The Southern cultural tradition in the works of Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy
Description
This study is an examination of three Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy, and their relationship to the traditional codified values of the American South. All three of these writers demonstrate in their works a similar concern for the need to come to terms with the codified tradition of their forebears. More specifically, all three deal in their work with a thematic pattern which was important in the work of the central figure of what has become known as the Southern Literary Renaissance, William Faulkner. This pattern involves a despair evinced by Faulkner, through his presentation of several of his characters, over the place of the Southern cultural tradition in the modern world. For characters like Faulkner's Quentin Compson, traditional expectations and conceptions prove fatal, because the character cannot find a way to adapt or revive traditional codes in a modern world which is governed by shifting and untraditional standards. In many of the novels of Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy, the protagonists are also initially unable to adapt their own traditional expectations to the demands of the modern world, and like Quentin find themselves fleeing both the cultural instability of the New South and the traditional values which have become, in their prescriptive forms, untenable. Unlike Quentin, however, the protagonists in the novels of these three authors are eventually able both to live according to traditional values and to survive in a modern world of moral reletivism. Their protagonists find a 'middle ground' in which they integrate past values with present realities. This union is perhaps best put by Eudora Welty, in The Optimist's Daughter, as a process in which memory and the past are made 'vulnerable to the living moment.' That is, the past and its traditions become functional guidelines for living in the present