SOURCE: Burgess, Cheryll. “From Metaphor to Manifestation: The Artist in Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green.” In Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, edited by Dawn Trouard, pp. 133–41. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Burgess attempts to find instances of Welty's artistic self-consciousness in the stories of A Curtain of Green.

“This could never have been a popular view,” admits Eudora Welty, referring to Willa Cather's lifelong opinion that “[a]rtists … are perhaps greater, and more deserving to be made way for, than other human beings” (Eye 59). While she attempts to understand and to explain why Cather sets apart the artist in value, Welty herself strikes a humbler pose. Whereas Cather's novels introduce numerous semiautobiographical artists, characters of commanding stature, Welty's corpus contains very few portraits of the artist. She does not vaunt her role, even from behind the veil of fiction.

Despite such...