list and a set of assignments. Eudora Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter was an obvious choice, and we read it after James Agee’s A Death in the Family and before William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and Matthew Guinn’s The Resurrectionist. Since the course was intended for majors, I put together a set of assignments that asked them to practice literary analysis and research. Each student was assigned a secondary text to read in the form of a book about death practices, literary criticism, or cultural history, and they then had to give a presentation to the class based on the text and to write a review of the book. Students were also assigned in small groups of four or five to write close readings of selected passages from the novels, and at the end of the semester, each student also wrote a ten-page research-based literary analysis that related to the texts and themes we discussed during the semester.

In an essay published, unfortunately for me, two years after I taught the course, Travis Rozier explains that “Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, a work centered on mourning, memorialization, and funerary ritual, depicts a South undergoing social change as a growing consumer culture offered new opportunities for self-creation and social climbing” (138). Beyond the facts that Welty is an important writer and that the novel is an excellent work of literature, I put the book on the syllabus because it represents an encounter with death in a middle-class white family in the twentieth century, which created useful points of contrast for our discussions of death in working-class, African American, or contemporary settings, and these conversations about differences allowed us to trace the values of different social groups and the evolution of death culture. The novel allowed us to talk about issues of social class, family dynamics, gender, domesticity, community construction, regional difference, symbolism, and the invention of tradition among other topics.

Our class discussions focused on the issues of death, memory, and family in The Optimist’s Daughter. In the first class session, we discussed Laurel’s errand of filial piety and her father’s undignified death in an antiseptic New Orleans hospital room during Mardi Gras.¹ At the beginning of class, a student gave a presentation on The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. His book argues that the development of symbolic culture is an attempt to establish the illusion of immortality, and he describes symbolic culture as all of the elements of civilization that humans have created to separate themselves from their own physicality, including architecture, art, language, music, clothing, and social relations. In other words, all of the processes that define our humanity are means to deny death, and he asserts that this drive to deny death motivates the vain human attempt to find a meaning to life. After the student presented this book to the class, we talked about the implications of this idea. They were reluctant to agree with his position as none of them felt the compulsion for immortality, but I asked them to imagine what about them would live on after they die. They soon listed their children, their creative works, their possessions, and their memory in their loved one’s imagination. We used this conversation to frame a discussion of the opening of The Optimist’s Daughter. We noted that Judge McKelva dies near the beginning of the book, so most of the novel concerns those elements that live on after him and how those vestiges of immortality complicate the lives of his surviving family.

We then discussed the way that Welty frames Judge McKelva’s death with a juxtaposition between order and chaos. The antiseptic hospital in New Orleans represents the emergence of medical technology as a means of extending life spans, and the clinical setting of hospitals and doctors, we observed, has displaced the spiritual setting of churches and preachers. Judge McKelva enters the hospital for a routine procedure, but Welty foreshadows his death with references to his first wife’s death, his failing eyesight, and the sensation of coldness and silence in the hospital room. Outside, meanwhile, New Orleans celebrates Mardi Gras, a frenzy of carnival affirming life in the face of death. We then discussed Fay’s role in the scene as a chaos agent. Her obsession with Mardi Gras precipitates Judge McKelva’s death when she attempts to drag him out of bed to celebrate her birthday. Later in our discussions, we pointed out that Welty consistently characterizes her as a disruptive force in the book who complicates the issues of mortality and immortality in the novel. In addition to possibly causing Judge McKelva’s death, she also unsettles his immortality by disrupting the family, works, possessions, and memories that he leaves behind.

The second session began with a presentation on Pat Jalland’s book Death in the Victorian Family. She describes death as a social act, and she conceptualizes the notion of the good death, the way most people would imagine their own ideal passing. In the Victorian period, the good death meant dying at an advanced age in one’s own home surrounded by loved ones in a state of religious grace and with minimal pain and no violence. Most of my students agreed that this is how they would idealize their own deaths. This standard allowed us to construct a rubric for evaluating whether or not characters died a good death, and we discovered to no one’s surprise that characters in southern literature rarely die a good death. Most of the characters in southern literature seem to die difficult, solitary, or painful deaths. Of all the books we read in the semester, Judge McElva’s comes closest to meeting the criteria for a good death. In some respects, he dies well because he is older and surrounded with his remaining family, but Fay’s childish tantrum complicates his passing, adding an element of violence and disruption to his death. This led a student to raise an excellent question: for whom is the death good, the deceased person or their family? We discussed this question for the remainder of the class. Many students felt that the purpose of the good death was to soothe the family’s grief. To the individual, a good life is more important than a good death.

In the next class, a student presented on Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited, which allowed us to interrogate the economic and material aspects of the death industry. Her book exposes the ways that death has been commercialized by funeral homes, cemeteries, conspicuous memorialization, and an array of business and political interests to capitalize on a family’s grief after the loss of a loved one. This book led us to ask questions about death as a transaction and the commodification of grief, a set of questions that are relevant to the southern funeral customs represented in part 2 of The Optimist’s Daughter. We focused our attention on the community of Mount Salus and the family dynamics that play out there during the Judge’s funeral. The family gathers at the home for a wake where offerings of food are brought to the family to signify the community’s shared grief. Then the Judge is buried in the town cemetery, but his grave is located in the new section of the cemetery near the interstate and away from the most prominent families in the community. My students observed that the divided cemetery and the interstate highway indicate the effects of modernity on the small town, whose population has dwindled as more people, like Laurel, move into cities. My students also brought up the symbolism of clocks and time in our discussion. There are several examples of clocks in the section, beginning with the grandfather clock in the family home, and the repeated references to clocks and time are an obvious symbol of mortality.

For the third class session, we discussed the incarnations of memory in part 3 of the book. As birds chatter in the branches, Laurel and her friends chat in the garden near Becky’s roses. We discussed the way that Welty uses imagery to enhance the scene, and we teased out two patterns in this section. One of the patterns involved bird imagery, which culminates in the chimney swift trapped in the house, and the other pattern concerns memories attached to material objects. From her mother’s roses, Laurel moves to her father’s library, where she constructs a memorial version of him in her imagination that omits Fay, and later she reads through her mother’s letters and confronts the image of her parents in her memory. As we discussed this section of the text, we wondered about how accurate and stable memory can be, and we proposed that memory is, in fact, dynamic and contingent. We wondered if these material items, as Becker suggests, construct immortality, and we worried that they do not. Immortality, my students argued, is an illusion.

For the last session, we discussed part 4 and returned to the lingering question about memory as a burden to frame our discussion of Laurel’s late husband, Philip Hand. He died during the war when his ship sank, “left bodiless and graveless of a death made of water,” and we compared his death to Judge McKelva’s relatively good death (Complete Novels 979). The pattern of death and remembrance in the novel by now became clear; Mount Salus for Laurel is a mausoleum of memories to her father, her mother, her husband, her past, and the South. All of her memories coalesce around a breadboard that Philip carved for Laurel’s mother that Fay uses as an ashtray, which angers Laurel. When she confronts Fay, Fay says, “The past isn’t a thing to me. I belong to the future” (991). This comment reveals the underlying tension of the novel, and my students recognized that the novel’s tension stemmed not from Judge McKelva’s death directly but from the conflict between Laurel’s past, which she has attempted to detach herself from in Chicago, and the future of her family and the South. We asked, as we read the final sentences of the novel, whether Laurel says good-bye to the past.

Several of my students wrote close readings of the bird in the house from section 3 of the novel (981–85). The recurring bird symbolism in the book charts a motif of memory as fleeting and elusive. They chirp and flit, distracting the reader during conversations between characters and chattering in the background during key scenes, but the chimney swift trapped in the house brings the bird symbolism unmistakably into focus. My students recognized that the bird has a symbolic meaning, but they disagreed about what it signified. Some gravitated toward fairly obvious readings that the bird symbolizes an elusive memory, and others suggested that the bird represents Laurel’s attempts to detach herself from the past by figuratively chasing it away. One especially perceptive reading used the detail that Mr. Cheek, the handyman who attempts to catch the bird, “crows” (983) at Laurel to construct an interesting feminist reading of the book that suggests that the home was a patriarchal space—a metaphorical birdcage—that Laurel must vacate.

My students had a great deal of latitude in how they constructed their end of semester papers. The assignment required them to write an extended research-based analysis of one or more of the texts we read during the semester. Some students wrote about specific works, such as a fascinating essay about African American conjure traditions and Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, but others wrote papers that addressed multiple works. One in particular tackled the notion of a good death as an illusion, using A Death in the Family, As I Lay Dying, and The Optimist’s Daughter to argue that the living judge the process of dying only to assuage their own fears of the unknown. Another student’s paper analyzed books about death as processes of denying death. Her essay used Becker’s theory and the clock symbolism in The Optimist’s Daughter to suggest that a book about death is ultimately a vain attempt at constructing immortality.

Reading The Optimist’s Daughter in this class allowed us to connect several issues that were central to the topic of death in southern literature. Becker’s theory about the denial of death played an important role in our discussions as we wondered whether the artifacts and conversation that Laurel encounters in Mount Salus signify the structures of civilization that contribute to an illusion of immortality. If immortality exists, we wondered, is it a form of memory? The book also gave us a useful insight into the deathways of a middle-class family and to our own experiences with deathways in the contemporary South. Discussing the economics of death led to some fascinating conversations, for example, about the burial of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying as an illustration of the family’s poverty, which contrasts with the middle-class expressions of grief that accompany Judge McKelva’s obsequies. Most of the students in my class had attended several funerals, but few had thought of them from the critical perspective of the commercialization of death or the culture of memorialization. We were able to see the social function of death and the practices that accompany it, leading us to recognize that death is more about the living than the dead.

We were able to use these insights to interrogate the deathways represented in the other novels we read. Most of the novels we read incorporated some element of familial obligation as part of the death practices, but these were expressed differently in the early twentieth-century South depicted in A Death in the Family and in the rural South depicted in As I Lay Dying. I began the course with A Death in the Family to establish the effects of death on a strong family unit, and we were able to contrast that family structure with the dysfunctional families in The Optimist’s Daughter and As I Lay Dying, and contrasting these novels allowed us to consider the ways that families operate as dynamic structures. The comparatively good death that Judge McElva dies in The Optimist’s Daughter was also a useful counterpoint to the violent, complicated deaths in Strange Fruit and A Lesson before Dying. The unsettled family structure in The Optimist’s Daughter offers instructive points of comparison with the resilient family structures in Gaines’s novel, and we had a fascinating conversation about whether Jefferson dies a good death in A Lesson before Dying. Welty’s realism also contrasted in interesting ways with the magical realism of A Visitation of Spirits and the historical realism of The Resurrectionist. Guinn’s book is based on the grave robbers who supplied southern medical schools with corpses in the nineteenth century, and it elevates the conversation about death as commodification to another level, one where the body itself becomes a product.

The Optimist’s Daughter works well in a course about death in the South because it reflects the changes taking place in the region through the lens of a small town situated within the greater context of the rapidly developing nation. In this respect, the book works extremely well in any number of contexts. Published at a time when the term “sunbelt” was coming into discourse to describe the economic development in the southeastern and southwestern United States, it illustrates the issues taking place as the post– civil rights movement era South urbanized and industrialized. Because Laurel lives in Chicago, the book also illustrates the effects of the great migration on white middle-class southerners, who, like their white working-class and African American counterparts, deserted the South in droves to seek better opportunities outside the region.² The book pairs exceptionally well with Peter Taylor’s novel A Summons to Memphis to describe the complicated feelings that white southern expatriates felt toward the region, and the familial deaths in both of these books imply the metaphorical death of one incarnation of the South in the years after the civil rights movement. However, as current civil and political issues indicate, reports of the South’s death have been greatly exaggerated.