Essay Questions

What evidence supports the contention that Welty was one of the first American short story writers to introduce allusions to movies into the short fiction form of literature?

Welty published her first collection of short stories in 1941, roughly a decade after the sound revolution in Hollywood. One of Welty’s most anthologized and well-known stories—if not her single most famous work of fiction of any kind—is “Why I Live at the P.O.” Central to the narrative is relatively clear yet still somewhat ambiguous parentage of the two-year old girl Stella-Rondo has brought home with her. The exact details of her parentage is further obscured by the name by which she is referred throughout: Shirley T. Because the girl is described as having familiar golden ringlets, this is quite clearly an allusion to the number one box office attraction in America between 1935 and 1938. This is a fact that patrons of Leota’s beauty salon in “The Petrified Man” would likely know as a result of her keeping copies of Screen Secrets on hand for reading material. A vacant house is described in the opening paragraphs of “June Recital” as resembling a cliff in a western movie serial. These and other pop culture references were supplanted more traditional allusions to classical works of literature, indicating a shift in the background and interests of modern readers.

What is the effect upon narrative interpretation of Sister being an unreliable narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.”

There is no actual “plot” per se to this story as it basically just a first-person recounting of events intended to answer the titular question. So the question becomes, why does Sister now live at the P.O., but it is a question that cannot really be fully answered because it is the events which lead to her decision, but her recounting is so one-sided and prejudicial that one must read it with a certain amount of caution. At its core, the narrative account is basically a claim of victimization. It would appear that at every turn each member of her family has it in for Sister in one way or another. Stella-Rondo is plotting to turn Papa-Daddy against her. When this “evidence” of persecution is combined with Sister’s profound distrust of the relationship between Stella-Rondo and Mr. Whitaker, one can quite easily read the story more as an insight into a paranoid personality than as a victim of maltreatment. Thus, because of the unreliability of Sister, the story can be interpreted in two completely different ways, both of which are equally viable.

What does Welty gain by telling the story of Aaron Burr in “First Love” through the eyes of a young deaf boy?

Long before the Broadway musical Hamilton made him something of a household name, Aaron Burr’s place in history was essentially just behind Benedict Arnold as the definitive homegrown American villain. Only two works of literature by major American writers were produced in the 20th century that dared to portray Burr in more heroic terms or, if not exactly heroic, at least substantially more ethically and morally ambiguous. One is Gore Vidal’s novel Burr and the other is Welty’s story, “First Love.” Notably, both literary works use an external narrative observer to tell Burr’s story. The purpose in both cases is to create the necessary distance to refashion Burr’s reputation without directly attributing that refashioning to the author. Welty gives herself the opportunity of suggesting a metaphorical deafness in the young boy coincident with his physical inability to hear and understand. In this way, it becomes the boy’s view of Burr as something more romantically heroic rather than Welty’s and the boy can be forgiven for not fully understanding the situation both literally and figuratively.