Dark-purple faces and pitiful whiteness: maternity and coming through in Delta Wedding.(Critical essay)

EUDORA WELTY'S DELTA WEDDING PERCOLATES WITH WOMEN'S EXPERIENCES of sexuality. Six pregnant, recently pregnant, and potentially or rumored-to-be pregnant women populate the story: Ellen Fairchild, the ideal and idolized plantation mother; Robbie Reid, the working-class outsider who has married into the Fairchilds; Mary Denis, a Fairchild cousin who cannot attend the wedding because of her recent childbirth; the unnamed runaway girl whom Ellen encounters in the woods; the bride of the titular wedding herself, Dabney Fairchild (as Pearl McHaney suggests) (1); and Pinchy, one of the Fairchilds' black servants. The lines connecting this diverse group of women throughout the text suggest that through the depiction of maternity--both actual and potential--Welty interrogates, first, the ways in which race, class, and gender are constructed around motherhood and, second, the possibilities for transgression and subversion grounded in women's claiming of sexual and maternal rights. In Delta Wedding, Pinchy's pregnancy, as I will argue, is central to Welty's portrayal of the violence inherent in Southern racial and sexual stratification. As a defining Other, Pinchy provides the condition for white women to claim agency at her expense, but Pinchy also has the ability to resist and subvert this construction. Further, Welty's textual treatment of Pinchy's pregnancy--veiling and erasing it until it becomes the thing that cannot be spoken--at once draws perceptive readers into a more intimate understanding of the workings of oppression in the lives of her characters and implicates readers in that very oppression. Welty encourages these readers to enact the same erasure that the text performs, in effect placing readers in the story with the intention that those sensitive to the story's racial dynamics will come to realize their own complicity and will as a result adjust their moral allegiances. (2) As many scholars have pointed out, Welty does not "crusade" in the sense of addressing polemic to her readers; instead, she reveals the damage done to individual lives and presents individual ways of coping with or subverting the oppressions her characters face in language that does not alienate even a conservative readership. According to Naoko Fuwa Thomton, Welty's "social subtext"

 
   accommodate[s] the author's motivation for expressing ideas that 
   might unnecessarily make wary or turn away the reader were they not 
   offered under the camouflage of the surface story--ideas that 
   become more amenable to the reader's attention if they are 
   excavated as part of the natural process of unguarded reading. (4) 

Welty's novel contains a striking consideration not only of the harms inflicted on the victims of racism and sexism but also of the ways in which the oppressors' lives are controlled and stunted by their own exercise of domination.

In order to understand Pinchy's significance in the novel, the reader must first recognize her pregnancy. In her 1993 interview with/an Nordby Gretlund, Eudora Welty described Pinchy as "get[ting] religion"--the closest she ever came to explaining what the term "coming through" means in the novel ("Seeing" 255). Criticism to date has by and large followed Welty's lead; for example, Betina Entzminger asserts that "Pinchy is also in the midst of an internal struggle, trying to 'come through,' or to make a religious conversion" (59). While this reading--put forth by Weky and supported by folk and religious uses of the term "coming through" throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--lends Pinchy weight in relation to the spiritually bereft Fairchilds, I argue for an alternative metaphorically suggestive reading of Pinchy's character and her significance for the racial and sexual dynamics of Delta Wedding: that she is in active labor, as previously proposed by Gretlund (115-20). (3) Given this reading, the responses of the different characters to Pinchy's condition and the treatment she receives at their hands speak volumes about the construction of sex and race in the 1920s plantation South.

In his interview with Weky, Gretlund remarks, "I have the impression that Troy Flavin, the overseer, is having a relationship with one of the black girls on the plantation, i.e. with Pinchy." The author replies that

 
   I get more letters about Pinchy. "What does it mean," they say, 
   "Pinchy is coming through." Well, I should have explained that. It 
   is just a term that meant that you would get religion. She was 
   going through that, which I had heard from time to time. But a lot 
   of things I didn't have the wits to realize would need to be 
   explained. I just took it for granted that everybody would know 
   what that was. ("Seeing" 255) 

Asked about Pinchy's relationship with Troy, Welty instead comments about the term "coming through," leading the interviewer (and her readers) away from a direct discussion of Pinchy's sexuality. Welty's further assertion that she lacked "the wits to realize" the ambiguity of this euphemism strikes a disingenuous note, especially given its use elsewhere in the novel to refer to Mary Denis's labor: "'Mary Denis Summers Buchanan has come through her ordeal--very well,' said Aunt Jim Alien. 'Tempe just telephoned... She wanted us to tell you it was a boy'" (129, emphasis mine). In the interview with Gretlund, Welty continues with her project of using Pinchy's "coming through" as a shibboleth, a litmus test of her readers' and her critics' abilities to read race and sex in the everyday of plantation life, as in the novel, where she also diverts attention from Pinchy's sexuality but in a visible way. If few critics have noted that the phrase refers to childbirth even within the same text, Welty seeks not to do the work of unraveling their response but to have them unravel it for themselves. (4) Many scholars have commented on Pinchy's ambiguity, accepting