It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty, Collected Stories 179). It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. What I want to single out is not his place in the community, which was central, but his difference from most of the adult white men I knew and observed. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. Life on the Mississippi. Omissions? During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. 3. Review and critique podcasts produced by other students as a basis for creating their own segments. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. They catch a baby alligator and the Malone brothers insist that they want to keep it. 11The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. 43When I finished rereading The Wide Net I reread Eudora Weltys autobiography, One Writers Beginnings. I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. The Internet started off with research into what was then known as packet switching as early as the 1960s. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty, Collected Stories 181). 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. As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River (Welty, Collected Stories 176). More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. 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. They all carried their classic illustrations. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. But the shifting, or loss of identity, is a constant threat. 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. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. Foots waited until they were all inside. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 1980. I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved (Welty. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. HIGHLIGHTS who: February et al. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). He goes with them to drag the river. eNotes.com, Inc. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. 183). Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. 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. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. Full Time Paid Internship Job Summary: Be a part of an innovative team and culture The Physical and Post-Production Technology department is responsible for a wide array of technologies across Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm, and various other Walt Disney groups. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. enotes editorial.vsenotes.com20 jan. 2023 . In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? 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. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. Robert Fitzgerald. 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 is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. His full name is William Wallace Jamieson. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. 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. In the end, they seem happy and content again. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. The Golden Apples. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. 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. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, eight giants with great long black eyelashes (Welty. in Marrs 67-68). In. 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. 26I am ready to plead, however. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty. 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.. publication online or last modification online. Foots waited until they were all inside. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? 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. 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. 184). 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. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. Print. Robbie is right to be frightened. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. . In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. 171). 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. 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. The second is the date of It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. Bigpicture.net registered under .NET top-level domain. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the. . It was a far better show than the movie. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. 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. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. The last date is today's We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. That was only part of the legend. In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Wide-Net-and-Other-Stories. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusWhen Eudora Welty read at 92Y on April 22, 1985, it had been 32 y. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. 6It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . 24But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. A man named William Wallace Jamieson has a pregnant wife called Hazel, and he's been going out a lot lately until finally, one night, he stays out all night. The pounding is musical, given that Eudora Welty is playing the instrument, but it can be felt all through the story, from the ironic chord of the first three words all the way to the final throb of the last line. The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. Delta Wedding in 1946. 34I think my grandfathers reputation helped me too in an experience that will stay with me as long as I live. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. Einstein activity capture is a powerful productivity-boosting tool that is integrated with Salesforce. 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. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. [] Magnolia and live-oak never die. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. Even the trees have bones that crack when lightning strikes. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. Furthermore, wide networks can successfully learn with a . The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. 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. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charma wind touched each man on the forehead (Welty, Collected Stories 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. Press in the Library of Southern Civilization series. Later on I was told that the killers were black men, and that members of our family had made sure they were given a fair trial. There is Virgil of course, living up to his name (but only in the mind of the reader, we need to remember) in that he is there to guide William on his quest, to keep him on the track, as he says. deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). Missisippi Delta in 1923. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. Published in ACM SIGCOMM 83. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. 90). He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. At least this is true of the first half of The Wide Net. The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that The Wide Net performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. the second is . Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. 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. 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 Foots was in charge. 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. 4. Eudora Welty could use myth otherwise, as she does in such works as her masterpiece The Golden Apples. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. 32But I digress, drifting with the memory. . 9Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing The Wide Net and Other Stories. Backus, locally known as Beanie. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume, 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. LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House. We may remember his prayer: If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness! (Vergil 166). The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. 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. It was, however, filled with southerners. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. 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. This was not because it was dangerous, or unseemly; it was simply against the code. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. date the date you are citing the material. The roses needed a lot of water. CRM is one of the top technology investments that organizations can make. He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. The second date is today's I am ready to plead, however. At the beginning of the story William Wallace catches a small rabbit and acts as if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it (Welty, 172). Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Corrections? Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity.
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