Analysis Of The Robber Bridegroom By Welty

American short story writer, novelist, essayist and memoirist Welty is often designated as one of the notable southern regionalists, along with such writers as william Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O’connor. Welty has distinguished between two styles in her writing, which she labels”inside stories” and “outside stories.” The Inside stories are introspective and the thoughts and emotions of her characters are clearly delineated. They include the novels “Delta Wedding” and “The optimist Daughter” and many other short stories. Outside stories are those in which the reader has no access to the charactes’ thoughts. Characterization is achieved through dialogue. Story telling and action. Outside stories including “The Robber Bridegroom,”

In its use of magic and miracle, the locket, the milk that won’t spill, the talking head—it appeals to the supranational more than to the reason. In so far as it mythicizes history, with the Harps and Mike fink and even Jamie Lockhart, it deliberately distorts what passes for recorded fact. It thererby undermines the notion of a fixed reality, just as the use of disguise does, and in a more serious way, as the use of the theme of doubleness does, Clement tells us that all things are double, are divided in half, and in doing so, he casts doubt upon the certainty of any one thing. And finally the prose, appropriate to a fairy tale or a fable in its ballad like rhythms and its frequently sensuous images, is thoroughly artful in its contrived simplicity, the very antithesis of the even tone and orderly march pf the sentences in, for example, the common-sensical divine Jane. “New orleans was the most marvelous city in the spanish country or anywhere else on the river. Beauty and vice and every delight posssible to the soul and body stood hospitably, and usually together, in every doorway and beneath every Palmetto by day and lighted torch by night. A shutter opened, and a flower bloomed. The very atmosphere was nothing but aerial spice, the very walls were sugar cane, the very clouds, hung as golden as bananas in the