But I digress, drifting with the memory. 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. We bought ice cream at the same shop even though there were white and colored water fountains outside on opposite sides of the shop. in Marrs 67-68). He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. [Anthony Herrera; Rachel McPherson; Marcus Viscidi; Kyra Sedgwick; Barry Tubb; Tim Ransom; M Josef Sommer; Glen Roven; Eudora Welty;] -- Set in rural Mississippi, the story focuses on the turbulent relationship of a young married couple, William Wallace and his wife Hazel, in the American South in 1933. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. It syncs contacts, emails, and events from email tools to Salesforce. When Mother Nature, with majestic abandon, unleashes a storm for the ages (or the makers of myths) to show who will always rule the roost, William Wallace is not deterred or disturbed. Of course these signs and symbols enrich the story at the same time they divert William Wallace from his search. The Aeneid. Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. Summary of The Wide Net by Welty. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. Foots was in charge. Print. William Wallace knows now that Hazel holds the secret mystery that will continue to make him more of his own man, and he is willing to follow her lead as long as it takes: He climbed to his feet too and stood beside her trying to look where she looked. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. 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. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. 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. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. 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. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. He walked through the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work. 46I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. 39These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. They have to go and get the wide net, though, and that belongs to a man called Doc. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. ISBN: 978-1-88301155-0 976 pages. 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. Does anybody really believe there is a body in the creek or are they just having great time being outdoors together in the precious last waning days of early fall. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. 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 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. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990. in Marrs 70-71). He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. But 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. 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. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. 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). It is then, after they've eaten, that they see a giant snake that they call the King of the Snakes. 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. He walked on. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets The King of the Snakes, who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. 28What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the Aeneid, and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. William 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. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Plot Summary submission guide. 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, . 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. 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. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. 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. 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 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, Collected Stories 178). 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. 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 Aeneid. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. in Marrs 103). eNotes.com, Inc. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. 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. 1 Mar. 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. 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. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the. He himself would have been too modest to mention it. She is one of Hazels cousins. Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2006. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 1980. He has coedited (with Patrick Samway) four anthologies of Southern literature: Stories of the Modern South (Penguin), Stories of the Old South (Penguin), A Modern Southern Reader (Peachtree) and A New Reader of the Old South (Peachtree). If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. from the Chandigarh University, India have published the research: Genome-wide identi fi cation, expression pro ling, and functional analysis of ammonium transporter 2 (AMT2) gene family in cassava ( crantz), in the Journal: (JOURNAL) how: Showed that these three genes were upregulated in different degrees under the condition of ammonium Genome-wide identi . New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. 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. Get this from a library! 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. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightnin drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappys cheek, stayed till he died (Welty, Collected Stories 183). A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). 43When I finished rereading The Wide Net I reread Eudora Weltys autobiography, One Writers Beginnings. It was, however, filled with southerners. 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. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. . 178). Ben Forkner was a Professor of English at the University of Angers where he taught Southern and Irish literature, directed the English Department, and founded the Journal of the Short Story in English. I believe my shock at having to account to myself as a southerner when I arrived in my early twenties in Chapel Hill, and faced the impressive body of scholarship on southern myth then in fashion, helps explain why. He was on a mission. 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. CRM is one of the top technology investments that organizations can make. The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. 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. It was a far better show than the movie. The narration speculates on what he experiences in the solitude of the river bottom: So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? This was her 3rd book of fiction, another collection of stories; published in 1943 after the Robber Bridegroom. Robbie is right to be frightened. Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, best known for her realistic portrayal of the South. A man and a woman, unknown to each, but sharing the commonality of being from the North, meet in New Orleans and commence upon a strange tour that almost verges on the romantic, but gets only as far as one hesitant kiss. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. 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. Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. Robbie worries about lightning. 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