Critical Review: “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty
In a 1961
lecture recording “On Story Telling” by Eudora Welty the author discusses her views about technique and vision necessary to create good fiction. During the 1930’s, just as Welty was beginning to write in earnest, she worked as a publicist for the Works Progress Administration. She took hundreds of pictures of the Mississippi landscape and its’ people. Her dedication to her photography as an
authentic rendering of the south offered her an understanding of artistic perspective. Welty very strongly felt that story writing and critical analysis should be separate. The theme can be accidental or an unconscious struggle by the
writer , but should only
reveal what is observed. “It is the intrinsic nature of the fiction, plot, and characters themselves that reveal something a certain distance beyond what is said to the
reader simultaneously with the writer (Welty lecture 1961).” Welty’s short stories are masterpieces of southern
fiction that reveal their characters with a modernistic realism and each new subject of “regional sentiment becomes a metaphor for human experience” (Welty lecture 1961). In her writing Welty explored themes such as independence, guilt, sheltered lives, daring intellect, love, and separateness” (class introduction to author). Any worthy landscape or portraiture art includes specific elements and
perspective in it’s revelation as significant to genre. Welty’s southern fiction is much the same; her short stories set in small town Mississippi are so good because they present authentic subject matter through the dialogue, and specific dialect, of characters in their most real and natural settings and circumstances. Her story, “A Worn Path” is an excellent example of Welty’s success with her artistic formula that it is the writer’s duty only to create an authentic portrait, leaving the meaning to the perspective of the reader.
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