The optimists daughter. The Optimist’s Daughter Study Guide: Analysis 2022-10-31

'The Optimist's Daughter' reminds of the value of shared histories and good neighborliness

Suddenly, your safety net is gone. Ten years after the death of his wife, Becky, he marries a younger woman that he met at a Southern Bar Association conference named Wanda Fay. At only 180 pages, this book was still a struggle for me to get through. Her mother, Becky McKelva slowly loses her vision as she approaches her death, and her father dies while attempting to recover from surgery for a detached retina. Her embarrassment over the arrival of her white trash relatives from Texas, the relatives she claimed were dead, was almost touching.

The Optimist's Daughter Summary

It not only contains several characters who suffer from blindness or poor vision but also images of vision or the lack of vision. The wife makes all the arraignments. As she unsentimentally dusts her father's library for the last time, my heart was breaking. One of my Freaky Double-Jointed Thumbs This can be a confusing book, but my advice is to hang in there. A pivotal scene in the novel is the freeing of the chimney swift, the bird that was trapped in the house. Laurel has lost her mother, her husband, and her father. But life is life and people are people, and Welty had the innate skill to bring the complexit Eudora Welty 1909-2001.

The Optimist's Daughter Characters

Isn't disrespectful for dead? Not much insight is given into her motivation, even with the introduction of her backwards family. Please do not misunderstand: This is not one of those novels that is eking by on bland mawkishness alone. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. He doted on Fay, as neighbors in Mount Salus say, although no one, including his daughter, can understand why. She left a home in which she had grown up and that had been carefully tended by her mother to her widowed father's late-life second wife without resistance. It was written much later than the bulk of the rest of her work.

The Optimist's Daughter

She travels down to New Orleans to visit her father, the Judge, because he has to have surgery on his eye. I've read some other reviews and realize that the book was confusing to some people even to the point that they gave up rela "Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams. After the judge's death the women return to Mt. I expect a tour de force compared to Faulkner, but I was disappointed that the beginning will have been laborious even if the book finishes brilliantly. She lost her husband in the War and grieves You see this character more often in movies, or even in history or real life. It will never be impervious. Yet Mount Salus aristocrats show a curious lack of breeding.

The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (1960)

The crossword clue possible answer is available in 6 letters. Additional images of vision persist throughout the novel. It's not Judge McKelva, the self-proclaimed Optimist of the book's title. Welty moves the story from a New Orleans hospital to small town Mount Scalus , Mississippi. In his seventies, he married Fay, younger than his daughter, and he weathered that marriage, though Fay did not have the intelligence of his wife or daughter, nor have his place in society. In other words, she has to wonder about the true nature of death.

"The Optimist's Daughter" Pulitzer winner Welty Crossword Clue Answers, Crossword Solver

The last date is today's date — the date you are citing the material. The novel begins with Judge McKelva, Fay, and Laurel in an examining room, with Dr. An outsider who wants all attention for herself and receives no sympathy from old Mount Scalus, Welty has created an ideal antagonist in Fay. And when her family from Texas shows up for the funeral, you see that she got it honestly. She was 92 when she died.

The Optimist’s Daughter Study Guide: Analysis

I wonder if we look at them differently in your youth and age? Having lived in Jackson for her entire life, Welty could have been writing about her own town, and she describes this town in an intimate manner. As pesky as a gnat and as prone to tantrums as a spoiled child, she is undoubtedly irritating. With Fay, the stupid young wife of her father, Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home and stays a few days after the funeral for reunions with old friends. Isabelle confesses that, as a willful teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell deeply in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper--in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. That woman was tasteless, shallow, silly----everything her mother had not been.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty: 9780679728832

Memory and death are two of the major themes of this short novel, but along with these is rebirth, both of the Judge's home garden, described in careful and loving detail by many, and of his daughter. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Here, Laurel finds love and friendship in a community which she left after childhood. She returns to Mississippi from Chicago in the whirlwind of her father's death and funeral. I failed to find the meaning in the blatantly meant-to-be-symbolic events, such as the home invasion by a chimney swift. Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

How does her presence add another layer to the social differences in the novel? Laurel and Fay return with his body to the family home in Mount Salus, Mississippi. This is my birthday! I felt so sad for Laurel and the complete loss she experiences. So the key to this book was to keep listening. Each day I look at all those boxes, and with few exceptions I say, "No, not today. Welty puts this story together in layer upon layer as carefully as my grandmother put together a coconut cake at Christmas. Eudora Welty is considered one of the great American writers of the 20th century.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

It comes with no frills, no literary allusions, no photographs. Explain how this exchange sets up the characterization for all three main characters. She only breathed for three days. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. When I first read the book, I was in my thirties.