New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. Synopsis It looks like we don't have a Synopsis for this title yet. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English, 67|2016, 125-140. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. The Wide Net, short-story collection by Eudora Welty, published in 1943. Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. Print. (qtd. She is one of Hazels cousins. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. Learn about student-produced podcasts by reading and discussing the article "Students and Teachers, From K to 12, Hit the Podcasts.". The "Wide Residual Networks" paper linked makes a nice summary at the bottom of p8: . 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. The second date is today's But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. Delta Wedding in 1946. Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Log in here. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. When was Delta Wedding set?? Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. . As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. [] Any day now the change will come. Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, The Weavers Grave, by the Irish writer Seumas OKelly. It was, however, filled with southerners. Robert Fitzgerald. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. 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. , and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 8). A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. Recollections contains a fifty-page biographical essay by Forkner. 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. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. The Wide Net (185) :Eudora Welty Breaking up of the party Discussed by Jenna Campbell William Wallace Jameson Hazel In old 1300s Great war hero of Scotland Williams Wife 3 mths Pregnate Virgil in the wars for Scottish Independence Conflicted main character, Best friend of William almost like his voice of reason Also In Dante's Inferno Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. if there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original publication in traditional print. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. We may remember his prayer: If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness! (Vergil, 166). publication in traditional print. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. [] Magnolia and live-oak never die. The web value rate of bigpicture.net is 49,209 USD. But they remain children, and act their age. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. 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. The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, St Elmo by Augusta Jane Evans. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. He returns to his wife better capable of living a meaningful, fulfilling life. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined . Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2006. William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. 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. 1 Robbie is right to be frightened. They were later given to the University of Florida. 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. 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). The father of the white boys is rumored to have drowned in the Pearl River, and the father of the black boys had been struck by lightning and, as Robbie cries out during a storm, was dead three days, dead as that-there axe (Welty. 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. Get this from a library! 46I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. He himself would have been too modest to mention it. Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university. It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? date the date you are citing the material. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. 4. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 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. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. 44Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. Summary of The Wide Net by Welty. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. Even the trees have bones that crack when lightning strikes. I believe my shock at having to account to myself as a southerner when I arrived in my early twenties in Chapel Hill, and faced the impressive body of scholarship on southern myth then in fashion, helps explain why. 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. A man and a woman, unknown to each, but sharing the commonality of being from the North, meet in New Orleans and commence upon a strange tour that almost verges on the romantic, but gets only as far as one hesitant kiss. Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201055. 33In this respect, my grandfather was a rare exception. Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charma wind touched each man on the forehead (Welty. , 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). 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. It was a far better show than the movie. As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. bio notes: born: 4/13/1909 died: 7/23/2001 born as: Eudora Welty nationality: USA American short-story writer and novelist whose work is focused with great precision on the regional manners . Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. 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