Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the south-eastern extremity of the Mississippi Delta.
The Delta is an alluvial floodplain of some 7,000 square miles, spreading across north-west Mississippi, between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers.
Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University before returning to Jackson in 1931. It remained her home for the rest of her long life.
Predominantly a short story writer, she also published five novels. ‘Delta Wedding’, her second, appeared in 1945, although it was set some twenty years earlier, in September 1923.
The Mississippi Delta had been dominated by extensive cotton plantations, powered by slavery.
Surprisingly, by the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, the clear majority of farmers were black, only for the state government to whittle away their autonomy, reducing most to the status of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Violent racism was, of course, rife.
During the 1920s and 1930s, increased mechanisation drastically reduced the demand for labour, causing many – both black and white – to leave the Delta for cities further north.
But this difficult history is largely ignored in Welty’s rose-tinted view of the place.
The action takes place on a substantial plantation called Shellmound, located in an imaginary settlement called Fairchilds.
The family that owns the plantation is also called Fairchild. Battle and Ellen Fairchild have a house overflowing with children, mostly their own, and Ellen is pregnant once more. They are accompanied by a flotilla of aunts, most of them elderly widows.
All are preparing for the imminent wedding of Dabney Fairchild, Ellen’s 17 year-old second daughter, to 34 year-old Troy Flavin, the Plantation Overseer, an outsider from the hill country.
Aside from the wedding, nothing much happens, except that Battle’s brother, George, is reunited with his wife, Robbie Reid, who has temporarily left him. This has something to do with George rescuing Maureen, his mentally disturbed niece, from the path of an oncoming train, although Robbie’s reasoning is irritatingly elusive on the point.
As the book opens, we join Laura McRaven, aged nine, who is travelling by train to stay with the Fairchilds, her late mother’s family. She is to have no part in the wedding, since she is ostensibly still grieving her mother, (but is eventually recruited as flower girl when her predecessor goes down with chicken pox).
The assembled womenfolk prepare the house for this extravagantly ornate wedding – though all the hard work is done by a handful of black house servants – while the children play around them. The children enjoy great freedom – school books and learning are conspicuous by their absence. Aside from Troy and the servants, the men don’t seem too busy.
The majority of the servants and the smattering of other black characters are depicted as either amusing, eccentric or downright mad. This is a different kind of racism: less violent, more insidious.
Most of the internal monologue is given to a subset of the white women: Ellen; her two elder daughters, Dabney and Shelley; Robbie and Laura.
Two other notable characters are Ellen’s livewire daughter India, also nine, who is always up to speed with the family’s little disputes, scandals and melodramas, and George, the family’s great hope, who is simultaneously of them and apart, pursuing a career as a city lawyer.
At the novel’s climax, the already over-large cast is supplemented by a bevy of bridesmaids, groomsmen and miscellaneous wedding guests. The brief ceremony is followed by an extended party. Finally the family gathers itself in readiness for normal life to resume, Dabney exported and Laura now apparently adopted into the Fairchild clan.
Welty had clearly been influenced by Virginia Woolf, but even her most thoughtful female characters are pale shadows of Mrs Ramsay or Mrs Dalloway.
Her style is lyrical, not always too well edited, and her characters’ thoughts are often articulated in a tantalisingly approximate manner, invariably sliding away from sense towards vague meaninglessness.
The most prominent recurring imagery features water and rivers, typically associated with female sexual awakening. This extract, in Dabney’s inner voice, gives a flavour of the novel as a whole:
‘How quickly she had known she had loved Troy! Only she had not known how she could reach the love she felt already in her knowledge. In catching sight of love she had seen both banks of a river and the river rushing between – she saw everything but the way down. Even now, lying in Troy’s arm like a drowned girl, she was timid of the element itself.’
From time to time I enjoyed reading this book, in spite of my better judgement, but found it ultimately disappointing, for it somehow falls short.
Then again, you might disagree.
TD
July 2025
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