But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. The Collected Stories. 45Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. 26I am ready to plead, however. In the end, they seem happy and content again. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. Print. They catch a baby alligator and the Malone brothers insist that they want to keep it. But they remain children, and act their age. Since William Wallace cannot be contained in any single myth, or even in a multitude of myths, it should not have surprised me that he is able to exist untouched by history, or at least untouched by a southern identity usually defined and distinguished as being overwhelmed and overdetermined by history. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. After all, where else can I look for a better source? 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. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. the second is . Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. Corrections? Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. He was on a mission. Print. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in. 179). William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. His name was Patrick Duval. Twain, Mark. 17She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? There is Virgil of course, living up to his name (but only in the mind of the reader, we need to remember) in that he is there to guide William on his quest, to keep him on the track, as he says. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of. I realized that the origins of these myths had to be traced and analyzed, not least of all to better understand their impact on American culture and history. He walked on. He hated fighting, but he had never lost a fight, and all his rivals had given up trying. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, Collected Stories 176). 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. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty, Collected Stories 180). The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. They marvel over the snake, but seem to feel satisfied by their feast. Hickory tree there will be yellow. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. 176). Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace and Company 1943 We offered this copy of the first edition in our Catalog 119. reference info. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. 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. Still, if I should apologize, I do. 9Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, eight giants with great long black eyelashes (Welty, Collected Stories 173). 6It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. 16What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. I saw it 26 years ago and I wish it was on tonight. They were later given to the University of Florida. Me and Benz tight as a pair of shoes. The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. 13There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. No police, no first responders, no telephones, no helicopters just the local men and boys with an old fish net. He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. He has written many essays on writers from Ireland and the American South, and has edited a dozen anthologies, including Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin), A New Book of Dubliners (Methuen), Georgia Stories (Peachtree) and Louisiana Stories (Pelican). 23Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. The Wide Net (1987) Plot Showing all 0 items Jump to: Summaries It looks like we don't have any Plot Summaries for this title yet. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). Salesforce has a wide range of tools that can be integrated with it to boost productivity. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. 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. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. eNotes.com, Inc. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. Brainstorm a list of topics for a podcast. in Marrs 67-68). No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, The Weavers Grave, by the Irish writer Seumas OKelly. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. He walked on. Summary. Press in the Library of Southern Civilization series. William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1781. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. 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. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. The last date is today's [] Any day now the change will come. Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines.
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