Speculations on Eudora Welty’s Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

• Published in: Eudora Welty review 2020-04, Vol.12 (1), p.125-142
• Main Author: McHaney, Pearl Amelia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Allusion; Art galleries & museums; Autobiographies; Biographies; Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen) (1885-1962); Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898); Essays; Gothic fiction; Literary characters; Literary devices; Narrative techniques; Publishing; Publishing industry; Readers; Reading; Short stories; Storytelling; Welty, Eudora (1909-2001); Writing
• ISSN: 1947-3370; 2165-266X; 2165-266X
• DOI: 10.1353/ewr.2020.0011

[...]2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. Writing nearly two decades later in 1956, John Davenport offers a perceptive summary of Seven Gothic Tales: "Each of the seven tales is as skillfully contrived as an interlocking Chinese puzzle; a ceaseless counterpoint, sharp as a fugue by Scarlatti; one finds oneself going through the looking-glass, or gazing at multiple reflections in innumerable looking-glasses as each successive storyteller tells his tale" (271). Dinesen's "The Deluge at Norderney," for example, includes a scene with Mardi Gras masks, familiar to Welty from her sojourns to New Orleans festivals documented in her 1930s photographs and in The Optimist's Daughter when Fay cries out, "I saw a man and he was dressed like a skeleton and his date was in a long white dress, with snakes for hair, holding up a bunch of lilies!," to which the taxi driver says, "scornfully, 'this here is Mardi Gras night'" ("Deluge" 26-27; OD 908 ).