Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book)
by Eudora Welty
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eudora WeltyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1979-03-21
ISBN: 0156252805
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book)
Book Review: Alienation in a large family
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book)
A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family?s preparations for her cousin Dabney?s wedding.
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