| "Clytie" | |
|---|---|
| Short story byEudora Welty | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publication | |
| Publisher | The Southern Review |
| Publication date | Summer 1941 |
"Clytie" is ashort story byEudora Welty first appearing inThe Southern Review (Summer 1941) and first collected inA Curtain of Green (1941) byDoubleday.[1]
"Clytie" is presented from athird-person omniscient point-of-view, with Clytie Farr as the focal character. The story is set in the fictional village of Farr's Gin in theDeep South during the 1930s.
The Farr family, formerly well-to-do local elites, are now impoverished. The bed-ridden patriarch, "Papa" Farr, suffers from advanced dementia. The mother is deceased. The three surviving children are Octavia, Gerald and Clytie, none of whom have married. The eldest son, Henry Farr, committed suicide with a pistol years before.
Octavia is the matriarch for the household. Gerald is an invalid who rarely emerges from his bedroom. Miss Clytie performs the duties of a domestic servant for the entire family. Octavia is her disciplinarian older sister, subjecting Clytie to petty cruelties. The family is largely isolated from the community. Only one resident of Farr's Gin, the reluctant barber Mr. Bobo, has access to the household: he is admitted once a week to shave the elder Farr. A former black servant for the Farr patriarch, Old Lethy, is barred from the premises, but lurks near the property. Clytie is often observed wandering aimlessly on main street in rain storms. Regarded as the village idiot, she is both ridiculed and pitied.
On the occasion that Clytie is commanded by Octavia to collect rainwater from the cistern barrel, she confronts her aging face in the water's surface. In that moment she becomes aware of the depth of her suffering, and casts herself headfirst into the barrel: "When Old Lethy found her, she had fallen forward into the barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs."[2][3]
InterviewerLinda Lipnack Kuehl: "You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerateJane Austen's kind of family novel. Is Austen a kindred spirit?"
Eudora Welty:Tolerate? "I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don't read her or anyone else forkindredness"—Interview inThe Paris Review, The Art of Fiction. Fall 1972[4]
Literary critic and poet Carol Ann Johnston reports that Welty emulates British authorJane Austen's fiction with respect to her "narrative position" so as to "shape the reader's view of community."[5][6]
Welty is carefully conscious of where the narrator in her stories stand in relation to the story she tells. Like Austen, Welty has the gift of keeping her narrators at just the right distance from the story...[7]
Johnston cites "Clytie" as a superb application of Austen's narrative method to its focal character, Clytie, whose tragic life and death exposes the suffering inflicted by her family: "We could not begin to understand the complexity of tone in the story had it been placed in the wrong frame."[8]
Author and criticKatherine Anne Porter in her Introduction toA Curtain of Green (1941) comments on "Clytie": "[T]he very shape of madness takes place before your eyes in a straight account of actions and speech, the personal appearance and habits of dress of the main character and her family."[9][10][11]
.Johnston reminds readers that Clytie is the Greek mythic name of a sea nymph and daughter toOceanus, the god of water. She fell in love with the sun god,Apollo. Welty employs metaphor linking this goddess to Narcissus, in that Clytie's final act is to glimpse her face in a barrel of water, into which she plunges and drowns.[12]
Most readers connect Clytie's experience with the mythic story of Narcissus...Clytie's story is Welty's version of the results of women's lack of self-knowledge..."[13]
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