I am determined to read all the novels and short stories of Eudora Welty, starting with The Optimist’s Daughter, for the simple reason that she is that rare bird: a novelist who is also a photographer. Although there is nothing in this novel that explicitly involves photography—except a brief scene where Laurel, the daughter of the novel’s title, looks through an old family photo album—nevertheless the novel is preoccupied with sight and vision. The father, Judge McKelva, is having difficulties seeing out of one eye and has gone to New Orleans with his new wife, Fay, and his daughter, Laurel, to consult an old friend who is a specialist. Although we never learn the precise diagnosis, it appears he has a detached retina that has been left too long. The Judge requires surgery to correct the blindness, but something goes wrong during recovery and the Judge dies. The daughter, recently widowed herself, must face her boorish stepmother—two women who are the same age but of vastly different temperaments and experiences.
Blindness in literature is never simply blindness. It stands for something else. Naming that something else can be a matter for contention. Blindness can be the price one pays for the quickening of the inner eye. Through a heightening of the other senses, the blind man becomes a poet or a prophet or a seer. This is the meaning of blindness we conventionally associate with John Milton who is mentioned twice in the novel. But blindness can also stand for the buffoon without personal insight, a man like Lear’s Gloucester who cannot see how he is being used by one son at the expense of the other. Shakespeare has Regan and Cornwall gouge out his eyes to drive home the point. Gloucester’s is the blindness of a fool, not the blindness of a poet or a prophet or a seer. Because there is an ambiguity that lives at the very centre of blindness-as-metaphor, and because Welty is too good a writer to dictate to us how to read blindness in her novel, we are left to decide for ourselves, or to reconcile ourselves to the possibility that the ambiguity will go unresolved. A person can be both a prophet and a fool.
This may be the best way to understand Judge McKelva. In his hometown of Mount Salus, Mississippi, he was admired and respected. He was a figure of Southern gentility, a moral centre for his community, a person upon whom fortune had smiled. And yet he made a singularly foolish decision, the decision which drives the novel, and which becomes a source of mystery for Laurel and the reader alike. Judge McKelva married Fay. How could he have been so blind? Fay, immature and self-absorbed, so much so that she throws a temper tantrum at the side of her husband’s death-bed, perhaps hurrying him to the grave with her screaming. Fay, who lies to Laurel that she has no family, only to face her shamelessly at the Judge’s funeral while her mother and outsized clan arrive from Texas. Fay, with her brazen mouth and utter disregard for the feelings of others.
After the funeral, Laurel has a few days alone in the homestead where she grew up, before returning to her own home in Chicago. During this period of reflection and reminiscence, we learn that the Judge’s first wife, Laurel’s mother, also became blind late in life. Blindness, it seems, is the family’s burden. Laurel decides to leave behind nothing of her mother’s memory in this place. She burns the correspondence between her parents and, in a symbolic gesture, burns Milton’s Universe. Does this mean she will be freed from the blindness that afflicted her parents?
At the same time, a bird enters the house through the chimney flue. After several attempts to get rid of the bird, Laurel traps it and releases it outside. As her father’s maid observes: “All birds got to fly, even them no-count dirty ones.” Laurel has made good use of her time alone in the house and is preparing herself to release Fay, the house, her feelings, even her attachment to the memories she has of this place.
As Laurel is leaving, Fay returns to occupy the house, and the two women share a final confrontation. It concerns a breadboard. Laurel wants to take it as a memento because her father made it for her mother. But Fay has ruined it, cracking walnuts on it with a hammer and putting out cigarettes on it. In her anger, Laurel raises the board as if to strike Fay, but restrains herself. Fay mocks her for not knowing how to fight; she—Fay—had a whole family to teach her. Laurel observes to herself:
But of course … it was Fay who did not know how to fight. For Fay was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him.
I find the resolution of The Optimist’s Daughter unsatisfactory because it’s too satisfactory. At the risk of a crass comparison, it reminds me of any one of a hundred pat Hollywood films where opposing forces finally confront one another. The aggrieved party has their say. The perpetrator acknowledges the wrong they have committed. Balance is restored. However, this is not my experience of human relations. When I feel aggrieved, I rarely have the chance to say my piece to the person who has wronged me. Even when I do, the person rarely demonstrates insight regarding their behaviour and its impact upon me. Instead, my complaint entrenches them in their view that they are right and I am wrong. I leave, angry and licking my wounds. Or worse (to bastardize a phrase from Lear), I discover to my chagrin that I am more sinning than sinned against. We part company and continue to stumble in our varying states of blindness.