Customer Reviews

Delta Wedding

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Reading "Delta Wedding" is like attending a family wedding and meeting all your distant relatives for the first time. You have a sense of belonging and, at the same time, a sense of being an outsider. Everyone seems to know everyone so much better than you do and you're rushing to catch up on everyone's story and sort out who is who. This is a relatively short book, but perhaps because she is primarily a short-story writer, Eudora Welty has packed this book so densely with character and detail, you will feel as though you have read a family saga of many hundred pages. The delta is recreated in such detail that you can feel the humid, misty breezes and hear the crickets chirping. The young girls through whose perspective you watch the proceedings are enchanting. Struggling to keep track of the characters forced me to go back and re-read parts of the book at times, which was, in fact, helpful in discovering important overlooked details. This is a book you can re-read many times always discovering something or someone new. Eudora Welty ranks at the very top of Southern writers and American writers in general.

When you see the title "Delta Wedding," please don't assume that Eudora Welty's novel is either a gaudy supermarket romance or a pollyanna tribute to nuptial celebration and Southern domesticity. It is about the events leading up to a wedding, and of course there is plenty of talk about dresses and cooking and dancing, but Welty, almost like Virginia Woolf's American counterpart, suffuses the atmosphere with mysterious psychological undercurrents and the foreboding aura of secrecy. We get the sense that there is more to these people's personalities than the text can convey, and we read on patiently and attentively, hoping to unravel the complexities.

The setting is the area of central Mississippi through which the Yazoo River flows, not far from Faulkner country geographically or literarily; much of the land in this particular locality is owned by a family named the Fairchilds, the dynastic centerpiece of the story. The prevalent symbol in the novel is a train called the Yellow Dog, the principal means of mass transportation that connects this part of Mississippi to the rest of the state. This is the train that brings nine-year-old Laura McRaven from Jackson to visit the Fairchilds, her cousins, on their plantation, where Dabney (that's a girl) Fairchild is engaged to be married within the week to a man twice her age named Troy Flavin.

It is also the train that, not long before the novel begins, nearly ran over Laura's uncle George as he tried to rescue his addled niece Maureen who had caught her foot in a trestle. George's wife Robbie had witnessed this near-accident and now is using it as an excuse to leave him--how could he be so selfish as to risk his life and widow her? Although this does not speak well of Robbie's character, the source of her discontent is really alienation. She knows that she is beneath George's station, and every instance in which he bonds with another Fairchild only affirms that the Fairchild mystique is a closed circle, impenetrable to her.

For a novel concerned about a wedding in the immediate present, it is deeply immersed in its characters' pasts. Laura is an only child whose mother has recently passed away, so this large house where she is surrounded by myriad cousins, aunts, and uncles, like legendary creatures whose fantastic world she has suddenly entered, is an awesome environment with a rich and intricate history. The Fairchilds are such a regional monument that the entire town cemetery is practically their very own mausoleum; Dr. Murdoch, the insensitive local physician, picks out future burial plots for Fairchilds as though he were deciding where to plant flowers in a garden.

One interesting characteristic of "Delta Wedding" is that, true to impressionistic storytelling, there is no traditional protagonist that I could identify. Laura receives much of the focus, but this is not really her story, nor is it narrated in her voice. Dabney is too shallow and spoiled to be a heroine; her older sister Shelley, a smarter and more serious girl, is not interested in being a heroine, and good for her. "Delta Wedding" does well without a hero because it is realistic fiction at its most crystalline; a sincere, authentic depiction of life in the rural deep South of the 1920s which shows a part of the country modernizing to the twentieth century even while clinging to the shadows of the past.

As a lifelong Southern girl, I find that there are three authors who can fully unveil the truth about the south: Shelby Foote, William Faulkner, and Miss Eudora Welty. This book beautifully tells the story of Laura McRaven, a young girl visiting her deceased mother's family in the Mississippi delta, ostensibly to attend Cousin Dabney's wedding. Miss Welty has a true gift for evoking the smells, tastes, and sounds of the rural south. You will feel that you have spent the summer with the Fairchild clan. Not to be missed as a benchmark in southern literature. Yankees will vow to move south.

I had to read this for a Lit of the American South class I'm taking for my M.A. I read it in two days with a study guide close at hand as well as several background articles on Welty. I'm grateful for the additional materials, but even without them I know I would have found much to praise in this book.

When I first started to read, my professor suggested compiling a list of characters and their relationships in order to assist in keeping everyone straight. This was excellent advice and allowed me to read without getting too bogged down in character names and trying to figure out who was allied with whom, etc etc.

The novel is ostensibly a portrait of one Southern family. On a broader perspective, one can view it as a deconstruction of the American South with its age-old social structures and isolationism. But it can also be taken on a much more universal level. Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in any milieu will relate to Ellen Fairchild, Laura McEvern, and Robbie Reid. Families across the world aren't so different. Robbie's statement in the novel's climax: "I didn't marry into them, I married George!" is, I thought, particularly insightful.

I honestly can't praise this book enough. It has inspired me to want to read more of Welty's work as well as other great Southern writers. An excellent introduction...

In some ways, perhaps in structure and narrative tone, it reminded me of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Again, this is one of the greatest books I have ever read!

Enjoy!

On its surface, "Delta Wedding" is a story about the preparations for a wedding by a Southern clan. As one of the characters remarks, the family takes "you in circles, whirling delightedly about [but} nothing really so very much happened." Anyone expecting a page-turner about plantation life or a thickly plotted potboiler will surely be disappointed. Instead, you must be willing to believe that "old stories, family stories, Mississippi stories [are] the same as very holy or very passionate."

The plot, such as it is, is simple: the extended Fairchild family reunites for a wedding, and everyone brings their dreams, memories, grudges, and intrigues. As with any "typical" family reunion, there is a pervasive threat of scandal that never quite pans out, and several petty incidents get blown out of proportion by the affected characters. The sheer number of kinfolk can be overwhelming at times, but they are clearly delineated (although it must be said that the black servants rarely transcend stereotype, which is undoubtedly an accurate portrayal of how a rich Southern family would have viewed the help). Welty's drawling humor gives the narrative much warmth and vitality; her ability to switch perspective seamlessly from one character to the next is truly without equal.

All in all, Welty writes beautifully of familial relations and social manners; she can truly be considered the Jane Austen of the South.

This book is deep, deep without being ponderous or erudite. It is deep like life, like an ordinary day, filled with significant events and events whose significance has yet to be found. Living in the cold northeast and not having travelled much outside New England, I loved Delta Wedding for its description of the Mississippi Delta, its people and their way of life. Reading a book like Delta Wedding makes me itch to write a novel of my own, to celebrate, to examine life in my small corner of the world the way Ms Welty does the Mississippi Delta.

Eudory Welty has created a world as hazy and ephemeral as a hot Southern afternoon. Characters and events emerge and dissipate in this novel like heat waves. There are recurring images, thoughts, and events that the characters always try but never quite succeed in understanding fully, only ravelling and unravelling. A langorous pall exists throughout, holding in tension the urge to unravel . There is so much unfathomable symbolism here, that I can't be sure if Welty is depicting the unravellable nature of the human brain or if she's just over my head. Oh, yeah -- and some folks get married.

Eudora Welty, winner of the National Medal for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize, paints a haunting, lyrical portrait of the enormous Fairchild clan at Shellmound - their rustically feudal cotton plantation in the 1920's Mississippi Delta.

The family has gathered for the wedding of Dabney, the second and prettiest daughter, (in her particular generation), and Troy Flavin, Shellmound's overseer, a ruddy-haired man who is totally unsuitable, in the eyes of various family members. However, nothing is expressed verbally to indicate their displeasure. Their attitudes, the way they live and treat each other, say it all.

It is late summer, and the festivities are underway in the semi-tropical heat which hangs heavy over the river and bayou. Nine year-old Laura McRaven, a cousin whose mother just died, arrives for the celebrations on a trial visit, of sorts, that will decide whether she is to become a permanent member of the clan, or be sent back to her non-Fairchild father in Jackson. The plot is a simple one, however, the novel's pattern of relationships are most complex. The characters' reveal themselves through their actions, conversations, soliloquies, and sometimes through the perceptions of young Laura, as they all deal with the issues which unite and divide them.

Welty's sensitive story vividly portrays the charm and customs of old Southern family gatherings of yesteryear, and explores the complexities and chaos associated with close-knit families. The author literally invites the reader, most hospitably, into Shellmound and beckons us to join the festivities.

"Delta Wedding" was Ms. Welty's first novel, published in 1946. While I thoroughly enjoyed "Delta Wedding," I do prefer Ms Welty's short stories to her novels.
JANA

Welty has a way with words that is unlike any other American author. Delta Wedding is one of those "typical" Welty books that delivers passages that you have to reread several times because they are so evocative of time, place or spirituality.

DW is set at Shellmound, the Fairchild's plantation in the Mississippi Delta, aka cotton country. Laura McRaven, a cousin to the Fairchilds' travels by train from Jackson to Fairchild and is both overwhelmed by her huge family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and lured to be accepted by them. Laura's mother had recently passed away, and she expects to be treated special as a result. Other than her first greeting by her Aunt Ellen (the matriarch of this enormous family) she is pretty much left to fend for herself. Sometimes this proves too much for her, but by the end of the novel it seems that Laura fits right in with the rest of the Fairchilds.

One theme in particular that I liked about the book is that of the view of the outsider. Laura is an outsider who both wants to be inside and remain outside. She likes her "special-ness" by being an orphan and not being part of the Fairchild clan, but she desperately wants to be part of something grand, and the Fairchilds seem like a good place to start. Ellen, who married Battle Fairchild, is from Virginia and is seen as snooty even though she is thoroughly in love with the people around her. Welty does such a wonderful job of showing someone who is so overwhelmed by her life that she can't seem to react with enthusiasm--it's as if she's a piece of drift wood in the Yazoo River. Then there is Troy Flavin who is the bride groom of the story. Not only is he from another part of Mississippi where there are hills, but he is the overseer for the plantation--he is doubly outside. He looks different than everyone else, too. Unfortunately, we don't get to see the world from Troy's perspective other than in the few statements he makes about his mother and her quilting.

I enjoyed reading DW, though I have to admit I wished it were a little shorter. I felt myself being overwhelmed by the huge cast of characters. I still don't know how many children Battle and Ellen have, and I found myself wondering who some minor characters were upon their reintroduction to the story. That said, Welty has such a talent for a turn of phrase or for the absurd, that I found myself laughing out loud and thoroughly enjoying this book.

Eudora Welty scored big-time with this dreamy, humid, dense (HUGE cast of characters), meandering but otherwise very simple story of a young girl, a cousin, whose mother has recently died. She's shipped off for the summer to the 'plantation' home of her mother's sister and a never-ending list of cousins and aunts and great aunts and boyfriends and husbands and and and and.
Nothing much happens, but we're treated to a leisurely piece of writing in all the intoxicating cadences of southern drawl, sweet as mint tea and magnolia blossoms.
A beautiful southern classic.