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Welty’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a story of a southern girl who goes back to her home in New Orleans due to the death of her father and proves completely unable to cope with his passing.  She quarrels vehemently  with her step-mother, until she begins to realize that she will not find peace until she deals with her own past and what it means for her father to be gone.

One of Welty’s favorite subjects to write about is the art of communication.  More specifically, the multiple levels of communication and the culture of communication in the South.  She enjoys positioning characters in such a way that they are forced to deal with the Southern culture of understanding what is not said.  And, the consequences of stating exactly what one truly thinks.

Simply put, Welty studies the ambiguity of the South—what people say and what they don’t say. What people perceive and what they don’t perceive. It is important when reading Welty that you cannot always trust her narrators. They too can be ambiguous, and say things they don’t really mean.   In this way, the reader experiences much of the same communication problems and errors that the characters themselves experience.  While she writes about human perception in a number of her stories, Welty, indeed, does it best in The Optimist’s Daughter.

Quote from The Optimist’s Daughter:

“The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.’

“For a long time Judge McKelva was seen as a reassuring figure by the many who knew and liked him. They looked at him, with his wife Becky and daughter Laurel, and they felt good: that was how well-bred people in Mount Salus, Mississippi, to be. When, yen years after his wife’s death, the Judge marries silly young Fay everyone is disconcerted: but a lonely old man can be allowed at least one folly. For Laurel, however, her father’s remarriage is a difficult an puzzling betrayal. Years later, circumstance brings Laurel back from Chicago: first to New Orleans, then to Mount Salus and the old house of her childhood. It is only here, alone with her memories, that Laurel can finally come to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.”

Buy The Optimist’s Daughter.

Read our bio of Eudora Welty and peruse her other books.