"All serious daring starts from within": crossing inner and regional boundaries in Eudora Welty's "The optimist's daugther"
- Autores: Carmen Arzua Azurmendi
- Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 43-51
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
The Optimist's Daughter was written for the New Yorker in 1969 and then revised and extended to its present form in 1972, when it won the Pulitzer Prize.
The novel told in third person tells us the story of Laurel McKelva Hand and there is not much action in it. The struggle is overall an inner struggle, a desire to surmount Laurel's ghosts, her parents, her friends and enemies and also herself.
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power Eudora Welty has in portraying the limited possibilities of a province woman who travels physically and affectively alone, from Chicago to New Orleans, to attend her father who is being examined for eye trouble. This real and metaphorical literary travel will serve Laurel to come to terms with her family and her emotions. She will also reconcile herself with her father and dead mother and husband and will reach an understanding of the blindness which pervades the book. At the same time the story will cross regional boundaries by transforming regional sentiment as metaphor for universal human experience.
