Customer Reviews

The Robber Bridegroom

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

 

 

A beautifully written blend of fairy tale imagery, evocative prose, and Southern folklore. Welty's mastery of colloquial speech and her rich descriptions of the Natchez wilderness are the high points in my mind. A short novel with a somewhat lively plot, diligent readers shouldn't have a problem finishing this one off in one or two sittings. Overall, I found it to be a very promising first novel by the Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Eudora Welty borrowed from the old Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Robber Bridegroom' to create this story that is part fairy tale, part historical fantasy, and very strange. Instead of old Europe, the action takes place in the southern United States. The old characters are all there: the innocent daughter, the merchant father, the irascible thief who becomes the 'bridegroom', and some new people have been added. A wicked stepmother, a boy named Goat, and an Indian tribe are just a few of the extras.

Apparently some of the characters, like Mike Fink and the Harp brothers, were real people, or at least were part of American folklore. Welty combines old world and new world fairy tales to create something completely unique. If you know the story of the Robber Bridgroom, you'll see how Welty has slyly snuck in very subtle similarities (the bird in the cage), and you'll be astonished at how much the ending was changed from the original story.

The book moves with rapid speed through larger than life situations. The Indians cooked and ate the merchant's family and he and his daughter escaped, THEN he married the evil Salome, THEN some guy tried to kill him while he slept with his bag of gold, THEN Lockhart carried his daughter away naked, THEN... It becomes almost too frantic, and you might need to go back a few pages now and again to make sure you didn't miss something. It's probably not the best introduction to Welty, but it's one of her most colorful works. For an elegantly written, surrealist fairy tale, you can't do much better than this.

He has long blond hair, carries a talking raven on his shoulder, and both outwits and outfights stupid but wily giants. Who is he? If you guessed "Odin", you've been reading the same sagas and folk tales I have -- and specifically the Twice-Told Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- but the answer this time is Jamie Lockhart the Robber Bridegroom, the abductor of Rosamond, beautiful princess-like daughter of the rich planter Clement Musgrove, hated by her wicked-witch step-mother Salome. Others have recognized the folk-tale roots of Eudora Welty's first published novel, most recently the voracious reader and reviewer Herr Schneider; whether those roots are German or Norse makes little difference, though I'd argue that the secondary characters in this narrative - Little Harp, Goat, and Mike Fink - are trolls pure and simple. Younger readers, if there are any, might put the cart before the horse and compare this 1942 fantasy with the Coen Brothers Southern Gothic film "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" In fact, there are plenty of homegrown 19th C American antecedents for The Robber Bridegroom, especially the almost-forgotten "Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi" by Baldwin.

This is a rollickingly funny book, no matter what else one might claim to find in it. It's a comic antidote to all the dead-serious mythification of William Faulkner, an intentional (I think) counterweight to the exaggerated self-reverence of Southern culture. And it's short! About the length of a good viking romance.

Clement Musgrove, the planter father, is a curiously honorable man in a world where the only dishonor is getting thwarted in your rascality. Near the end of the tale, when everything has gone from worse to worst, Clement sets himself in the middle of a circle of stones and delivers a three-page monologue of runic wisdom. Here's an excerpt:

""What exactly is this now?... What is the place and time? Here are all possible trees in a forest, and they grow as tall and as great and as close to one another as they could ever grow in the world. Upon each limb is a singing bird, and across this floor, slowly and softly and forever moving in profile, is always a beast, one of a procession, weighted low with his burning coat, looking from the yellow eye set in his head.... But the time of cunning has come, and my time is over for cunning is of a world I will have no part in. ... Men are following men down the Misssissippi, hoarse and arrogant by day, wakeful and dreamless by night at the unknown landings. A trail leads like a tunnel under the roof of this wilderness. Everywhere the traps are set. Why? And what kind of time is this, when all ids first given, then stolen away?"" Snorri Sturlison couldn't have said it better. And no sooner is Clement's monologue spoken than he is snatched by Indians, vengeful spirits as silent as the trees such planters as Clement have been despoiling for cotton lands.

Like all good folk tales, The Robber Bridegroom comes with a stinger, a grim Grimm moral.

Welty's first published novel is a retelling of Psyche and Cupid, with a decidedly American twist. Instead of turning the Greek myth into a fairy tale, she's created a delightfully unbelievable, far-fetched and bizarre "tall tale".

Many of the elements of a fairy tale are there--the wicked stepmother, the beautiful heroine, the naive and loving father, the handsome hero--but these are overshadowed by tall tale traits such as the superb stretching-of-the-truth skills by nearly everyone encountered from the mail rider who was swallowed by a crocodile to our heroine, Rosamond, who can't tell a truth to save her life.

The story takes place along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi with "Red Indians", robbers and a few famous American tall tale characters filling up the bad guy roster--with the hero, Jamie, switching sides regularly. Rosamond's father Clement Musgrove is a wealthy planter who meets Jamie at an inn and unwittingly brings his disruptive presence into Musgrove family.

Many deaths, lies, misunderstandings and berry stains later, Rosamond and Jamie do live happily ever after. . . and Rosamond even starts telling the truth. . . well mostly the truth, "it was all true but the blue canopy".

This fanciful tale is a well-executed, superbly written, pleasant read and it's only afterwards that one realizes that Welty added a bit of acid to this pleasurable brew.

In her first piece of full-length fiction (more of a novella than a novel), Eudora Welty has taken a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same title, set it along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, added a couple of legendary Southern outlaws (including the notorious Harp Brothers, one of whom is represented only by his severed head), and stirred in a good measure of Southern humor. The result is a wickedly funny (if slight) adult fantasy, complete with the usual cast: a beautiful young girl, a stepmother, and a good number of Disneyesque dimwits. There are no hidden meanings or surprise plot twists--this is just a fanciful yarn cleverly told with great wit and style.

I have trouble understanding how anyone could not understand or enjoy this story. Anyone who grew up reading fairy tales or folklore should enjoy this fantastic yarn. Welty's sense of place and use of dialogue are justifiably lauded, and this beautiful yet harsh story, though not entirely representative of her other work, is a delightful read.

I was moved to read further in Eudora Welty (1909 -- 2001) after reading her newly published correspondence with her friend, the novelist and editor William Maxwell, as edited by Suzanne Marrs, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. I began with Welty's short first novella, "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942), a work that was new to me. Many of the reader reviews of this book here on Amazon are unusually perceptive, including reviews by my good Amazon friends Giordano Bruno and Helmut Schneider. The reviews helped me with a book I found enigmatic.

Welty writes with exhuberance, in a style filled with brio, fantasy, long descriptive passages, strings of adjectives, and sudden shifts in mood and in written tempo. Although an early book, it shows an author in love with language and with word painting. The book is an amalgamation of different forms. Most prominently, it uses fairy and folk tales and mythology. Stories by the Brothers Grimm, the Cinderella fairy tale, and the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche (The god Cupid carries off a human woman to marry her. He tells her that she cannot see his face. When Psyche takes a peek, Cupid leaves her.) are transposed into a story at an indeterminate time in the 18th Century along the Natchez trail in the deep South. Welty also uses myth in a later work that I have read: the 1949 collection of Mississippi stories called "The Golden Apples". She wants to show how these primal tales of human behavior and motivation carry forward into an American setting.

Besides using myth, Welty's book uses American folk-figures such as the riverboat man Mike Fink (celebrated by Disney many years ago) and the notorious "Harpe" brothers, a pair of robbers and murderers. Together with the bravura, the myth, and the folk history, "The Robber Bridegroom" is marked by gimlet-eyed toughness in a story replete with greed, violence, rape, and ignorance.

The main protagonist of the novel, Jamie Lockhart, is a double-sided figure, a dashing New Orleans businessman on one hand and a thief and killer in the woods on the other hand. He can be remorseless in this latter role but he has a tender streak. The story centers upon Lockhart's rape of and subsequent marriage to a beautiful girl named Rosamond, a pathological liar. Rosamond is the daughter of Clement Musgrove, who has become a wealthy planter. Clement and Rosamond escaped when Clement's first wife and young boy were killed by Indians. Clement then remarries the shrewish Salome, who presses Clement to work, to become wealthy, and to adopt an extravagant mode of life. Salome is jealous of Rosamond and tries to do her in. Her efforts ultimately result in Rosamund's dishonoring by Lockhart. But Rosamund has fallen in love with her assailant and joins him with his gang of thieves in the woods. Much of the story turns on mistaken identity as Clement, whose life has earlier been saved by Lockhart, asks him to kill his daughter's rapist and promises him the daughter's hand as a reward.

Many American books are about the loss of an alleged innocence and frequently tie this loss to one or another historical event. In Welty's book, the innocent person is Clement. The first sentence of the book describes Clement as "an innocent planter, with a bag of gold and many presents." Clement has difficulty seeing the evil and greed in people, including Lockhart, his daughter, and his wife Salome. He tries to live simply and with contentment and says of himself at one point: "I know I am not a seeker after anything, and ambition in this world never stirred my heart once. Yet it seemed as if I was caught up by what came over the others, and they were the same. There was a great tug at the whole world, to go down over the edge, and one and all we were changed into pioneers, and our hearts and our own lonely wills may have had nothing to do with it."

In the course of her tale, Welty contrasts Clement's innocence with Lockart and with Lockart's relationship to Rosamond. Lockhart is a criminal but seems from the outset to have some feeling of restraint and decency. He refrains from killing Clement early in the novel when he could have done so and he refrains subsequently from killing "Harp", who deserves to be killed. Although he violates Rosamond, he later treats her with apparent love and tenderness. After many melodramtic tribulations, Lockart and Rosamond marry and have twins, including a dughter, Clementine. Rosamond almost stops lying. Lockart becomes a prosperous New Orleans trader. Welty says of him at the conclusion of the story: "Jamie knew he was a hero and had always been one, only with the power to look both ways and to see a thing from all sides."

Clement retains his innocence. When he visits New Orleans to sell his tobacco, he ignores both the beauty and the vice which is about him everywhere. As Welty says, "he was an innocent of the wilderness, and a planter of Rodney's Landing, and this was his good." Clement reconciles with Rosamond and Lockhart, but (Salome gets killed in the course of the story) he declines their invitation to stay in New Orleans with them. He returns to his plantation for the simple, innocent life of his dreams. It is the tension between Lockart and Rosamond, their sophistication, ruthlessness, and success, and Clement and his struggle to retain his innocence that is at the heart of "The Robber Bridegroom" and of Welty's picture of early America.

There is a tendency to see "The Robber Bridegroom" as simpler than it is. Without trying to overdo it, I think it is a difficult book. I am looking forward to reading more of Welty.

Robin Friedman

In this delightful little nonsense, Welty transposed elements of several Grimm fairy tales to a Mississippi setting, during Spanish times. We have the evil stepmother, the talking raven, the talking locket inherited from the dead mother, the robber gang's hidden cottage badly in need of a house keeper, we have the singing maiden hiding her nakedness with her long golden hair, the bandit king and his true love not recognizing each other, the greedy wife who wants more and more riches...
Add the planter who lost his first wife and his son to fierce Indians, some real historic regional outlaws, including the talking head of one, the landscape on the river, with plantations and forests and generally puzzled wild life, and a fierce and puzzled tribe of Indians, who is clearly unused to Grimmsy/Weltyan behavior on the part of the palefaces, and you get a charming story about love and greed and with only so much deeper meaning as you think you must find when you can't help looking for it.

I picked up the LoA volume of Welty's novels after Gentleman Brown told me that Welty is the real Southern writer to know. Let's see how the other novels are, this one is just a warm up. Glad to see, though, that there was enough sense of humor in the 40s' publishing world to give this first novel a shot and a chance. In the 70s, the story was made into a Broadway show -- but I know nothing about its success with the public.
Glad to see, too, that the Grimms' sense of humor is not lost on everybody. And that bandits can become honorable merchants and that New Orleans hospitality was based on beauty and vice.

The story was very intriging. I had to read it for a class, and I'm glad because I had never heard of it or its author before. I'm very happy with my new- found writer that will be up there on my top ten list! I'd also like to add that I had to do a paper on the book and found it to be able to be compared with Cinderella and Snow White- and even a little bit of Beauty and the Beast!

I had to read this book (novella?) for an English class this past spring. I was not a fan of the cover art, but I was a fan of the length of the book, especially as a busy college student. . .

Turns out . . . I LOVED it. It was a nice fantasy break from the style of many classics. I wrote my final paper on it. Like all fairy tales it was simple and easy to understand (thumbs up!)but when you reflect on it, you can actually take away some adult advice. It has everything you need and doesn't require a lot of time to get it all. It has the annoying characters, the funny ones, the ones you love and the ones you love to hate. Definitely a good read for busy people everywhere who want a good story but don't have a lot of time.