Moon Lake
The body of water which gives this story its title is its central and controlling symbol. The story takes place at a summer camp for girls on the threshold of maturation into young women. A reclusive male lifeguard who saves one of the girls from drowning but is otherwise hostile to them and an older deacon who lasciviously stares at their budding breasts are representative male figures in the story. Language filled with erotic subtext and imagery of the mysterious world lying beneath the surface of the water all contribute to situate Moon Lake a symbol of experience which the innocent find both tempting and terrorizing.
The Apple (A Visit of Charity)
At the beginning of this story the young Campfire Girl, Marian, mysterious pauses at a bush before entering a nursing home to earn points for acts of charity. Only at the very end of this disturbing and deeply metaphorical nightmarish encounter is the significance of the pause at the bush revealed. Before going inside, Marian hides a red apple behind the bush. Upon desperately running from the Gothic atmosphere of two strange old female residents inside the nursing home, Marian stoops to pick up the apple and the bite which ends the story serves to make the fruit fraught with Biblical symbolism associated with falls from grace, acquisition of knowledge and the true meaning of Christian charity.
The Pavilion (A Memory)
As the title indicates, “A Memory” is a story about the perfection of a single moment in time in the memory of a teenage girl. That perfection is subsequently marred forever by ugly intrusion of the real world. The symbol of this memory being flawed forever is a beach pavilion which has a clean white roof near the beginning but has become small, worn and pitiable by the end.
The Rabbit (The Wide Net)
“The Wide Net” is about a wife who is distraught over her husband spending more time out with his friends than with her. She leaves a message behind that she has had enough and is going to down herself and the husband is moved to go to his friends on a search mission which seems to lose its focus. At one point the husband manages to catch a wild rabbit in his hands which sparks the following dialogue with his companions:
“Let her go, William Wallace, let her go. What do you want with a live rabbit?”
“Let her go.”
“She can go if she wants to, but she don’t want to.”
The rabbit thus becomes one of Welty’s more obvious symbols as the conversation clearly implicates the status of its current state of bondage to William and the advice of the friends as a metaphor for his wife.
The Worn Path
One of Welty’s most famous stories is “A Worn Path” and the title landscape of that story operates on two symbolic levels simultaneously. On one level, the path is a symbol for the long life of the story’s protagonist, Phoenix Jackson in the way it presents obstacles to an old, frail woman who is just trying to get medicine for her grandchild. In addition to being, frail and a woman, however, Phoenix is also black and so the encounters which speak metaphorically to her personally also operate on a broader level which makes the worn path symbolic of the African-American struggle.
