The optimist's daughter

wonderfully, really southern. Oh, how I love the classic southern writers. Rereading Eudora makes me realize the difference between mediocre and great writing, she doing the latter (and obviously I doing the former, ha ha).

Like love, grief is ultimately something that we must all go through alone. There can be people who help, but our emotional journeys are ours alone.

And that is the heart of "The Optimist's Daughter," a dark, quiet little novel set in the mid-20th century South. Eudora Welty explores a difficult, emotionally wringing topic -- one woman losing the last loved one she had, and the struggle to come to terms with the many people she's lost.

Elderly but healthy Judge McKelva goes in for an eye operation, but seems strangely lethargic afterwards. His daughter Laurel -- who has been away for several years -- is concerned as her father continues to decline, especially since his flaky second wife Fay is treating him badly, and even has to be physically restrained by a nurse. Then the judge dies.

And Laurel finds herself in her old family home, trying to deal with Fay, her weird family, and the many well-meaning-but-dense friends that McKelva had over the years. But when the house is empty and she is alone, Laurel looks back on her life -- her all-too-brief marriage to a loving man, her mother's horrible death, and her father's remarriage -- and learns how to feel again.

Few books that I've read really handle the subject of grief -- usually people hug, cry, and get over it except for a few pages every now and then, when there is a mention of the Dearly Departed.

But not many authors can really get to the wrenching, lonely core of grief and loss, and how it can set us free, or lock our emotions and throw away the key. And that is basically what "The Optimist's Daughter" is all about -- McKelva's illness and death are a prelude to Laurel's soul-searching, and the exploration of how she handles her grief.

Welty wraps the slow, gradual storyline (which takes only a few days) in warm, colourful prose ("Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of matchflame had pierced through..."). She does have a tendency to let the dialogue from various people ramble, but often that rambling makes some very sharp points about loss, such as how the well-meaning often tell white lies about the dead, or ignore their dying wishes.

Laurel is kind of a nonentity for the first half of the book -- she's all locked up in herself, and we don't know much about her. But then Welty paints the devastating pain and guilt that she's been feeling, and shows how you have to let go of the past in order to live the future. Quite a contrast to the childish, putrescent Fay, whose rallying cry is always "What about ME?" and who accuses her dying husband of ruining her birthday.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is only optimistic as it ends -- up until then, it's a beautifully painful look at love, loss, and grief. A magnificent story, if a rather uncomfortable one.

"The Optimist's Daughter" bears two of the great hallmarks of Eudora Welty's writing: meticulously recorded conversation and an emphasis on how "stories" shape our lives. Laurel, a young woman who left the South many years ago to pursue a life in Chicago, returns when her father is suddenly taken ill and requires an operation in New Orleans. There she waits out her father's long attempt at recovery in the company of her stepmother, a self-absorbed woman younger than herself with whom she has nothing in common. After her father dies, the two women accompany the body of her father, the Judge, back to her childhood home in a small town in Mississippi. Prior to the funeral a visitation takes place, and here we hear the authentic voices of all the townspeople as well as those of the Texas clan of the stepmother Fay who has claimed that all her relatives are dead. As each of these visitors pays condolences to Laurel the entire town becomes fleshed out in the words that each uses to describe his or her relationship with the Judge. Whole characters come fully to life in a single line of dialog. On the day after the funeral, some of the neighborwomen get together with Laurel to review the funeral (and discuss the stepmother). Everyone feels dissatisfied with how the funeral came off--all feel slightly uncomfortable with their own performance and those of the other mourners--demonstrating the awkwardness and stress of all funerals and the inadequacy of most people to express their true feelings of loss in these circumstances.

Throughout the book, we see the importance of the "stories" that we tell about ourselves. Already at the funeral the townspeople begin to tell stories about the Judge, exaggerating his courage and turning him into a community hero. Laurel objects to the town rewriting her father's history, but is powerless to stop them, as her father ceases to be an individual and becomes a story. Fay has worked hard to convince herself and the rest of the world that she comes from better origins than is the actual case. She is a difficult character to care about with her selfishness, distance, anger, and envy, but, as we see and hear the stories of the members of the family she has tried to distance herself from, we begin at least to understand better why she is the way she is. On her last night in her childhood home, Laurel looks through the letters and papers of her long-dead mother, who was beloved by the town, her husband, and her daughter. Through these stories (based on Welty's own memories of her mother's childhood home in West Virginia and on her mother's stories of growing up there) Laurel comes to a deeper understanding of both of her parents, their marriage, and herself.

The final theme in this simple, but profound book is the deep isolation of individuals, even when surrounding by family and friends. Laurel's father appears to have been deeply isolated emotionally despite his marriages to two women to whom he was devoted, and he draws into himself again as death approaches. Laurel's mother became increasingly isolated as blindness and mental disintegration drew her into her own world of pain and anger. Fay is loved neither by her family or the town to which her husband has brought her. Her only connection was to her husband and her anger at his death, which she sees as his desertion of her, becomes understandable. Laurel, long a widow after a brief marriage, has chosen to continue living alone in the city to which her husband took her, isolated from the community of love in which she grew up. Ultimately, however, Laurel discovers that memories can bind us to the past and prevent our moving forward. Before leaving her childhood home forever, Laurel burns all of her mother's papers. Having thus broken the hold of the past, she is now free to create a life of her own. Home will now be wherever she is.

Judge McKelva, Laurel's father, had a slipped retina. The Judge, an optimist, felt Dr. Courtland, a former neighbor in Mount Salus, Mississippi, could do the operation. Dr. Courtland had had something to do with the care of Laurel's mother, who had died.

Afterwards the Judge showed unnatural patience, reticence, and silence while he had to keep his head still after the operation. Reading NICHOLAS NICKLEBY seemed endless to Laurel. In wordless communication, Laurel came to understand that her task was not to read the book aloud to her father, but to pass the time at his bedside by reading it to herself.

The Judge's new wife was probably younger than his daughter. Fay was from Texas and claimed that her family was deceased. She tried to rouse Judge McKelva and she was stopped from doing so by the private duty nurse. McKelva collapsed and died. Dr. Courtland said that the eye had been healing. The Judge had helped the doctor financially while he was in medical school he told Laurel.

Laurel's bride's maids met her at the train and filled the house with food. The old Garden Club members were present, too. Adele Courtland, the doctor's sister, helped. It was a surprise to Laurel that Fay's relatives appeared at the Judge's funeral. The Judge had had no use for theatrics. Laurel was confused. The mourners were saying her father was a crusader, an angel.

It came to Laurel that her father had liked Gibbon, not Dickens. Mount Salus Presbyterian Church had been built by the McKelvas. Fay decided to return to Texas with her family for a visit. Family members spoke her language. Laurel faced her father's library. Everything important was in there. (Fay was getting the house.)

Laurel had married Philip Hand, an Ohio country boy. She was a widow, too, and would return to work in her field of art in another state.

In Eudora Welty's book, The Optimist's Daughter, Laurel Hand, the main character, notices her father's clock has stopped. Her father has, of course, just died, and for Laurel this means that time has become an elastic proposition. If any 20th century author can be said to have the power to split a moment, it is Eudora Welty.

The Optimist's Daughter is a study in grief and in love that carefully avoids cliché. Arriving from Chicago, Laurel watches her father let go of life after a seemingly successful operation. Meanwhile, his second wife, a younger woman named Fay who lacks the capacity for any kind of introspection, stages a display of raw anger. When they return for the funeral, Laurel watches again as the eccentric town, and Fay's even more eccentric family, converge upon the coffin of Mount Salus's first citizen.


Welty, who spent most of her life in Mississippi, has an ear for small town vernacular, and dialogue plays an important part in the book. Yet she never permits the narrative to travel along familiar lines, and often the characters speak out into thin air, as if to themselves. Laurel's distinctive silence marks the minutes before she is able to confront the past, which she does once she is alone, examining the contents of the house.

A storm, a trapped bird, and the fading correspondence of her parents' bring about the catharsis that she requires. She begins to understand the fallibility, the depth, and the complex nature of their love. `"Why did I marry a coward?"' her mother asks while dying, and Welty, as Laurel, continues - `then had taken his hand to help him bear it.'

Of all the writer's precepts, perhaps the most difficult is simplicity, of knowing when to shut up. Welty walks a fine line between boredom and profundity at times, but as Laurel goes about erasing the traces of Fay's influence (the nail polish on the desk) and her own past (she burns her mother's letters and confronts her personal losses), we sense in her a woman of uncommon maturity. There are no literary flourishes in The Optimist's Daughter, which means that every word on the page is carefully used. Take your time with this book - it bears re-reading.