The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. 178). The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. At least this is true of the first half of The Wide Net. The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that The Wide Net performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume, There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of. What was her first novel and when was it published? 1943. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. He has recovered his memory too, and with it, we know now, a new power of self-direction, decision, and acceptance. We bought ice cream at the same shop even though there were white and colored water fountains outside on opposite sides of the shop. William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. She had just published a masterpiece of modern realism in which dream and the inner world are as vividly brought to life as the outside, but this is an affirmation of the living human mind, not an evasion. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. Print. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. But they remain children, and act their age. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. "The Burning" digs so deep that it verges on becomingas exemplified hereone of the most ferocious of the very few examples of genuinely Expressionist literature by a famous American short story author. Print. He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. AccueilNumros67ArticlesConverging Toward the Human: Myth 1It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Weltys story The Wide Net the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). The Golden Apples. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love,, (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. 46I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. Neither does Eudora Welty in her autobiography, and she is one of the most southern writers who ever existed. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990. Print. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). Jamieson takes a bit more twisting to unravel a historical connection. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. For one thing, I think I would have trouble arguing to myself, or to my wife and family, that I never existed, even as a boy, yet Eudora Welty is writing in the tradition of the modern folk tale. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. Hickory tree there will be yellow. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 183). Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, 176). Us is the fishes (Welty. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty, Collected Stories 187). When she allows William his ritual role of thinking himself the man of the house by letting him tamely slap and spank her, the reconciliation is complete. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 102). Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of "The Wide Window" by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler). Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. 179). When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. 22There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. The Chamber also achieved 4-star accreditation in 2018, an honor achieved by only 204 of the 7,022 chambers in the country. The story recounts how Sister, the intelligent and ironic narrator, comes to fall out with her family over incidents arising from her younger sister Stella-Rondo's sudden reappearance in their small southern town, minus her husband and with a two-year-old "adopted" child in tow. 45Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. 15The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. eNotes Editorial. They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. Already a member? This was not because it was dangerous, or unseemly; it was simply against the code. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. I saw it 26 years ago and I wish it was on tonight. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). 37Beanie deserves his own story. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). One was the Florida artist A.E. Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. . The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. note:when citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. At the beginning of the story William Wallace catches a small rabbit and acts as if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it (Welty, 172). In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. 18Since William Wallace cannot be contained in any single myth, or even in a multitude of myths, it should not have surprised me that he is able to exist untouched by history, or at least untouched by a southern identity usually defined and distinguished as being overwhelmed and overdetermined by history. 36There is one more story about my grandfather that I need to relate. Bigpicture.net registered under .NET top-level domain. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. He surely died the poorest judge in all of Florida, but he did leave me his gold Hamilton watch which had been given him when he retired from working on the railroad as a young man in Georgia. He was on a mission. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusWhen Eudora Welty read at 92Y on April 22, 1985, it had been 32 y. . We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, eight giants with great long black eyelashes (Welty. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. 4. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. It is a timeless story of three courageous women, Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, who defy the status quo and begin writing a novel from the perspective of the black maids of the white families. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. The packet switching technology was essential to the development of . Still, if I should apologize, I do. 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. 17She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. This is the truth that William Wallace discovers by himself, and somehow memory, lost and found, is crucial to the discovery. The shock will take a little time to absorb, but he has now found himself, and is beginning to embrace his new role as a father. History and Overview of CSNET (PDF: 156KB) by Peter J. Denning, with Anthony Hearn and C. William Kern. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. By Alexa's traffic estimates bigpicture.net placed at 30,366 position over the world, while the largest amount of its visitors comes from India, where it takes 35,646 place. 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. He surely died the poorest judge in all of Florida, but he did leave me his gold Hamilton watch which had been given him when he retired from working on the railroad as a young man in Georgia. she had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered, like their own secret, the elation that comes of great hopes and changes (Welty. For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. Log in here. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. It did not cost much to have a horse and a small motor boat. The Wide Net, short-story collection by Eudora Welty, published in 1943. It was a huge success, a romantic tome so overwritten and full of adjectives that Eudora Welty in her autobiography says her mother told her it used to be recommended to take it out with a chair when watering the roses. and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief Think of all the people who would be in my bookwonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of themand Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. He has coedited (with Patrick Samway) four anthologies of Southern literature: Stories of the Modern South (Penguin), Stories of the Old South (Penguin), A Modern Southern Reader (Peachtree) and A New Reader of the Old South (Peachtree). A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty, Collected Stories 180). CRM is one of the top technology investments that organizations can make. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. Print. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. The scenery the pace and the dialog are like a soothing low speed raft trip. Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. They were later given to the University of Florida. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. On rereading the story I soon realized that my instincts had not failed me completely. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. 23Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. 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