Eudora Welty’s Atmosphere of Place: Ecologies of Air
Lately I have been thinking about place, what it is and how writers evoke it. One of the masters of writing, Mississippi writer Eudora Welty connects place with identity and feeling. She writes in “Place in Fiction”: “Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel’s progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place . . .” (46-47). In her fiction, and I’m thinking about her short stories, Welty deftly and sensuously creates these gathering spots through careful descriptions of the landscape, naming trees and flowers, sketching the characters who populate the region, by mimicking the voices of the locals, and shaping plot around the usual practices of place. Place in her stories is also evoked through descriptions of the air, the atmosphere, the wind that blows over the land and through open windows, touching as it does the characters, prickling their skin, and plots that turn on the change of air, the coming rain out of the gray skies. Writing of the quality of air, she creates elastic ecologies of place and community that have room for dream, memory, mystery, a place where the Ladies in Spring can work their magic. She calls location, “the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course” (“Place in Fiction” 53-54). More than simply being an element of the setting, air can act as a conductor of emotion and belief, a character and actor in the play of events, a metaphor, and an agent of change.
As a writer of short stories who must quickly bring readers into the situation of the story before getting the plot going, Welty often uses quick descriptions of location to draw her readers in. In a handful of stories, these descriptions include comments about the weather, the climate, the sky, the air, the atmosphere. These opening lines not only set the location and time of the story, but also foreground “the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course” (“Place in Fiction” 53-54). For instance, when she begins “A Worn Path” by noting, “It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning,” she draws the reader into the story of the “very old and small” and very poor Black woman who braves the cold to get the medicine for her grandson (129).1 This frozen day hints at the toughness, resilience, and determination of the little woman as she meets the trials of the journey, her memory of previous trips guiding her as she recited directions, “’Up through pines. . . Now down through oak’” (130). Though the day is cold and the fields barren, it is a bright morning, foreshadowing the Christmas soon to come and Phoenix Jackson’s accomplishment in getting what she wants—the medicine and some money to buy a toy windmill for her grandson. In these ways, the opening lines draw readers into the story and foreground its emotions and the moral conviction of caring.
I want to look at a few more openings to show how Welty uses descriptions of atmosphere to set up a story. “The Whistle” begins, “Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that had been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones.” Here, the thin darkness and penetrating cold reify themes of poverty and stasis, of being trapped by the weather and poverty that the story exposes (53). Constructing the metaphor of the sleazy dress to give substance to the night, Welty foregrounds the flimsiness of the dress that Sara Morton wears and then surrenders to the tomato plants she must protect from the cold. Working a tomato farm owned by Mr. Perkins, the impoverished Mortons “every night . . . trembling with cold [on their pallet of quilts]” must respond to the whistle that “sounded out in the clear night” warning of a freeze that threatens the tender tomato plants (54, 55). As Welty plots the actions of the couple, as they go out to the plants, as they lay first quilts and then the man’s coat and the wife’s dress over the fledgling plants, she describes a “cold like a white pressing hand” (55), a cold that sinks “into them like the teeth of a trap,” creating metaphors to describe the night air as she constructs from the night a palpable, chilling metaphor for place and the human story contained in it.
Attending to the night sounds carried by the air in “The Key,” Welty foregrounds the play between sound and silence in her story of the deaf, mute passengers, Albert and Ellie Morgan: “It was quiet in the waiting room of the remote little station, except for the night sounds of insects. You could hear their embroidering movements in the weeds outside, which somehow gave the effect of some tenuous voice in the night, telling a story” (28). Against this opening voice, Welty writes a story of silence: first the silence of the passengers waiting for the train, then the silence of the couple who must communicate through sign language, the silence of their hearts and hopes somehow represented by the dropped key that comes suddenly to the man. And then the silence of the young man who fiddled with the key, dropped it, and watched the interactions between the couple, never saying a word as he simply gives the woman a key to “Star Hotel, Room 2” (35). Albert’s dream of hearing through the vibrations of a rail at Niagara Falls is dashed when they miss the train: “’You hear it with your whole self” (34). Though silence predominates, a reader can hear the missed communications that keep the couple in place, literally and emotionally, the story that the night insects rehearse.
Defining place through atmosphere, Welty begins “The Purple Hat”: “It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. . . It was in New Orleans” (203). Announcing early on the hazy, heavy atmosphere of place, Welty brings readers into the little bar and the story of the purple hat at the same time that she defines New Orleans as a place where women gamble and take new lovers, a place of mystery, of purple hats and mysterious vials, where ghosts might inhabit the air the way the rain does, and where people like the young man in the bar disappear in “the rain of the alley” (207). Mixing the realities of New Orleans bar life and climate with the mysterious tale of a woman with a purple hat who has been gambling for thirty years without changing, a woman who one character says he has seen murdered twice, Welty creates a southern version of magical realism, where the impossible exists amid the real. The veil that the rain creates and the moments when the “sunlight was still suspended” create a space, like the story itself, where the bizarre can happen, even if just for an hour, before the chimes of St. Louis Cathedral pull the auditor of the tale of the purple hat back into the world.
And she begins “Ladies in Spring” by following a boy and his father through the gray landscape, the dreary weather that will soon give way to rain: “The pair moved through that gray landscape as though no one would see them . . . . It was a soft, gray, changeable day overhead—the first like that, here in the month of March” (470). The sky that “moved, soft and wet and gray,” the river “All but dry,” and the “powder dry” ground portend the rain that will be the major event of the story. Though the story follows Dewey, the boy who caught a google-eye perch, and his father out of the woods and into town under the umbrella of Miss Hattie, the wonder of the story lies in the way the rain was called. Spying Miss Hattie in the woods, the father tells his son, “’Miss Hattie calls herself a rainmaker, son. She could be at it. We sure can use the rain. She’s most generally on hand at the post office” (471). Just as surely as another “mysterious lady” (473) who appears and disappears three times out in the woods calls out to Dewey’s father and Miss Hattie relays the mail from train to post office to their recipients, the ladies of spring conjured, called up, the rain: “Miss Hattie brought the rain by sitting a vigil of the necessary duration beside the nearest body of water, as everybody knew” (471). Treating this magical coming of rain matter-of-factly, the story illustrates that there is room for mystery in the air, announced in this story by the bay tree “moving and sighing” and the “little sound like a mouse somewhere in the world, a scratch, then a patter like many mice racing . . . ” (473).
As these openings illustrate, depictions of the air, the weather, and atmosphere help Welty create a sense of place in her fiction and foreground character, plot, and theme. The air is not just rain or heat or cold, but something that evokes feeling and the moral crisis of the story. And because of its ephemeral nature, the air suggests that there is something more to existence than material certainties, that realities of magic and mystery also exist. These qualities come together in some of her most atmospheric stories, “No Place for You, My Love,” and “A Curtain of Green,” where the air becomes an agent of change.
A prolonged description of weather, air, and atmosphere, “No Place for You, My Love” illustrates how Welty uses air not only to set up a story or sketch a location but to create a space where things happen, where the imperviousness of the story’s Northern visitors can give way, even if momentarily, to feeling and mystery. As she takes her characters, strangers who meet at Galatoire’s during a summer Sunday luncheon, on a drive south of New Orleans in the man’s rented faded-red Ford convertible, Welty defines the South in part by describing its air, sky, atmosphere: “. . . it was South. The vast, thin, wide-thrown, pale, unfocused star-sky, with its veils of lightning adrift . . .” (433). This humid, hot atmosphere that the characters can feel and smell and see will melt at key moments the strangers’ usual imperviousness, evoking mystery and prompting touch and connection.
When Welty follows her characters south of New Orleans on a careless jaunt to the end of the road, she describes an air that one can feel: “the bath of July” (422), the heat “like something falling on her head” (425) and that “came inside the car and wrapped them still” (434). Welty’s air is alive with life and motion, something tactile and palpable that stuns the Northern visitors. The air below New Orleans “was a raging of insects” (423), alive with the “thousands, millions of mosquitos and gnats—a universe of them, and on the increase” (424). As they crossed the Mississippi River on a ferry, the heat mixed with wind “was like something falling on her head . . . It was like riding a stove. Her shoulders dropping, her hair flying, her skirt buffeted by the sudden strong wind . . .” (425). On the other side of the river, “Here was a heat that ran deeper and brighter and more intense than all the rest—its nerve.” It is a sentient heat that seems to see them and that they see as if it were a person—“No, the heat faced them—it was ahead. They could see it waving at them . . . shimmering finely as a cloth . . .” (427). A heat that saturates place, a heat that one can feel and see touches the characters and anticipates their own moments of contact with each other.
With the sunset, “the nearness of darkness . . . then the first sounds of people . . .” and “out of the heat . . . the full moon” (429), comes the first break in their usual imperviousness, their first touch, “accidental,” and the woman’s unspoken embarrassment (429). Once inside the beer shack, Baba’s Place, there “came a smell of garlic and cloves and red pepper, a blast of hot cloud escaped from a cauldron . . .” (430) and the “strong odor of geranium talcum” as the men, refreshed from a day on the water, enter the bar (430). Human, sensuous smells of cooking and food, of freshly powdered skin linger in the air, adding another layer to the atmosphere of place. As the woman moves to find some cool spot, the man takes her hand and “They were dancing” in “the thickening heat” of that little shack with its easy community of men and boys and women and pet goose, all coming together for the evening. Welty writes: “Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost. . . . they were, at last, imperviousness in motion,” touching and touched in this elsewhere space south of South. Like the air in motion wrapping them in its humidity and heat, the strangers “found it, and had almost missed it: they had had to dance. They were what their separate hearts desired that day, for themselves and each other” (432).
Before leaving Baba’s at the end of the road, “Bathed in sweat, and feeling the false coolness that brings, they stood finally on the porch in the lapping night air for a moment” (433). The lapping air that enfolds them here and on their trek through South Louisiana is both a metaphor for connection and an agent for their moment of togetherness. Back in New Orleans after their long jaunt, the man kissed the woman, lingering as “their faces touched unkissing, unmoving,” like “the heat [that] came inside the car and wrapped them still . . .” (434). Touched and enwrapped by the palpable air, the characters expose themselves, allow for a vulnerable moment their own unspoken “currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction” (“Place in Fiction” 53-55).
Reflecting on the origins of this story, Welty remarks, “the very image of the story’s predicament . . . took shape as the strange, compulsive journey itself, [which] was palpable as its climate and mood, the heat of the day . . .” (“Writing and Analyzing a Story” 35). Making the palpable air, the heat, part of the structure of the plot, Welty charges the climatic setting with metaphoric meaning, aligning the turning points of the story with the air. At the end of the journey and the story, the man’s query, “Forgive,” the forgiveness given though unspoken by the woman, and his remembrance of times past when he was “young and brash” signal the fleeting moments of identity, of being in touch with the inner self that has for so long been unapproachable before the sad return to their mundane, impervious lives. These magical moments of impulse, of respite from the loneliness of their lives --the touch, the dance, the kiss, the query--Welty implies, are made possible in the tactile air of the “south of South” (434). Like the ephemeral inner lives of the characters, the air is a “visual illusion, shimmering and dancing over the waste that stretches ahead” (“Writing and Analyzing a Story” 36).
Reimagining the old story of a young woman held by winter until she is lured by the beauty of spring in the shape of Cash, dressed for Easter in its colors, Welty uses “the stir of spring” (211) as a metaphor for the change in Livvie, for her awakening to self and love, represented in part by the sweet smell of the earth. Throughout the short story “Livvie,” Welty deploys the airs and smells of spring as metaphors for change, for the seasonal change that chooses life over death. Despite old Solomon’s efforts to safeguard his home and young wife against evil spirits with bottle trees, the “fragrance” that escaped the lipstick the cosmetics lady offered imaginatively transports Livvie “away in the air through the spring” above the chinaberry tree (213) before the bedazzling Cash made his entrance and swept Livvie up in “the bursting light of spring” (218). In this story, Welty uses the spring air and the fragrance of the lipstick as metaphors for Livvie’s transformation and escape from the house of winter. But something in the ways the air acts suggests that it is an agent of change, an unseen actor that has a role in Livvie’s transportation to a new state of self-awareness and sexuality. Metaphor does not just say that something is like something else, that Solomon’s home is like the winter or that the story itself is a metaphor for the changing seasons, but in the original meaning of “metaphorein” it is a verb that means to carry over, from 'meta' (beyond) and 'phero' (to carry). We can then think of the air that stirs and moves as a way of representing change but also as something that carries Livvie over from one state (winter) to another (spring).
This same melding of air as metaphor and as agent of change is seen as well in “A Curtain of Green.” The story opens, “Every day one summer in Larkin’s Hill, it rained a little.” But on the day of the story’s action, it is five o’clock and the rain still has not come, leaving the town’s women sitting in their windows, “fanning and sighing, waiting for the rain” (98). Mrs. Larkin, however, goes out to her large and densely planted garden to work all day, as she has done ever since her husband was killed in a freak accident when a chinaberry tree fell on his car, crushing him to death. On this day there is no wind and “the cries of the birds had hushed” as she and Jamey, the young African American man, worked in her overgrown garden. He seems to be “lost in some impossible dream of his own while he was transplanting the little shoots” (101) just as she has lifted the curtain of memory to replay the scene of her husband’s death, as if the still air creates a space of imagination and memory where alternate lives can be imagined. “[A]t once terrified” and lonely by her reminiscence, feeling an “obscure fluttering” in her breast, “the bird that flies within your heart” (100), she raises her hoe above the kneeling Jamey’s head as if to bring it down on him, to turn accident into purpose, to exercise some kind of control over her life as she attempts to do with the garden. But “In that moment, the rain came. The first drop touched her upraised arm. Small, close sounds and coolness touched her” and she lowers the hoe to the ground to listen to “the sound of the end of waiting” (101). This is the turning point or climax of the story, symbolized by the rain that finally came on that close, sultry summer day. As if awakened from memory and grief by the coolness of the rain, washed by the steadily falling rain and “A wind of deep wet fragrance,” she is overcome as “tenderness tore and spun through her sagging body” (102). Fainting, she sinks into the flowers as if she were dead. Only when she stirs does the frantic Jamey run out of the garden to end the story. It seems evident that the rain is a metaphor for Mrs. Larkin’s change of heart, of going from grief and murderous impulse to overwhelming tenderness. But one wonders if the rain was also a cause of her transportation to a new state of being. Had the rain not fallen at just that moment, would she have brought the hoe down on Jamey’s head? Just as the rain broke the heat, it broke her grief.
Air and the smells it swirls awaken memory and identity as it does when the narrator of “Kin” revisiting scenes of her youth reflects, “I took so for granted once, and when had I left for ever, I wondered at that moment, the old soft airs of Mingo as I knew them—the interior airs that were always kitchenlike, of oil-lamps, wood ashes, and that golden scrapement off cake-papers—and outside, beyond the just-watered ferns lining the broad strong railing, the fragrances winding up through the luster of fields and the dim, gold screen of trees and the river beyond, fragrances so rich I once could almost see them, untransparent and Oriental?” (509). The remembered fragrances of this passage not only identify place, rural Mississippi and the fictional homestead at Mingo, but they return the narrator to the South and her past just as surely as the train that brought her back from the North. Palpable “like the ripple of an animal’s shining skin” (509) and the little bouquet of flowers that Aunt Beck used to give her visitors as they left, the air is a repository of memory and emotion, connecting identity to place and time, to remembrances of times past, as Marcel Proust put it.
As smell is linked to memory, so wind has long been associated with inspiration, the breathing in of the spirit, the inspiration that moves poets and artists. In Welty’s short story “The Winds” this source of inspiration is figured by the equinoctial storm that barrels in with the equinox, whirling together dream and memory and song as the young Josie falls in and out of sleep to the thunder and lightning of the storm. The story ends as the storm comes to an end and Josie hears the call of imagination that will transform her from a girl to a poet, a teller of stories, a trumpet or coronet of song.
The story begins by connecting the sound that “came stealing through the air” to imagination as Josie imagines the voices, “Choruses and cries” coming from a joyous hayride (190). It was the equinox, one of two days when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of equal length, a sign of “seasonal change” that signals Josie’s crossing over from childhood to maturity. Josie fears that the older girl across the street, Cornella, who represents that maturity, could be outside in the storm, “she’s in the equinox” where “there was a strange fluid lightning” and “soundless thunder” that shook the house “as if a big drum were being beaten” (192). Not heeding Josie’s fears, Father tells her that “’Once in an equinoctial storm . . . a man’s little girl was blown away from him’” (192), and at the end of this introductory section, Father’s own little girl has metaphorically blown away with the storm within.
Drifting in and out of sleep as the storm raged, Josie floats imaginatively through the summer and into the past in a surreal kaleidoscope of the monkey-man, fairies and their Queen, songs the turbaned cook sang, her bicycle, the strangely sentient house across the street, and thoughts of Cornella getting ready, all while an old man drives by slowly singing his sad song (194). “As though the winds were changed back into song” (195), Josie remembers hearing “Beautiful Ohio,” snippets of folk songs, and the lady musicians of the Chautauqua who played a piano, a cornet, and a violin. As the storm and story continue, Josie roils through memory and dream, music and myth until finally the storm ends with a “breaking sound, the first thunder” as she seems to hear a proclamation “in the last high note of the lady trumpeteer” (200-01).
It ends with Josie safely back in her bed, listening to the rain and a “tapping that came at her window” as if a plea, but from whom? “She could not know. Cornella, sweet summertime, the little black money, poor Biddy Felix, the lady with the horn whose lips were parted? Had they after all asked something of her? There, outside, was all that was wild and beloved and estranged, and all that would beckon and leave her, and all that was beautiful. She wanted to follow, and by some metamorphosis she would take them in—all—everyone. . . . .” This is the call of the imagination coming in the wind, the writer’s call, the beckoning of Cornella and the proclamation of the lady trumpeter. Brought on by the equinox, Josie’s identity has transitioned from a girl to a poet. In this imaginative coming of age of the writer, her epiphany is charged by the air. The fragment of a letter that Josie finds “trembling in the air” on the porch after the storm clinches the theme of change when it repeats the word “When,” “when are you coming for me?” (201). The note carried by the air calls her to the future, to the ways she will reassemble the cacophony of images and songs that whirled through her dreams.
Creating stories from her own abundance of images and songs, Welty brings magic and mystery to the places and characters she describes. Writing an air that suffuses the environment and the stories, she illustrates how the air, its fragrances, heat and humidity are part of the ecology of the South and a key element of Welty’s southern stories. In them air connects and touches the landscape, characters, plot, and themes. Complex interrelations are held together, she has shown, by the air, which represents both the real, physical world and the imagined domains of myth, dream, memory and mystery. Smell, feeling, movement, weather, seasonal changes stir and evoke moments of identity and belonging in the stories. In their winds, they carry the weight of moral conviction when they provoke action, affect characters, and turn the direction of the stories.
Notes:
1. All short stories cited are included in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty and cited parenthetically in the text.
Works Cited:
Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton
Mifflin, 2019.
-----. “Place in Fiction.” In On Writing. New York: Modern Library, 2002, 39-59.
-----. “Writing and Analyzing a Story.” In On Writing. New York: Modern Library, 2002, 29-
38.