Eudora Welty was an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. A prolific Southern writer, she used many themes throughout her literary works including racism, responsibility, myths, initiations, isolation and depression. This paper focuses on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of depression in Eudora Welty’s selected short stories. Descriptions of mourning and melancholia and how they are applied to the protagonist characters are discussed.
Two stories taken from Eudora Welty’s short stories are A Piece of Paper and Clytie. In A Piece of Paper, Ruby Fisher comes home from a storm, completely isolated. Her only happiness is reading the newspaper. She reads the news that “Mrs Ruby Fisher will be shot in the leg by her husband.” Suffering with depression, she is unable to understand the coincidence in names and gets frustrated. When her husband clarifies the misunderstanding, she understands her fault and becomes happy again.
Clytie is a story about an old maid who suffers with mental illness. Clytie’s character is set in a rural town of Farr Gin. She lives with her arrogant elder sister Octavia, younger brother Gerald and their old sick father. Clytie has a unique habit of observing faces. Her behaviour and her speech at times clearly show her sufferings of depression. When she sees her own face in the water, she commits suicide.
In 1917 Freud published his landmark paper “Mourning and Melancholia” in which he contrasted the normal expression of grief related to mourning with the abnormal mechanisms involved in melancholia. In A Piece of Paper, Ruby Fisher’s case parallels mourning — she loses herself from the outside world due to isolation but retains self-esteem and returns to normal life. In Clytie, melancholic depression is apparent — she experiences mental illness as well as self-reproach. As Freud argues, in melancholia the depressed person has inability to love others, develops hatred feelings, and other strong effects that can lead to suicide.
Works Cited
- Welty, Eudora. “A Piece of Paper.” Selected Short Stories, Essays, Memoir. USA: Random House Publishers, 1992. Print.
- Welty, Eudora. “Clytie.” Selected Short Stories, Essays, Memoir. USA: Random House Publishers, 1992. Print.
- Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers, vol. iv, pp. 152-170. 1917.