SOURCE: "Place Dissolved In Grace: Welty's Losing Battles," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 39-53.

In the following essay, Walter discusses Welty's Losing Battles.

The more one gets to know Eudora Welty's characters and to observe her construction of worlds in words and images, the more difficulty one has in seeing a division between objective and subjective, outward and inward. Her physical locales, though faithful renderings of the world's appearance in convincing visual detail, are always also figures of the thought, emotions, and dreams of her characters and narrators; and usually what wisdom her characters achieve is by way of imaginative awareness of their place as a reflector of their own and time's deepest secrets. Welty's characters typically begin in their stories with attitudes or beliefs settled in routine or tradition and sometimes hardened by a defensiveness resulting from experience of losing battles with...