Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, 176). My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. 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. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. 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. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. I say this because when, published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the. Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. Portail de ressources lectroniques en sciences humaines et sociales, Flannerys Ghost: Paradigms of the Holy Ghost in Three Stories by Flannery OConnor, The Journal of the Short Story in English: presentation, Joycean Drama and the Remaking of Yeats's Irish Theatre in Ivy Day in the Committee Room", Catalogue des 609 revues. 184). The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. 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. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. The first page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web, written in March 1989 (Image: CERN) Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990.Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. Scottish heroes and William Wallace Jamieson of The Wide Net, surely, we might be tempted to think, the combination brings southern history into the story despite all evidence to the contrary. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. 3Though I have spent much of my professional life reading and thinking about southern identity and the historical versions of the Old and New South, I really did not encounter anything resembling a theory of the South as a land of myth and mythmaking before I began my graduate studies at Chapel Hill. He returns to his wife better capable of living a meaningful, fulfilling life. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. 7William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. And, to tell the truth, the details are daunting, especially as we are led down the old Natchez Trace towards the Pearl River, deeper and deeper into southern river country, a vast cradle of natural wonder that teems with vitality and mystery. 38I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. . It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. 181). Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. 180). 183). Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Download PDF More from Eudora Welty From the. 12Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. The story recounts how Sister, the intelligent and ironic narrator, comes to fall out with her family over incidents arising from her younger sister Stella-Rondo's sudden reappearance in their small southern town, minus her husband and with a two-year-old "adopted" child in tow. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. The last date is today's Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the, . William Wallace keeps diving down to search for Hazel until, finally, the group decides to stop and cook some of the fish they've got for a meal. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. As Mr Duval finished, and stood up to leave, he reached out to me and shook my hand: Your granddaddy was the only white man I ever loved.. CSNET bridged between the original (closed) ARPANET and the NSFNET (open) by . It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty, Collected Stories 183).1 This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. Print. The narration speculates on what he experiences in the solitude of the river bottom: So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? Summary of The Wide Net by Welty. 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. 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. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. 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 The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. 102). She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. 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. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. 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. Remember that (Welty. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). He took me in and introduced me to each worker by name. Recollections contains a fifty-page biographical essay by Forkner. He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. The roses needed a lot of water. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty. But the shifting, or loss of identity, is a constant threat. eNotes.com He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. The scenery the pace and the dialog are like a soothing low speed raft trip. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201055. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? Nature is the wide-open playground of both good and evil, and it is best to be wary when the thunder roars. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. History and Overview of CSNET (PDF: 156KB) by Peter J. Denning, with Anthony Hearn and C. William Kern. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. They have to go and get the wide net, though, and that belongs to a man called Doc. But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. Of course these signs and symbols enrich the story at the same time they divert William Wallace from his search. 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. She could have easily searched out one of the old Backus crowd willing to share the memory of Beanies role in the funeral and the missing headstone. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. 20Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love, Collected Stories 168). I think my grandfathers reputation helped me too in an experience that will stay with me as long as I live. , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1781. 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, Collected Stories 183). He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. Still, if I should apologize, I do. They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men. N 102 Library of America Series. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. 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. And we fished for the same fish from the same piers in the inlet. When he wakes up he affirms his new sense of power and potency by tying a catfish to his belt and launching into a wild Dionysian dance. 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. They were later given to the University of Florida. The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. The packet switching technology was essential to the development of . Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty, Collected Stories 171). They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. The Wide Net and Other Stories. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. 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. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. [] Any day now the change will come. Even the trees have bones that crack when lightning strikes. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty, Collected Stories 187). In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. What was her first novel and when was it published? In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. 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. Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. 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. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. Carrying his great string of fish, he enters at the head of the party into Dover which now looked somehow like new after the rain (Welty, Collected Stories 184). Welty, Eudora. 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