23 pages • 46 minutes read
Eudora WeltyA Visit of Charity
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Photography
Before becoming famous as a writer, Welty was a photographer. She worked as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an employment program established by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Welty traveled to photograph her fellow Mississippians carrying out their daily routines. She felt her experience photographing these people influenced her writing. In her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty explained how photography informed her writing:
Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey—strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s (928).
Welty acknowledged that, before this WPA work, she led a sheltered life in her middle-class Jackson, Mississippi home. Taking these photographs allowed her a firsthand look at the poverty and poor living conditions of the people of her region. This work shaped her stories such as “A Visit of Charity.”
Historical Context: The Great Depression
Welty wrote this story in the decade following the Great Depression—a time when acts of charity were matters of life and death for struggling Americans. Marian’s visit is not motivated by kindness, however. Her words and attitude toward the women in the Old Ladies’ Home show her selfish motives. She is there to collect points for her Campfire Girl badges. She shows little interest in conversing with the women or helping them. Shocked by their dark, crowded room, she cuts the visit short and leaves. Her actions show insensitivity toward the women and their deplorable living situation.
At one point, Marian asks Addie her age. Very shortly after, Marian escapes from the room. She runs out of the building and grabs an apple she has hidden under the shrubs in front of the building. As she runs for a bus her hair shines in the sunlight, and her scarlet coat matches the red of the apple. She calls out to a bus driver to stop, “As though at an imperial command” (143), and the bus grinds to a halt. Once on board, she takes a bite out of the apple, her visit of charity forgotten.
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By Eudora Welty
