Customer Reviews

The Optimist's Daughter

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

At the time of her death, Eudora Welty of Mississippi was generally considered America's greatest living author. Although Welty made her reputation with and is best remembered for her remarkable short stories, she also wrote a number of novels, including THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

As seen in reviews posted here, THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER provokes a very divided response in readers. This largely due to the nature of the work, which is character rather than plot driven, and which although quite short requires a slow reading in order to develop clearly in mind. Perhaps more so than in any other work, Welty writes "below the surface" here: the story itself, which concerns a daughter who returns to her tiny Mississippi home town when her respected father dies, is quite slight--but Welty endows it with a surprising depth of meaning, transforming what would otherwise be pure character study into a sharply focused and deeply moving statement on the nature of love, loss, life, and the passage of time we must all endure.

Although written in a deceptively simple style, THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER is the mature work of a master. Given the nature of the piece, I do not think it can be much appreciated by young adults; one requires the perspective of at least middle age to fully grasp both its delicacy and beauty. But once that perspective is acquired, THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER should move immediately to the top of every serious reader's list. Strongly recommended.

The sentence from this book that best describes it is: "Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams." What a beautiful piece of writing! I am so thankful for growing older and maturing. Having done so, this book can truly be enjoyed. It is about maturing, deepening, remembering, and honoring. It is about relationship with the persons in one's life, with the past and with the future. Obtrusively thrust in the middle of all this is Fay and the Chisom family, representing all the possible ugliness, crassness, uncaring and unfeeling meanness of today's world.

I could write that there is little that happens in this book...on the surface, but as in all truly rich experiences, one has to go deeper and reflect to see the richness. After slowly enjoying the first 160 pages or so, the last 10 pages explode in complexity and interaction and meaning. Those pages comprise one of the finest endings to a novel that I have read.

It is no great surprise that Eudora Welty received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the novel The Optimist's Daughter. Welty masterfully creates a journey through the heart of a daughter who loosens her grasp on the past while embracing the future after the death of her father, a beloved judge. The author uses motifs to reflect the past versus present theme, and symbols, and metaphors to add drama to the overall plot through insights into the characters. Eudora Welty uses the "judge and jury" metaphor through out the novel to keep the theme of the novel progressing. The metaphor describes Fay's judgement of Laurel's visit during her father's hospital stay, and like wise Laurel's judgement of Fay `s resentment towards Becky. The metaphor is once again used after the funeral when the garden club, Becky's friends, sentence Fay to be the outcast of the town. This metaphor is the core of the novel's struggle for the truth. Welty uses numerous symbols to aid her writing. The author uses birds to signify death, every time a bird enters a reference to or an actual death occurs. Black also symbolizes death and demons, whether they are people or inner thoughts. The black clothes at the funeral symbolize the morning that accompanies death. Welty also uses a breadboard in the last chapter that symbolizes Laurel's love for her husband and her past. The motif of the mountains is the most apparent in the novel. Laurel's mother Becky never felt more alive than when she was in the mountains. The mountains are where Becky McKleva drew her strength, hence why she wanted to return to her beloved West Virginia Mountains when she was on her death bed. The mountains are also the key to unlocking parts of Laurels past which aid her in her quest for happiness in the future. Eudora Welty masterfully created an insight into America's growing trend of the second wife syndrome in this novel. Her motifs, metaphors, and symbols made her flashbacks into the past easier to understand, and aided in the understanding of the characters. Through the judgements of Laurel and the town Fay's character is revealed, and in the end the past is resolved and the future is just beginning.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this moving study of memory and the progression of generations is still vibrant and relevant thirty years later. Not only does it show us the ripple effect that one person's passing has on loved ones, it also shows us the changes to society which occur as older generations pass away and new generations take their place.

Welty's concern here is with values--those traditional values learned by Laurel, the daughter of a Mississippi judge, from her parents; those learned by her parents from their parents; those imparted by the town she grew up in and the people who lived there; and those which Laurel has absorbed from her life as an artist in Chicago. In her values she is in direct contrast with Fay, the judge's young second wife, a crass and selfish woman from Texas with a large, boisterous, and uneducated family--a woman whose only desire is to come out a winner. When the judge dies, Laurel returns temporarily to her old room in the family home, which, Fay takes great pains to remind her, now belongs to Fay. There, surrounded by family belongings, she is assailed by memories of her childhood, her mother, her mother's final illness, and her relationship with her father. Her pre-occupation with the past is in direct contrast with Fay's concern with the present and her future--these women clearly belong to different worlds, and only Laurel is capable of change or adaptation.

Welty's ear for dialogue is unerring. She reveals character, class, and education in her syntax and choice of vocabulary and creates conflicts from the smallest of details--a misunderstood word, an imagined slight, a presumption. The conflict is leavened by humor in many places, some of it dark, especially when Fay's "no 'count" family arrives at the funeral. The characters themselves lack subtlety, however, and the symbolism is obvious--birds and flowers are constant motifs, and in the final scene, a handmade breadboard assumes meanings for Laurel well beyond what one would expect for such a simple item. For those of us who have lived through the death of parents and the disposal of a family home, this novel has a resonance rare in modern fiction, one which transcends the period in which it was written and the southern location in which it is set. Wonderful! Mary Whipple

Hearing this story in the author's own soft, cultivated and yet mischievous Mississippi voice is the greatest treat. I liked the story itself because it was one of those things that you just got drawn into, like family gossip. You don't maybe want to take the time at first, it's hardly blood and thunder, but you just get to wondering why people are where they are in life. How did we get to this pass? All of sudden you find yourself in some little town because your father is in need of an operation , and then you are forced to be among people not your own class because your dad gave into his sexual desires at an advanced age, and the woman he's married stomps all over the family memories and does the bedroom in hooker style. Later, the younger wife's kin will arrive and collectively freak. And you (finally) take it all like a good, believing Christian, but only because you have the gift of irony and humor. And because any other response does violence to the memory of your parents. Classical virtues act like a giant levee against the red mud tide of blind pig-squealing relatives. Is it self-control at a price? Sure. God, I love this woman. May flights of angels send her to her rest.

I enjoyed taking the time to read this short novel. Welty has crafted incredibly believable characters that carry their frustrations and inanities safely in a clip-shut purse to rest on their laps. I particularly enjoyed discovering Fay; she stands for the selfish, nasty, and brutish in all of us; she is all around us, we all know someone like her.

Best of all, however, is Welty's supple gift with language. She constructs the narration with a maturity of style that is difficult to describe. She delves into the lives of the characters, their pasts, their silent struggles, and reveals it with respect. It's as if she were handling a rare vase newly unearthed from a dig, turning it in the light, pointing out the scratches and cracks and always admiring the thing.

This is a character novel. The plot is secondary to the lives of the characters. Inside the story, the gossamer trace of humanity in the characters left me with a tickle--a flutter--and it made me think about things in my life in comparison.

Welty's Pulitzer winning novel, set in the South of 30 years ago, examines the physical mechanics of the funeral process, while placing the human heart under the microscope of social and filial stress. Laurel--a war widow deprived of the experiences and joys of normal married life, rushes back to Missisippi from her Chicago job and lifestyle. This devoted only child insists on her place at her father's bedside, as he undergoes eye surgery--a convenient medical smokescreen for the unmentionable killer: Cancer. How can a confirmed Optimist handle this grim reality?

The storyline develops in the aftermath of his inevitable death, but the battle lines are drawn even before he quietly expires: between Laurel--the daughter of beloved Judge Clint McKelva and his adored wife, Becky--and Fay, the utterly selfish and emotionally crude second wife/young step-mother. Is it seemly to be disputing arrangements before the man is even enterred?

What had the judge been thinking--to desecrate his wife's memory by bringing that crass Texas woman into the big house where Miss Becky was enshrined in neighborhood memory? Laurel suffers deep emotional trials as she tries to maintain her dignity at the Viewing--held in the Judge's study--then during funeral and graveside solemnities. But conditions deteriorate, as bruised egos and grieving hearts are bared in a shocking public display. The interlopers have no sense of decency or compassion for the sincere mourners who rally around their native daughter.

There is brief respite for Laurel when Fay suddenly departs with her hick kin; yet being alone with kind neighbors and loving bridesmaids does not really help her penetrate the veneer of faith in her childhood memories. How can Laurel rewrite the Past so as to validate her own bleak future? Like the bird trapped inside the house, will she be able to break out on her own, to accept her parent's foibles along with their love, while honoring their role in her life? This is more of a psychological piece, with admittedly little plot, but quiet insight into the tapestry of myths and lies which we accept as our heritage.

In Eudora Welty's book, The Optimist's Daughter, Laurel Hand, the main character, notices her father's clock has stopped. Her father has, of course, just died, and for Laurel this means that time has become an elastic proposition. If any 20th century author can be said to have the power to split a moment, it is Eudora Welty.

The Optimist's Daughter is a study in grief and in love that carefully avoids cliché. Arriving from Chicago, Laurel watches her father let go of life after a seemingly successful operation. Meanwhile, his second wife, a younger woman named Fay who lacks the capacity for any kind of introspection, stages a display of raw anger. When they return for the funeral, Laurel watches again as the eccentric town, and Fay's even more eccentric family, converge upon the coffin of Mount Salus's first citizen.

Welty, who spent most of her life in Mississippi, has an ear for small town vernacular, and dialogue plays an important part in the book. Yet she never permits the narrative to travel along familiar lines, and often the characters speak out into thin air, as if to themselves. Laurel's distinctive silence marks the minutes before she is able to confront the past, which she does once she is alone, examining the contents of the house.

A storm, a trapped bird, and the fading correspondence of her parents' bring about the catharsis that she requires. She begins to understand the fallibility, the depth, and the complex nature of their love. `"Why did I marry a coward?"' her mother asks while dying, and Welty, as Laurel, continues - `then had taken his hand to help him bear it.'

Of all the writer's precepts, perhaps the most difficult is simplicity, of knowing when to shut up. Welty walks a fine line between boredom and profundity at times, but as Laurel goes about erasing the traces of Fay's influence (the nail polish on the desk) and her own past (she burns her mother's letters and confronts her personal losses), we sense in her a woman of uncommon maturity. There are no literary flourishes in The Optimist's Daughter, which means that every word on the page is carefully used. Take your time with this book - it bears re-reading.

This book is the conclusion of Welty's thematic trilogy of Southern family life: while "Delta Wedding" concerns a family gathering for a marriage ceremony and "Losing Battles" relates the events surrounding a family reunion celebrating a matriarch's 90th birthday, "The Optimist's Daughter" is about a funeral. Like her previous works, this last of Welty's novels deals primarily with emotions rather than actions, with character rather than plot. Unlike any of her previous novels, however, this short work has both feet planted firmly in the last half of the twentieth century.

Laurel, a widow not entirely recovered from the loss of her husband many years earlier, returns home and finds herself completely without family. Her father dies, leaving in his wake the appropriately named Fay, a vulgar second wife who represents everything Laurel isn't and her mother wasn't. The rest of the novel describes the various attempts by Fay and by the friends of her father to reshape their recollections of his life to their own needs; a particular humorous scene describes four elderly neighborhood women criticizing both Fay and the deceased--more to affirm their own sense of superiority than to comfort Laurel, who endures every word of their conversation. After Fay leaves town for a few days with her trailer-trash relatives (who cause quite a stir when they show up for the funeral), Laurel is left alone to wander through her childhood home and wonder about her family's past. By the end of the novel, Laurel realizes that neither Fay nor her father's neighbors can take away the only things left in her life: her memories of her parents and her future.

Because of its leisurely pacing, this book isn't for everyone. To say that nothing happens is not entirely accurate: although it's a short book, it's difficult to summarize in even a few paragraphs. It is beautifully written, it's easy to read, and the novel has richly drawn characters--but some readers may feel the novel itself lacks character. Once I finished the book, I was not sure whether or not I liked it, and I don't feel it's her best. At times the book almost collapses under the weight of its own heavy-handed symbols: the birds, the mountains, the thunderstorm, the breadboard. The novel repays a few hours of reflection and rereading, however: passages that are seemingly unrelated to the main narrative eventually make sense. What saves "The Optimist's Daughter," in the end, is both its ability to haunt the reader and Welty's sure-handed understanding of humanity.

"The Optimist's Daughter" bears two of the great hallmarks of Eudora Welty's writing: meticulously recorded conversation and an emphasis on how "stories" shape our lives. Laurel, a young woman who left the South many years ago to pursue a life in Chicago, returns when her father is suddenly taken ill and requires an operation in New Orleans. There she waits out her father's long attempt at recovery in the company of her stepmother, a self-absorbed woman younger than herself with whom she has nothing in common. After her father dies, the two women accompany the body of her father, the Judge, back to her childhood home in a small town in Mississippi. Prior to the funeral a visitation takes place, and here we hear the authentic voices of all the townspeople as well as those of the Texas clan of the stepmother Fay who has claimed that all her relatives are dead. As each of these visitors pays condolences to Laurel the entire town becomes fleshed out in the words that each uses to describe his or her relationship with the Judge. Whole characters come fully to life in a single line of dialog. On the day after the funeral, some of the neighborwomen get together with Laurel to review the funeral (and discuss the stepmother). Everyone feels dissatisfied with how the funeral came off--all feel slightly uncomfortable with their own performance and those of the other mourners--demonstrating the awkwardness and stress of all funerals and the inadequacy of most people to express their true feelings of loss in these circumstances.

Throughout the book, we see the importance of the "stories" that we tell about ourselves. Already at the funeral the townspeople begin to tell stories about the Judge, exaggerating his courage and turning him into a community hero. Laurel objects to the town rewriting her father's history, but is powerless to stop them, as her father ceases to be an individual and becomes a story. Fay has worked hard to convince herself and the rest of the world that she comes from better origins than is the actual case. She is a difficult character to care about with her selfishness, distance, anger, and envy, but, as we see and hear the stories of the members of the family she has tried to distance herself from, we begin at least to understand better why she is the way she is. On her last night in her childhood home, Laurel looks through the letters and papers of her long-dead mother, who was beloved by the town, her husband, and her daughter. Through these stories (based on Welty's own memories of her mother's childhood home in West Virginia and on her mother's stories of growing up there) Laurel comes to a deeper understanding of both of her parents, their marriage, and herself.

The final theme in this simple, but profound book is the deep isolation of individuals, even when surrounding by family and friends. Laurel's father appears to have been deeply isolated emotionally despite his marriages to two women to whom he was devoted, and he draws into himself again as death approaches. Laurel's mother became increasingly isolated as blindness and mental disintegration drew her into her own world of pain and anger. Fay is loved neither by her family or the town to which her husband has brought her. Her only connection was to her husband and her anger at his death, which she sees as his desertion of her, becomes understandable. Laurel, long a widow after a brief marriage, has chosen to continue living alone in the city to which her husband took her, isolated from the community of love in which she grew up. Ultimately, however, Laurel discovers that memories can bind us to the past and prevent our moving forward. Before leaving her childhood home forever, Laurel burns all of her mother's papers. Having thus broken the hold of the past, she is now free to create a life of her own. Home will now be wherever she is.