Essay Questions

Compare and contrast the characters of Sister and Stella-Rondo.

The two women are sisters, one year apart in age, with Stella-Rondo the younger by exactly one year to the day. They are the daughters of a woman referred to as Mama. (No father is present.) Both come from a small town in Mississippi, and both were attracted to a photographer named Mr. Whitaker. Both women have a manipulative streak, however Stella-Rondo is better at lying and deception.

Stella-Rondo, though younger, is clearly the favored child. She is more intelligent than Sister, and the whole family revolves around her instinctively. Even the narrator is named only based on her relationship to Stella-Rondo. Although Stella-Rondo apparently can do no wrong, Sister doesn't seem to be able to do anything right especially once Stella-Rondo starts systematically smearing her and turning her family against her.

When Stella-Rondo and Sister offer two different accounts of the same situation, and present opposite points of view, Mama and everybody else invariably take Stella-Rondo's side. Why does this occur?

Option #1: This is a very dysfunctional family, and Stella-Rondo is the favorite child. She is so much more important than Sister, and so much more dominant, that even when Sister is obviously telling the truth about a conversation Mama witnesses, Mama feels compelled to support Stella-Rondo and to sacrifice the expendable Sister. Sister becomes a convenient scapegoat because she's vulnerable, and it's easier to blame her and expel her from the family than it is to ask Stella-Rondo difficult questions or to confront her with evidence of her lies and manipulation.

Option #2: Sister is an unreliable narrator who misrepresents what she says. Her accounts of her conversations with Stella-Rondo are not accurate. Stella-Rondo is indeed setting Sister up to appear to criticize other people behind their backs, but Sister is willingly participating. Furthermore, the incidents in which Stella-Rondo deliberately exaggerates or misinterprets Sister's words are retaliation for similar acts of social warfare by Sister, such as the attempt to convince Mama that Shirley T. is developmentally delayed.

Eudora Welty makes frequent use of euphemisms in this story. Provide some examples and discuss how the use of euphemisms helps with character development.

Examples of euphemisms include when Shirley T. "lost" the Milky Way bar she ate in Cairo (a city some distance from China Grove). The narrator means to say that the child vomited. Other euphemisms include the word "prescription" to mean a bottle of alcohol, "poisoned" to mean drunk", "in France" to mean hung over, and "Judgement day, going to meet her whole family" as a euphemism for death.

In the family's style of speech, people use euphemism to avoid explicitly stating something they are afraid of or believe is disagreeable. By doing so, they identify what kinds of facts or reality frighten or disgust them. Their selection of some kinds of euphemism but not others indirectly illustrate what their values, prejudices, and sensitivities are like. For example, using the word "Negroes" to describe household employees is offensive to a modern reader, who would be more likely to ignore the ethnicity of the employees unless it was directly relevant to the story, or to use the phrase "African-American" if their ethnicity was relevant. The fact that the narrator uses such a word suggests two things: first, that the narrator and her family had a cultural association between their employees' ethnicity and their status relative to the family, and second, that the narrator was not African-American herself (which has already been suggested during the Shirley Temple discussion).

Explain how the character of "Sister" develops over the course of the story.

Although the narrator, "Sister", initially says that everything was going well until Stella-Rondo's arrival, the portions of her back-story show that Sister and Stella-Rondo have a long-standing rivalry. Furthermore, Sister is just as manipulative and petty as Stella-Rondo but the pettiness is shown chiefly in her actions since Sister does not exhibit awareness of her own weaknesses.

Grudges appear one at a time. First Stella-Rondo stole Sister's birthday, having been born exactly one year later. Then she behaved with callous disrespect for her belongings, discarding valuable things such as her Add-A-Pearl necklace. She alienated Mr. Whitaker, a young man who was dating Sister, and broke up the couple by telling what Sister believed to be a stupid and malicious lie that was easily disproven. She left for Illinois having married the young photographer herself. Now, Stella-Rondo returns, having discarded the husband Sister wanted for herself, and brings with her a child that resembles her but that is much too old to have been conceived during wedlock. This suggests to Sister that Stella-Rondo hurt her even worse than she knew, and stole him not with a ridiculous lie but by sleeping with him.

The grudges are bidirectional. In the more distant past, Uncle Rondo favored Sister. He sent her on an all-expenses-paid trip to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky and gave her a radio he took from Stella-Rondo as a punishment. Stella-Rondo held that grudge for six full months. Yet Uncle Rondo, under the influence of "prescription", easily turns against Sister when Stella-Rondo suggests that Sister criticized him for wearing Stella-Rondo's kimono outdoors.

Although Stella-Rondo's manipulations are obvious, especially when the narrator explicitly points out that it was Stella-Rondo making critical remarks and not Sister, Sister is not above poisoning the well by openly questioning Shirley T.'s parentage and by suggesting to her mother that the child is developmentally delayed.

After deciding to move out, Sister displays a great deal of pettiness by gathering up specific items that are hers or that she considers hers. She does this at great physical inconvenience to the rest of the family. Furthermore, she sees to it that everybody in town knows that she's moved out, and she gloats over the notion of her younger sister coming to apologize and get her mail.