Of Women and Water: Submersion Stories in Eudora Welty’s Fiction

Too often, when women in literary texts come of age, they die. Instead of entering an adulthood full of possibility, female characters time and again follow the path charted by Ophelia and drown, either literally in waters they cannot navigate or metaphorically in a society that does not allow them to construct their own stories.

Eudora Welty, however, rewrites this standard female coming-of-age story by repeating a specific key scene. More than a dozen times in her narratives, a young woman encounters a body of water--a lake, a river, a whirlpool, or even a rain barrel. In every case, the character’s submersion signals her entry into an adulthood full of possible danger. When the submersion experience becomes a spiritual baptism, however, the enchanted natural world can empower female characters to counter human social structures that tend to leave them silent, ignored, or dead.

In crafting these submersion scenes, Welty upends the power dynamics of perspective. Against the corporate point of view of a town, society, or family, Welty writes the individual, submerged perspectives of women trying to create adult identities not defined by societal scripts. By positing an ecofeminist reading of Welty’s fiction, Of Women and Water: Submersion Stories in Eudora Welty’s Fiction argues that Welty’s texts seek a narrative that will safely land female characters in adulthood with the agency to tell their own stories of confinement, submersion, and escape.

Sarah Gilbreath Ford is professor of American literature at Baylor University and coeditor of the Eudora Welty Review. She is author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic, published by University Press of Mississippi, and Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White. In 2017 she received the Phoenix Award from the Eudora Welty Society, and in 2019 she was named a Baylor Centennial Professor.