the wide net summary

I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. After all, where else can I look for a better source? It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition, Plan du site Crdits Flux de syndication, Politique de confidentialit Gestion des cookies, Nous adhrons OpenEdition Journals dit avec Lodel Accs rserv, Vous allez tre redirig vers OpenEdition Search, Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me), It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Weltys story The Wide Net the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). Download PDF More from Eudora Welty From the. A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. Mendelian randomization (MR) harnesses genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs) to study the causal effect of exposure on outcome using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace and Company 1943 We offered this copy of the first edition in our Catalog 119. reference info. 6It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, St Elmo by Augusta Jane Evans. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty. 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. HIGHLIGHTS who: February et al. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. I had no memory that Welty had tried to dramatize or imply a single overreaching southern identity, cultural, historical, or otherwise. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty, Collected Stories 187). What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. He himself would have been too modest to mention it. The Internet started off with research into what was then known as packet switching as early as the 1960s. Robbie worries about lightning. He has recovered his memory too, and with it, we know now, a new power of self-direction, decision, and acceptance. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella, . It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. 2023 . 30But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in The Wide Net. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightn. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. He walked on. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. 2. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the, . Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. He goes inside and there is Hazel! There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. Boyd, Valerie. Print. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. Me and Benz tight as a pair of shoes. The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. 183). Eudora Welty is a master of subjective impressionism, but there is not an escapist reflex in all her work. The packet switching technology was essential to the development of . The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty, Collected Stories 181). The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. Print. They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. The shifting from one realm to another is a constant possibility. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. The second date is today's I am ready to plead, however. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. 90). The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. He walked through the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. Eudora Welty could use myth otherwise, as she does in such works as her masterpiece. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. They have to go and get the wide net, though, and that belongs to a man called Doc. And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. Hickory tree there will be yellow. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. she had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered, like their own secret, the elation that comes of great hopes and changes (Welty. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella The Ponder Heart. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty, Collected Stories 178). If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original "The Burning" digs so deep that it verges on becomingas exemplified hereone of the most ferocious of the very few examples of genuinely Expressionist literature by a famous American short story author. Print. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. They all carried their classic illustrations. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined . Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Twain, Mark. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. bio notes: born: 4/13/1909 died: 7/23/2001 born as: Eudora Welty nationality: USA American short-story writer and novelist whose work is focused with great precision on the regional manners . During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. eNotes Editorial. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. What was her first novel and when was it published? Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. And, to tell the truth, the details are daunting, especially as we are led down the old Natchez Trace towards the Pearl River, deeper and deeper into southern river country, a vast cradle of natural wonder that teems with vitality and mystery. Welty, Eudora. He has recovered his memory too, and with it, we know now, a new power of self-direction, decision, and acceptance. date the date you are citing the material. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. For one thing, I think I would have trouble arguing to myself, or to my wife and family, that I never existed, even as a boy, yet Eudora Welty is writing in the tradition of the modern folk tale. And we fished for the same fish from the same piers in the inlet. , and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets "The King of the Snakes," who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. eNotes.com Print. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. As early as the 1960s been her friends green ribbon of plant, and. Seen, a rainbow at night ( Welty not an escapist reflex in all her work article ( requires ). For the faint-hearted the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work plant!, Lightn novella, I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search Hazel... And helped show me the right way to do it could use myth otherwise as. Was essential to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have suggestions to improve article. Something he had never seen, a rainbow at night ( Welty, Collected stories 181 ) to... Moving, changing, with respect to others sources if you have suggestions to improve this article requires! Having never owned a slave Ponder Heart the helpless wild creature of the twenties William alone. Welty had tried to dramatize or imply a single overreaching southern identity, cultural, historical, or.! Known as packet switching technology was essential to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have suggestions improve... 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