It is a rarity to completely fall into a novel and
experience its slow unfolding almost as though one were a character oneself
but, with Eudora Welty’s masterpiece, Delta
Wedding, this is exactly what happens. The action is relayed through the
various perspectives of the extended Fairchild family and, indeed, sometimes
the same events are seen through more than one set of eyes with inevitable,
subtle shifts of emphasis and interpretation. Even within the best of families
there will be tensions, and there certainly are with the Fairchilds, some of
whom have a grip on reality that is tenuous to say the least. Nonetheless, there
is a real spirit, a kinship which overcomes all. This is a family that is
rooted in its Delta homeland and that looks after its own, and the result is
that the reader is swept up in their close and happy embrace. It is as though
we have been privileged to stay with them for those few days before and after
the grand family wedding and, at the story’s conclusion, at the end of our
stay, we are forced to bid them an unwilling farewell.
On a simple reading, Delta Wedding could
perhaps be considered Faulkner- or O’Connor-lite – Southern eccentrics doing eccentric
things, but without the underlying tragedy of Faulkner or the violence of
O’Connor. But this would be to grossly underestimate the novel and to overlook,
amid the genuine warmth of its vision, those hints and portents of the darkness
of life. There is a remarkable subtlety to the novel which, for me, marks it
out as certainly superior to the didacticism of Flannery O’Connor and right up
there at the pinnacle of southern fiction. This is not southern gothic: the
Fairchilds, although strange indeed, are not freaks. Nor do they dance to their
author's tune. They feel like real, breathing human beings.
The novel revolves around the extended Fairchild family, but in particular
focuses on three characters. Firstly, nine-year old Laura, whose mother has
just died and who is staying with her aunt and uncle and cousins, ostensibly
for the wedding but possibly for good, as the Fairchilds decide whether to
close ranks and embrace her to their bosom. Secondly, and possibly most
importantly, there is Laura’s uncle George, the only person in the family
seemingly untouched by southern eccentricity, and someone who is idolised by
the family. And thirdly, Laura’s cousin Dabney, who is to marry (beneath
herself, as is frequently hinted) the farm overseer Troy Flavin. Besides these,
there is a cast of rich and beautifully described family members – mother and
father Ellen and Battle, George’s wife Robbie, who has run away and left him,
but who returns because she adores him, the remaining children, ranging from
the toddler Bluet upwards, each with his or her own character, and a range of
eccentric aunts and uncles who lend humour and warmth to the action.
But it is the family as a collective unit that is perhaps the principal
character here. Welty establishes a wholly credible family whose kin-loyalties
leave them devoted to one another but also insensitive to the needs of others.
Robbie, for example, George’s wife, struggling to gain acceptance in the
family, complains to Ellen at one point: “Once I tried to be like the
Fairchilds. I thought I knew how,” and ends with the devastating critique:
“You’re just loving yourselves in each other – yourselves over and over again!”
And there is, indeed, a cockiness, even arrogance, about the Fairchilds,
demonstrated most tellingly in the novel’s most dramatic moment, told several
times in the narrative from different perspectives. On a family outing, they
are dallying by the railway line and one of the family, the slow-witted
Maureen, gets her foot trapped in the tracks. George calmly tries to free it,
while the rest of the family jump clear. A train approaches but George,
although he could have escaped, remains resolutely on the trestle, as though
facing down the train. Ultimately, the train stops just short of them and the
engineer shouts his apologies from the window. It becomes a grand, humorous
family story. ‘Inevitable,’ Ellen describes it to herself later, while
acknowledging that non-family members would have seen it as ‘conceited.’ George
Poore, in his contemporary review, sums this moment up neatly: ‘To the
Fairchilds...it was an amusing episode; to outsiders it was a piece of reckless
quixotry typical of the Fairchilds, the essence of Fairchildism.’
But then again, it might be argued this was the nature of the Delta people in
general. As Dr. Murdoch states at one point: “But – can’t do a thing about
Delta people... They’re the worst of all. One myself, can’t do a thing about
myself.” The family are summed up best, near the end of the novel, from the
point of view of the matriarch Ellen: ‘Passionate, sensitive, to the point of
strain and secrecy, their legend was happiness. “The Fairchilds are the
happiest people!”’
Throughout, the novel is told in subtly changing voices, from a range of points
of view. It is remarkably controlled and beautifully handled, giving each
character strength and individuality. However, Paul Binding argues:
In the novel's overall movement there is rather too little overt tension for
its theme to emerge as sharply above its context as it should, and again, there
is insufficient concentration on one viewpoint. We forsake Laura for Ellen, for
Dabney, for Robbie, and a certain dissipation of attention results.
I simply do not agree. The theme emerges from the whole, from the gradual
revelation of the family in its various misconceptions and misperceptions, its
prejudices and partialities. Throughout, there is a sense of excitement and anticipation
and of a tremendous vitality, as everyone awaits the forthcoming wedding. There
is the bustle of ordinary family life, given fresh breath by the ensemble
nature of the characterisations, and with each shift of point of view we see a
subtle change in the narrative frame, are given a slightly different
impression, offered another interpretation. In just the way that Faulkner uses
different voices in The Sound and The
Fury to help establish theme out of narrative, Welty uses her characters to
ensure Delta Wedding is more than
just a snapshot of an idyllic life. Without these shifts the novel could easily
have become bucolic, a comfortable despatch from arcadia, but instead Welty
ensures that we see this family as it really is – fine, happy, but as flawed as
everyone else’s – and we see the world in all its dark reality. The beautiful
girl who, unlike simple Maureen, is indeed knocked over by the train and
killed, ensures we do not lose sight of that.
And so Eudora Welty creates something truly memorable. Delta Wedding is a remarkable novel because it is a slice of
typical southern realism relayed through characteristically fine dialogue and
strong characterisation, while at the same time it manages to convey something
deeper, a glimpse of the realities of human nature, in all its good and bad.