41Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1781. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. What interests me more as the years go on is the life story of the individual southerner. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201055. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. When she allows William his ritual role of thinking himself the man of the house by letting him tamely slap and spank her, the reconciliation is complete. His name was Patrick Duval. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house. Be the first to contribute! eNotes Editorial. Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition, Plan du site Crdits Flux de syndication, Politique de confidentialit Gestion des cookies, Nous adhrons OpenEdition Journals dit avec Lodel Accs rserv, Vous allez tre redirig vers OpenEdition Search, Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me), It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Weltys story The Wide Net the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty. Full Time Paid Internship Job Summary: Be a part of an innovative team and culture The Physical and Post-Production Technology department is responsible for a wide array of technologies across Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm, and various other Walt Disney groups. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty, Collected Stories 183).1 This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. . Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. 26I am ready to plead, however. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. Jamieson takes a bit more twisting to unravel a historical connection. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. I am ready to plead, however. Robert Fitzgerald. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and livesthe old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 104). As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge (Welty. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. Einstein activity capture is a powerful productivity-boosting tool that is integrated with Salesforce. Delta Wedding in 1946. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty, Collected Stories 179). In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. Timeless stories from our 172-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love,, (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. . Print. 38I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing . The scenery the pace and the dialog are like a soothing low speed raft trip. Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. It was written forty years after The Wide Net but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. After all, where else can I look for a better source? Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. 15The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. Rereading The Wide Net brought many of these memories back to mind, and it brought back to mind too my dismay in Chapel Hill at fitting them into a theory of myth, or even at weaving them into a common pattern of southern identity. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. Her most acclaimed work is the novel The Optimist's Daughter, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, as well as the short stories "Life at the P.O." and "A Worn Path.". Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, best known for her realistic portrayal of the South. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. Print. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. He himself would have been too modest to mention it. 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