The Grief of Memory
A review of Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter
What does a person do with the grief of growing up? The grief of losing your parents, losing your childhood home, losing your spouse? Even the tremendous grief of losing the future you imagined for yourself? Eudora Welty’s short novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, explores these questions in a compelling and complicated way.
The novel begins with the surgery and recovery of Laurel’s father, for which she travels from her home in Chicago to help. Her father’s second wife, Fay, shows herself to be a shallow and selfish woman, and there is a great divide between the three characters as the recovery stretches on and eventually ends abruptly with no recovery at all. We then follow Laurel back to her hometown, to her father’s visitation, funeral, and burial, and then the lonely and difficult few days that follow before she returns to Chicago. While back in her childhood home, she is surrounded by old family friends, all of whom still love Laurel and wish her to stay, but none of whom truly know her, since they have been separated by years and miles.
Over the course of the novel, we learn more about Laurel and her family history. We learn that her mother came from a large and close-knit family in West Virginia. Although she left it and never moved back when she married Laurel’s father, she never stopped calling it “up home,” and made annual trips back to visit throughout Laurel’s life. Laurel’s memories there are tied up in her own mother’s memories of the place; the ache of not being able to go back stings her. Like her mother, Laurel moved away from her childhood home in Mississippi upon marriage, and her return home for the funeral is more bitter than sweet. She mourns the changes to the house that Fay has made; the absence of both her parents fills the rooms. Indeed, she can no more truly return there as a home than she could return to the ruins of her mother’s childhood home, as this house has been given by her father’s will to Fay. Leaving one’s home is a central part of growing older, and while it often brings excitement, it also brings sadness. So many memories remain tied to the physical places you grew up that the desire to go back often remains long after the place is gone for good. This feeling of longing and nostalgia for the safety and love and family of childhood is beautifully portrayed in this novel.
There are certain milestones in life and growing older that are difficult and painful for almost everyone. Leaving your childhood home and moving away from family is one of these. The death of a parent is another. But one of the hardest parts of growing older, made all the harder by how unexpected it is, is the slow reckoning of the image of a loved one in your head, and the true self of that loved one that becomes more clear to you the more years of experience you gain and moments of insight and connection you have. As children, it is easy to paint a picture of your parents in your mind that becomes their whole self to you; then, whether it be when you hear stories of them from their youth, or when you become a parent yourself, or when that parent makes decisions that step outside of that mental picture you imagined, something like a mini-death occurs, as your understanding of who your parent truly is expands or is replaced in your mind with a deeper, perhaps even foreign, one.
This is one of the major themes in this novel. At her father’s visitation, the town gathers together at his house to reminisce and mourn together. Laurel hears all the memories and stories being told around her and cannot recognize anything of her father in them. Of the story told by Major Bullock, a man who lives up to his name, Laurel thinks to herself, “He’s trying to make Father into something he wanted to be himself.” And then a few paragraphs later she voices her complaint: ““The least anybody can do for him is remember right,” she said. “I believe to my soul it’s the most, too,” said Miss Adele.”
This remembering is of the utmost importance to Laurel, and we as readers feel deeply for her the sorrow of loss and the emptiness of the condolences offered her. The people around her care about her and her father, but none of them have suffered the same loss that she has, and none of them have the same memories, and therefore the same image, of her parents that she does. And even she, who believes she remembers her father rightly, cannot quite account for his marrying the ridiculous Fay, or his slow giving up to death, without a fight.
Laurel’s mother passed away many years before the start of the novel. In the last days of her life, she became so delirious in her illness that she would throw out words and accusations against Laurel’s father that held little truth, but which Laurel couldn’t help but absorb, associating the inability of her father to end her mother’s suffering with a lack of something in himself. In the dark night she spends at her childhood house alone after the funeral, Laurel finds old letters and writings of her parents, and through them gains new insights to who they were. She finally allows herself to feel the deep grief of their loss, and the great loss of her husband who died in the war soon after their marriage began. Being thus cut off from all her family, without a way of carrying on that family and legacy, is a great sorrow and a great loss indeed, and it is a loss that she does not allow herself to fully grieve until confronted with the overwhelming power of the memories. The memories even allow her to grieve the loss of the future she wanted and wished for. It allows her to weep for her mother and the life in West Virginia she left. It allows her to weep for her father, left behind by both his wife and his daughter in an old house full of memories.
Her memories of her mother and father become even more complicated as she interacts with Fay, the much younger woman her father marries after he is left alone by his wife’s death and his daughter’s marriage and move to Chicago. Fay cares nothing for the past. She wants to erase the memory of Laurel’s mother as best she can from the house, as she consistently views her as a threat. In a heated moment she says to Laurel, “The past isn’t a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn’t you know that?”
What is the future without the past? Fay is the whole future of the house and its legacy. She knows none of its past and cares nothing for it. Laurel is longing constantly for the days of the past, for the moments that have been stolen from her and kept trapped forever behind an insurmountable wall of time. The memories she has mean everything to her:
“I know you aren’t anything to the past,” she said. “You can’t do anything to it now.” And neither am I; and neither can I, she thought, although it has been everything and done everything to me, everything for me. The past is no more open to help or hurt than was Father in his coffin. The past is like him, impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again- but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.
This fairy tale of evil step-mothers and orphaned daughters and a lost homeland does not end with a magic reversal, or the kingdom being granted to the rightful heir. Laurel does not choose to stay and remain in the community of her parents and childhood. She burns the mementos and letters that allowed her to revisit her mother and father’s memory. She does not even take the “everlasting breadboard” that is tied up with so much meaning and significance to her family, choosing instead to leave everything behind. “Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again,” she thinks to herself. And in a way, it is a valuable lesson. Clinging to keepsakes and tokens as if they themselves can bring back those we love is foolishness. In many ways, opening the tight grip of the hand and letting things go freely in their right time is an honorable and valuable act. But nevertheless, there is something beautiful that Laurel is missing by taking nothing back with her to remember her family or her childhood by. In leaving it all behind, she inevitably leaves all the memories to die with her, with no one to pass them on to and nothing tangible of them remaining for the future to encounter.
What a fantastic review Hannah!