New Women

Abstract

Eudora Welty’s final work of the 1940s, The Golden Apples and the last novel she has published to date, The Optimist’s Daughter, both focus on modern daughters who venture out beyond the protected domestic precincts of traditional womanhood. These women are similar to the daughters of Delta Wedding in their testing and revising of prescribed roles. The Golden Apples presents several alternative solutions to the problem of redefining the possibilities of feminine identity by dramatising the growth from childhood to maturity of Cassie Morrison, Virgie Rainey, and Jinny Love Stark in the small town of Morgana, Mississippi. Welty places their development in the heterosexual context of small-town society where relationships of family, generation, sex, social class and race involve them in a complex web within which their individual choices must be defined. The Optimist’s Daughter concerns the return of another such woman to her small Mississippi home town, after she has made a successful independent professional life for herself in the urban North. The illness and death of her elderly father is the occasion which brings her back to confront the meaning of her parents’ lives.