"The Book I Couldn't Have": The Perilous Attractions of "Elsie Dinsmore"

• Published in: Eudora Welty review 2009-04, Vol.1 (1), p.187-195
• Main Author: Hall, Joan Wylie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Finley, Martha (1828-1909); Welty, Eudora (1909-2001)
• ISSN: 1947-3370; 2165-266X; 2165-266X
• DOI: 10.1353/ewr.2009.0025

According to Waldron, Welty's mother told a formidable librarian in Jackson, Mississippi, that nine-year-old Eudora could "check out any book she wanted except books by Elsie Dinsmore" (315). According to a Mantle Ministries brochure, these texts provide models for "young girls and young ladies to dwell on Christ-like examples during a values-shifting era. Newman's precocious protagonist Katharine Faraday, at nine "hopelessly Anglomanie" from her reading of "Mr. Beerbohm and Mr. Wilde and Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins," gets a shock when she gets around to reading Elsie Dinsmore (13): [W]hen she was already too old to plead youthful irresponsibility in a hell which had been showering brimstone on infants less than a span long for three hundred years, a frightful immortality was revealed to her by a story called Elsie Dinsmore and a play called Doctor Faustus, and her childhood was darkened by the impossibility of getting rid of a deathless soul almost certainly predestined to hell... Since she had been denied the convincing raptures which heaven had granted to her mammy and to Elsie Dinsmore and to Saint Paul, and since her confidence in a printed page had been greatly increased by the observation that little girls whose hair is black and straight [like Katharine's] should be more erudite than little girls whose hair is fair and curly [like her sisters' and also like Elsie Dinsmore's], she set herself to search the scriptures. [...]Elsie's famous crisis is less a masochistic episode than a scene of assault, with the same startling undercurrents of rape that some critics have found in the memorable watermelon episode in Losing Battles, where Gloria Renfro, wearing her wedding dress, faces down the forceful Beechams.