Family Dramas in Southern Literature
Eudora Welty’s popular short story, “Why I Live at the PO,” is all about family jealousies and quarrels, the infighting between the narrator and the other members of the family—her Mama, Papa-Daddy, Uncle Rondo, and her sister, Stella-Rondo. The story begins with the return home of Stella-Rondo and her “adopted” daughter after separating from Mr. Whitaker (whom the narrator claims she knew first). As the narrator snippily remarks, “She’s always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away” (43). The story ends with the narrator leaving home in a huff, taking her miscellaneous possessions, including the radio, sewing machine motor, and preserves she had put up, and setting up housekeeping at the Post Office she tends. Like small-town gossip, the story tells us something about the emotional energies of rural Mississippi—that they are personal and grounded in place. Here as in Welty’s longer study of family dynamics, Delta Wedding, the family is synonymous with the town: “My family are naturally the main people in China Grove. . .” (52). Although the family in “Why I Live at the PO” would not be classified as genteel like the Fairchild family of Delta Wedding, they do form the upper-crust of this little Mississippi town: Papa-Daddy used his influence with the government to secure the narrator’s position at the post office and Uncle Rondo is a “certified pharmacist” (45). While the feuds seem to be contained within this raucous family, the local Black population is not immune to them and is drawn in when the narrator commandeers a Black girl to cart her belongings to the PO in nine trips of her express wagon
Welty’s humorous story sets the stage for my exploration of tales about family and what they tell us about the South. Most notably, Welty’s novel Delta Wedding and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis illustrate how the idea of the South and the idea of the family are intertwined, positing an ideal that connects genteel Southern families with place and history that William Faulkner explodes in Absalom, Absolom! In her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginning, Welty reflects on the importance of family in her fiction: “I’ve been writing about the structure of the family” and “human relationships” since beginning to write fiction (86, 87). Curious about the effects of modernization on the Southern family, Peter Taylor likewise examines the family in his writing. As poet and critic Andrew Lytle put it in 1957, “’Mr. Taylor is the only American writer, and indeed to my knowledge the only writer in English, whose subject is the dislocation and slow destruction of the family as an institution’” (qtd in McAlexander 5). Taylor admits that “The family was very important politically here,” and includes William Faulkner, whose great novels, Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and the Fury dramatize the disintegration of the Southern family. In his assessment of the importance of family in Southern literature, Taylor comments, “Faulkner and the other writers of his generation too were discovering what it was like to be a Southerner, what it was like to be an American and at the same time a Southerner” (Thompson 167). While the novels under review here revolve around family— who counts as “family” and the familial tensions punctuated by quarrels, jealousies, betrayals, and resolutions—they also reveal and interrogate the role of place in personal and familial identity. They understand not only how “Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story” (Welty, Place in Fiction, 53-54), but also the peculiar geographic and emotional landscapes of the South. Taylor defines the Southern temper as the “strong family tradition. . . . A sense of community, of knowing who they are” (Thompson 168). This is what Welty relays in the “complexities of the everyday, of the family” (Delta 206), that Taylor more ambiguously sees as fragmented, and that miscegenation and racism disrupt in Faulkner’s family tragedy.
The plot lines of these three novels begin with journeys to place: Laura McRaven’s train trip on the Yellow Dog to Fairchild, Mississippi, to attend her cousin Dabney’s wedding; the summons to Memphis that Phillip Carver receives from his middle-aged sisters; and the Sutpen family’s walk out of the hills to the Tidewater plantations where young Tom “even before he had had time to say what he came for, [was told by the Black butler] never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back” (Absolom 232). These plot devices presage the ways that journeying and place impinge on identity--confirming, unsettling, or reimagining a sense of self and belonging.
The opening scenes of Delta Wedding introduce nine-year-old Laura, the Delta, the sprawling Fairchild family, and Shellmound, the family home, its “tall, white, wide frame house with a porch all around” (6). The narrator quickly sketches the Delta, its flat land, red sunsets, bayou, and Delta buzzards “that seemed to wheel as wide and high as the sun” (3), the cotton fields, and the town of Fairchild where Laura’s mother is buried. Laura is greeted by “five or six cousins” who came to meet her and then by the rambling Fairchild family--the cousins, aunts and uncles, as well as Roxie, Howard, Pinchy, and the other Black servants.
The drama of this novel revolves around the ways various members of the family prepare for Dabney’s wedding, the visits with the Great Aunts, the food, the talk that goes on among family members, and the revelations of family history that goes back before the Civil War. Concurrently, the novel keeps circling back to the incident at the train trestle when Uncle George saved his niece Maureen from the oncoming Yellow Dog and prompted his wife Robbie to run away from him, angry that neither he nor the rest of the Fairchilds saw the danger that they put him in.
A Summons to Memphis begins with the narrator recalling his move from Nashville, the Upper South, to Memphis, the Deep South, when he was a teenager, folding into the journey a description of place, an introduction to family, and the theme of betrayal that will run through this novel, beginning with how his father had been “deceived and nearly ruined financially by his closest friend . . . one Mr. Lewis Shackelford” (4). The narrator, Phillip Carver, follows up this recollection of the past with the initiating plot device, the summons by his middle-aged sisters to return to Memphis to deal with their widowered father’s proposed marriage to Clara Stockwell. The novel will move in and out of the past as Phillip tries to understand and come to terms with the family dynamics that have left all the Carver siblings unmarried and the family fragmented.
And the chronology of Thomas Sutpen’s life follows his journey to combat the humiliation he felt at that mansion door by those who had divided the country because of “what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own” (221). Understanding that “You got to have land and niggers and a fine house,” he went to the West Indies to become rich. From there, he emerged on the Mississippi landscape “out of a quiet thunderclap” with slaves, a French architect, and a design to acquire the status “where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it” (261). Moving in and out of time and versions of history, the novel follows the unraveling of that design, beginning when Sutpen sets aside his first wife and their child, Charles Bon, because she has a strain of Negro rather than the Spanish blood her father had suggested. As Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon sift through the letters and narratives of Sutpen’s life, they discover the multiple betrayals of fathers and family that bring Sutpen’s dream to a fiery end and Quentin’s unconvincing repetition that he does not hate the South.
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One of the questions these novels ask is who gets to be “family” and what family means. In Delta Wedding the biological Fairchilds, including the large family of Battle and Ellen Fairchild who are expecting their tenth child, and the generations of uncles and aunts who gather for the wedding are counted as family. Even the dead Uncle Denis is spoken of as if he were still present. Less sure is the situation of Maureen, the intellectually challenged daughter of Denis and Virgie Lee Fairchild, herself “not of sound mind” (39), who is being raised by Battle and Ellen at Shellmound. Although Laura is family since her mother was a Fairchild, she is initially excluded from being a member of the wedding party because her mother is dead. After the wedding and at the end of the novel, after Laura was able to stand in for Lady Clare who became ill, Aunt Ellen tells her, “’Laura, there’s something to tell you. We want you to stay, to live with us at Shellmound. Until you go to Marmion [the home she will inherit from her mother]’” (312). Replaying a history of casually adopted families, when Great Aunt Mac raised Battle, George, and Denis after their parents’ “dreadful trouble” (87), their father killed in a duel and their mother dying of a broken heart, the ethos of the Fairchild family is to fold others in, to include them in the family. Although they are clannish and feel the difference between themselves and others, their tendency is to include others in their little world.
This ethos is challenged to some extent by Robbie (“little Robbie Reid” [30]), Uncle George’s wife, and by Troy Flavin, Dabney’s husband-to-be and the overseer of Shellmound’s cotton fields and laborers. Both come from the working classes and the differences between them and the Fairchilds are felt by both sides of the economic-cultural divide. Aunt Partheny, one of the Black women associated with the estate, calls Troy “’dat high-ridin’ low-born Mr. Troy’” (172), and Shelley, Dabney’s older sister, muses that Troy sees Dabney as “a sure thing” (112). Aunt Mac snidely comments to Robbie, who had been working in the town store, Fairchild’s Store, when George fell for her, “’Of course you only married George for his money,’” to which Robbie responded, “’No, ma’am. I married him because he begged me’” (211). While some of the Fairchild clan see Robbie and Troy as marrying for money, to these two outsiders the Fairchilds appear self-centered, spoiled, and “’too close’” (185), people who do not appreciate the beauty of homemade quilts or how to make light bread. Robbie speaks up, “’You’re all a spoiled stuck-up family that thinks nobody else is really in the world!’” (215). But in the end, after the wedding, Robbie and George have made up and Dabney and Troy are sweetly married. The outsiders have been gathered into the fold.
More problematic is the relation of the Black members of the household and plantation to the Fairchild family, “our people” as Ellen puts it when she encounters Pinchy in the woods (90). Wishing she had brought “a little Negro” to carry her umbrella on this walk, Ellen betrays competing attitudes, that they are “our people” yet are meant to do things for the white Fairchilds. The commotion of Dabney’s wedding displays these mixed attitudes. When Ellen declares that she is going to make a cake, she tells Roxie, the Black woman in charge of the kitchen, “Get out of the kitchen, Roxie. We want to make Mr. George and Miss Robbie a cake.’” Roxie understands that first she will need to grate the coconut and lemon, get the oven hot, and blanche the almonds so that Ellen can “make” the cake (29). In another instance, Shelley is sent out to invite the aged Aunt Partheny to the wedding, and yet the family suspects that Parthenia knows the whereabouts of Ellen’s lost garnet pin. And of course, as the wedding approaches, the household staff are busy cutting up the chicken for the salad that Aunt Primrose “made,” squeezing the fruit for the punch, ironing the napkins, building the altar, and stringing lights (272). Whether from curiosity or affection, during the wedding “All the windows were full of black faces, but the family servants stood in a ring inside the parlor walls,” Aunt Partheny “at the front of all the Negroes,” a part of but separate from the family celebrations (277). After the wedding Howard, one of the staff, is making the rounds of the garden with Ellen who gently gives him directions for pruning and watering while her children, Bluet and Ranny, play with his little boy. She can hear her daughter India laughing with Roxie in the kitchen, and Battle instructing “a back yard full of Negroes” on how to repair Marmion for Dabney and Troy (298-99). White and black in this novel’s family live and laugh in close proximity, their separation is always felt by who tells others what to do. As Patricia Yaeger notes, “Blacks and whites commingle” in the novel, “But African Americans can always be separated out in Welty’s story, not only because of the constancy and degree of their labor but because of their habit of fading away,” of going “from a character into an atmosphere” (68).
In A Summons to Memphis, the move from Nashville to Memphis initiated by Father’s betrayal by his friend and business partner, Lewis Shackelford, reveals the fractured nature of the Carver family. As Phillip muses in his notebook, “Perhaps it wasn’t the move but only my father’s insistence that the family should be moved intact . . .” (21), including the “three black servants” who apparently were considered not to have their own family or home (29), that led to the shattering rather than the expansion of the family. The beaus of the two young Carver girls are run off by Father. The “understanding” between Betsy and Wyant Brawley was broken off with the move (37), and once they are established in Memphis, Jo’s beau was dismissed by Father because he was related to Shackelford. Out of revenge, to “divide him forever from his two sons” (188), the sisters conspire to double down on scaring away Phillip’s love, Clara Price, and to assist Georgie, the oldest son, in going to WWII, where he will be killed (104). As well as affecting the lives of the children, the move to Memphis changed the tenor of the parents’ marriage, and for thirty years Mother “seldom [got] into her daytime clothes” (28). After their mother died and their father’s dating became serious, the sisters summon Phillip from New York to prevent Father’s marriage to Clara Stockwell, concocting another round of revenge in the family. Throughout, the novel reveals how the family was reduced rather than expanded: “None of his four children, you see, has ever married” (12), Phillip having escaped to New York, books, and an unmarried, serene relationship with Holly Kaplan.
What counts for family in Absolom, Absolom! is more complex and troubling in the ways it hinges on race and class. Hoping to realize his ambitions, Thomas Sutpen marries the daughter of his wealthy employer in Haiti, but “he repudiated that first wife and that child when he discovered that they would not be adjunctive to the forwarding of the design” (262). In Mississippi, he marries Ellen Coldfield, who is sufficiently white, respectable, and Protestant. She bears a daughter, Judith, and a son Henry, who will kill his sister’s fiancé--his best friend, and their half-brother Charles Bon--and then disappear. Seeking a white male heir to carry on the family line after Ellen’s death, Sutpen proposes to her younger sister, Rosa, that “they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry” (177). Still trying to build a dynasty, after the Civil War he seduces the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, his handyman. When he insults her for bearing a daughter, sneering, “’Well, Milly, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable’” (185; 286), Jones gets his revenge by killing him with a rusty scythe (183). Despite his efforts to create a family to meet his ambitions, first respectable and then just white and male, at the end of the novel only the Black grandson of Charles Bon, Jim Bond (Bon), remains. A simple-minded, “hulking young light-colored negro man” (370), he haunts the area after the family home goes up in flames with the remaining family members inside, a deranged Henry who had hidden there for almost four years, and Clytemnestra, Sutpen’s daughter with a Black slave. Focused on a design to achieve respectability, to never have to go around to the back door, Sutpen sacrifices family in an aberration of patriarchy marred by greed, rape, incest, bigamy, miscegenation, and murder. This is a story not of kinship but of betrayal and the violation of the meaning of family.
Family in these novels is both a loose, expansive term that includes kin and those who marry into the family, and one that excludes those who pose emotional and political threats to its (patriarchal) identity-- beaus and Blacks. Unraveling the meaning of family, moving in and out of time, memory, and perspective constitutes the emotional and structural matter of the novels. Welty uses different points of view in Delta Wedding to think about the relations between family members; Taylor’s narrator writes in his journal, imaginatively returns to earlier scenes, and talks out with Holly the meaning of his relationship to his father; and Faulkner fuses memories, narratives, letters, and imaginative reenactments of the past to tell the story of the Sutpen family and the narrative of the South it tells.
A key location in these novels and symbol of family, home and its artifacts is important to understanding the “emotional geographies” of the characters (McAlexander 8). As Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling posit, home is “an idea and an imaginary that is imbued with feelings” and connections to power and identity. As a “spatial imaginary,” home is a space, a place, where people work out and exemplify personal emotions, a sense of self, and cultural meanings, like what it means to be a Southerner (9, 11). Home is also the place where gendered and raced power relations are worked out. In Delta Wedding, Welty writes, “In the Delta, the land belonged to the women—they only let the men have it” and the houses that sat upon it. For this favor, the women exacted adoration and “small sacrifice by small sacrifice” from their men (190-91). Seeing through the “pleading mask” that the Fairchild women wore, Robbie understands the ways the gendered power dynamics are attached to place at least since the Civil War and possibly back to “the Indian times” when the Fairchild women “ran the household and had everything at their fingertips” (190). Inheritance and much of the action of the novel revolves around its women and girls. One of the homes that will follow a matrilineal line of inheritance, Marmion, that Dabney and Troy will occupy, empty since it was built in 1890, will go to Laura once she is old enough, since it was to go to her mother.
Homes and homeplaces like Shellmound, the Grove, and Marmion are markers of identity, place, and history. The fields, the town, the homes, the artifacts like the nightlight that lit Aunt Mashula as she waited for her husband to return from the War, and family portraits hanging on the walls, “tangible images of rootedness and grounded community” (Blunt and Dowling 209), constantly remind the Fairchilds of their past and their sense of belonging to the land and of the land belonging to them. Home, like the South itself, is a place where the Fairchild family can expect to live out their lives, belonging to it even if they move to another location or to an afterlife in the family plot: “And it was as if they had considered her [Laura’s mother] all the time as belonging, in her life and in her death . . . as belonging here; they considered Shellmound the important part of life and death too” (176).
Belonging to place, or rather not belonging, is a key in A Summons to Memphis to the fracturing of family and identity and to the sense of lives ruined. The removal from Nashville and the readjustment to Memphis, Phillip Carver reflects, “required a tremendous effort for us all and was a strain one way or another on everybody” (4). Uprooted from the familiar home territory and the accompanying sense of family and identity, Phillip blames his father, feels betrayed by him: “. . . I said to Mother once during those years that I thought Father had ruined all our lives, except his own—by removing us to Memphis just when he did” (45). Having come from the more genteel Upper South of Nashville to the rambunctious Deep South of Memphis, Phillip and the family had to “cope with the peculiar institutions of the place” (4): “For Mother it meant a total alteration of her role within our family and at the same time a kind of personal liberation for which she was not prepared . . .” (21). For the adolescent Phillip it meant a “displacement of manners and social milieu” (Robinson 57) signified by changing his clothes, hair, and speech to try to fit in. Though he adapted superficially to Memphis life with the help of his friend Alex Mercer, the young Phillip had already begun to separate himself from the family identity by collecting “rare books and first editions” (45), a passion that would take him out of the South and to Manhattan and a world apart from his father. In the end, the family finds itself in the Memphis situation of elder widowers courting a new wife that they had earlier decried as “vulgar and utterly ridiculous” (4), the overly made-up old-maid sisters out to prevent their widowered father from remarrying.
Although the Carver family has a historic family seat at Thornton, Tennessee, and the family farm where all the children had been born, Father followed his “longing” and “aspiring [that became] craving” (162) and removed the family to Nashville and then to Memphis to escape the calumny of his betrayal by Shackelford. While the family itinerary is marked by moves and a succession of homes, Father always brought the wardrobes that had been made in Thornton with him. Phillip muses, “And it is the wardrobes more than anything else I remember about all the physical removes in subsequent years” (141). While the wardrobes represent the idea of home (Thornton or Nashville) wherever the family lives, with their movability they also represent the family’s detachment from a central home base and family cohesiveness. As a sign of their independence from the father who had ruined their chances at marriage, the sisters, both successful realtors, moved out of the Memphis home and bought separate homes until they returned to their Father’s home after his threat of remarriage had subsided: “My sisters’ two houses are only a few blocks apart on the very same street and are almost identical” (109). Phillip moved to Manhattan, where he lived with Holly Kaplan and only visited Memphis or, once he reconciled with his father talked to him on the telephone. There is an unsettled quality about the Carver family, marked by their moves and the effects of displacement on the individual members and the family unit that were prompted by the insistence and interference of the father.
The heritage that the Fairchilds and the Carvers claim, the old homesteads that represent their place in the South, is just the sort of thing that Thomas Sutpen lacks and tries to coerce out of the Mississippi wilderness. Having been born where everyone lived in log cabins “boiling with children” (221) and snubbed when he was sent to that Tidewater back door, Sutpen determined to have for himself the land, slaves, and “that smooth white house and that smooth white brass-decorated door” (233), all the accoutrement that would signify his station as a gentleman, a man of means. He commandeered the French architect to design his mansion and outfitted it with “chandeliers and mahogany, and rugs” that he procured from who knew where, perhaps stolen from a steamboat (43). And then he needed the right kind of family to live in his mansion to assure his place in genteel Southern society; “he needed respectability, the shield of a virtuous woman” and an “unimpeachable father-in-law” (14-15; 51). And so, he made a deal to marry Ellen Coldfield that would profit both himself and his prospective father-in-law.
For a time, his design seemed to work; he had Sutpen’s Hundred, and when the War came, he was made a colonel. But he was never a gentleman; he did not have “character,” as his actions toward his family and the fall of the house of Sutpen painfully illustrate. The shift in his fortunes begins when Charles Bon, his son by his first wife, and the secret he represents arrive on the scene. Although Henry has a quasi-incestuous relationship with Bon, copying his style and manners and complicating family relations, he will kill the brother who threatens to sleep with their sister, not because of any taboos regarding incest or bigamy since Bon was already married, but because of the taint of miscegenation. As Charles taunts Henry, “’I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry’” (358). Henry may kill Charles, leaving his sister a widow before she is a bride, but it is Charles and the other Black members of the family who get their revenge for being shunned by Sutpen: “So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon’s mother and Charles Bon’s grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, don’t it?” Shreve asks Quentin as they try to make sense of the family narrative (377-78). Although the novel puts patriarchy and its demands on display through the character of old Tom, Shreve understands the real force of gendered politics when Bon’s mother asserts her revenge and power to bring down the white Sutpen line.
The white house that Sutpen had bet his future on collapsed, first with the privations of the war, the South betraying its people as the fathers (Sutpen, Coldfield, Jones) betrayed their families. While the men were away at the war, only the women—Judith, Clytie, and Rosa—with Wash Jones to do the heavy lifting, were left to squeeze out an existence on the “ruined land” (157). The soldiers who sought to protect their homeland, the South and its way of life, like Henry whose “fierce provincial pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity” (96), were transformed, degraded, and betrayed. Even though Thomas Sutpen thought he could rebuild and reconstruct his family for a third time, his crude proposal to Rosa and his seduction of Wash Jones’s granddaughter signal the end of the design, his life, and the house. In the climactic scene when Rosa goes out to the house, she watches as it goes up in flames with Henry and Clytie inside, leaving only James Bond howling in the night: “. . . the house collapsed and roared away, and there was only the sound of the idiot negro left.” All that was left of the house that Sutpen had built were “those four gutted chimneys” (376) and a Black great-grandson he never knew and never would have recognized.
Absolom, Absolom! ends not with a wedding, or reunion, or even reconciliation as we see in the tales by Welty and Carver. Instead, it ends with revenge and the betrayals of pride, with a violated family and degraded South, with Quentin repeating after the tale of Sutpen and the South have been tied together, “I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” (378). But as readers of Faulkner’s other great novel of family dynamics, The Sound and the Fury, know, Quentin will commit suicide in the year that he and Shreve pieced together the Sutpen family tale.
If as Welty asserts, “the home tie is the blood tie” (Place 57), these novels reveal not only the blood lines and the memory in the blood of place and identity, but the quantity of blood expended to maintain the imagined space of the South. Through these novels, the South is represented as an ideal of kin and community that becomes fragmented when families move away from inherited places to locations where belonging becomes more tenuous. More tragically, Faulkner imagines a South and the family in ruins when ideas of home, kinship, and community are betrayed, violated, and remade into false ideals to justify a racist patriarchy. As Faulkner told his editor Hal Smith, “the theme of the novel ‘is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man’s family’” (qtd in Westling, 139). Land, home, family—all are connected in these tales of the South.
Works Cited:
Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling. Home, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2022.
Faulkner, William. Absolom, Absolom! New York: Vintage Books, 1936.
Robinson, David M. “Summons from the Past [Review of A Summons to Memphis]. Critical Essays on Peter Taylor, ed. Hubert H. McAlexander. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993, 55-60.
Taylor, Peter. A Summons to Memphis. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.
Thompson, Barbara. “Interview with Peter Taylor” (1987). Conversations with Peter Taylor, ed. Hubert H. McAlexander. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.
Welty, Eudora. Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt, 1946.
-----. “Place in Fiction.” On Writing. New York: Modern Library, 2002, 39-59.
-----. One Writer’s Beginnings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Westling, Louise. “Thomas Sutpen’s Marriage to the Dark Body of the Land.” Faulkner and the Natural World, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1999, 126-`42.
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.