One of the least charming features of the culture I grew up in was an obsession with other people.
Maybe it’s human nature, rather than a feature of a particular culture. But it seems to me that there was an exaggerated tendency in Southern culture to look at other people, not with a view toward helping them, but with an eye toward finding faults and mocking them. Gossip was the national sport, a bit like going to the bullfights in Spain.
Eudora Welty’s story “Petrified Man” gets at this feature of Southern life. The story is set in a beauty parlor. Gossip is the main attraction. People don’t want to talk about their own lives. They don’t want to consider how they might improve themselves. They want to talk about other people, and they worry about what other people might say in return.
In such environments, the “freak show” was news. The Petrified Man in this story was seen at the carnival.
I have known people like the characters in this story. I didn’t like them and so I don’t like the story told about them.
Don’t get me wrong: I admire Welty’s gifts as a storyteller.
But if her characters magically came to life today, I’d avoid them. While they were talking about the freak show when this story was written, today they’d be extolling the charlatans leading religious revivals or political efforts to make America great again.
If there is such a thing called Southern literature, there you have my relationship with it. I don’t really like a lot of the stories written about the South and Southerners.
• Source: Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir; New York: The Library of America, 1992, pp. 23-36. “Petrified Man” is in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” archives:
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