“when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign”
This metaphor pops up in one of Welty’s most persistently metaphorical stories, “The Wide Net.” The story is ostensibly about the search by a group of friends to find the body of his wife who has left a suicide note behind. Beneath that surface lies a much more symbolically expansive story which is the keynote of Welty’s approach to writing short fiction. This attribution of an unexpressed thought of one the characters is itself a surface statement which holds greater significance; the metaphor is applicable to almost the entirety of Welty’s body of short stories. Metaphors and similes are plentiful and creative.
Character
Welty wields the power of the simile as a means of comparison to delineate character like an artist. Through the judicious use of the power of comparison, she paints images immediately accessible which are capable of bringing characters into full dimension:
“she had close-cut hair which stood up on the very top of her head exactly like a sea wave” (A Visit of Charity)
“Ellie Morgan was a large woman with a face as pink and crowded as an old- fashioned rose.” (The Key)
“She has spent her life trying to escape from the parlor-like jaws of self-consciousness.” (Old Mr. Marblehall)
Setting
In addition to exploiting metaphorical language to deepen and enhance character, Welty also engages such figurative language to lend her setting an almost Gothic power. The richness of her choice of imagery extends beyond mere physical description to touch upon the metaphysics of place and locale:
“The flaked-off, colored houses were spotted like the hides of beasts faded and shy, and were hot as a wall of growth that seemed to breathe flower-like down onto them as they walked to the car parked there.” (No Place for You, My Love)
“The black of London swam like a cinder in the eye and did not go away.” (The Bride of the Innisfallen)
“They walked through the still leaves of the Natchez Trace, the light and the shade falling through trees about them, the white irises shining like candles on the banks and the new ferns shining like green stars up in the oak branches.” (Livvie)
Monkeys
One of Eudora Welty’s favorite metaphorical images for some reason is the monkey. Within her figurative prose, monkeys populate the short fiction of Eudora Welty with the persistence of old southern women:
“He is a monkey.” (Old Mr. Marblehall)
“Little Lee Roy held up a crutch and turned it about, and then snatched it back like a monkey.” (Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden)
“Around Cash, the pinned-up palmettos looked as if a lazy green monkey had walked up and down and around the walls leaving green prints of his hands and feet.” (Livvie)
“And his mouth is going every minute: like a monkey’s when it looks for something.” (Powerhouse)
Metaphorical Travels
So rich is Welty’s use of metaphor that many of her most anthologized stories are really metaphorical journeys often couched as literal travels and often couched more subtly as figurative passages from one place to another. One of her most famous works of fictions—short or long—is “A Worn Path” which follows an old woman’s literal trek across the titular landscape of a journey, but is so densely packed with symbolism that its metaphorical aspect is impossible to ignore. Alternatively, the equally famous tale of “Why I Live at the P.O.” features only a very short literal journey occurring right at the end, but which is every bit as much a metaphorical journey. “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “No Place for You, My Place” are other iconic examples of Welty’s mastery of this deeper, denser, story-wide use of metaphor.
