When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Print. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. Nature is the wide-open playground of both good and evil, and it is best to be wary when the thunder roars. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. 41Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. When he wakes up he affirms his new sense of power and potency by tying a catfish to his belt and launching into a wild Dionysian dance. I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. When William Wallace gets home, he notices a night rainbow over his house, though it clearly hadn't rained there. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. The "Wide Residual Networks" paper linked makes a nice summary at the bottom of p8: . , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. William Jamieson comes home one night from being out with friends and finds a note from his pregnant wife, who is threatening suicide by jumping off bridge He calls his friends and they go to the river searching for her, they also recruit bystanders to help out . It was told by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy. It was, however, filled with southerners. It syncs contacts, emails, and events from email tools to Salesforce. He took me in and introduced me to each worker by name. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. the second is . And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. she had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered, like their own secret, the elation that comes of great hopes and changes (Welty. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. . That was only part of the legend. There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. The last date is today's Sometimes referred to as a "network of networks," the Internet emerged in the United States in the 1970s but did not become visible to the general public until the early 1990s. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: Anybody can freeze a rabbit, that wants to he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife? (Welty, Collected Stories 172). But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty. The Pearl River is the prime example in The Wide Net and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. Trans. After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. That was only part of the legend. A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . Geographically, I had lived outside as a boy in the steamy heat of southern Florida. He walked on. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. Eudora Welty is a master of subjective impressionism, but there is not an escapist reflex in all her work. William Wallace knows now that Hazel holds the secret mystery that will continue to make him more of his own man, and he is willing to follow her lead as long as it takes: He climbed to his feet too and stood beside her trying to look where she looked. Later on I was told that the killers were black men, and that members of our family had made sure they were given a fair trial. It was a far better show than the movie. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) At least this is true of the first half of The Wide Net. The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that The Wide Net performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty, Collected Stories 183).1 This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume, There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of. 183). It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. publication online or last modification online. He returns to his wife better capable of living a meaningful, fulfilling life. They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. The Wide Net, short-story collection by Eudora Welty, published in 1943. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. I had no memory that Welty had tried to dramatize or imply a single overreaching southern identity, cultural, historical, or otherwise. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and livesthe old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 104). Print. The Wide Net. Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. The web value rate of bigpicture.net is 49,209 USD. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. 9Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. 1943. Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition, Plan du site Crdits Flux de syndication, Politique de confidentialit Gestion des cookies, Nous adhrons OpenEdition Journals dit avec Lodel Accs rserv, Vous allez tre redirig vers OpenEdition Search, Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me), It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Weltys story The Wide Net the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). I began this paper with a confession. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. 31He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. It was written forty years after The Wide Net but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. The Pearl River is the prime example in The Wide Net and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. 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