A Worn Path

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Literary Context

Welty wrote during an era in literary history sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. In this period between World War I and II, Southern writers reflected on the history of the South with increasing objectivity and curiosity. Some writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, sought to celebrate the antebellum South and looked back on the era of big plantations, slavery, and the Confederacy with nostalgia. Her novel Gone with the Wind (1936) portrays an aristocratic Southern family victimized by the Union Army and Reconstruction, and focuses more on a love story than the tense sociopolitical reality of the South at that time.

Other Southern writers approached the South in more complex terms. William Faulkner, a Mississippi native like Welty, immortalized the state with a series of novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County; noteworthy novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner wrote in a varied style that was eloquent, dramatic, highly descriptive, and punctuated by bits of rough humor. His characters—white, Black, and mixed race—are complicated individuals who struggle against the dark legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and familial decay. They are portrayed much like characters in Greek tragedies and epics, with flaws and nuance that lends them great complexity. Faulkner quickly became a colossal figure in Southern fiction, and writers after him had to contend with his influence and move beyond it.

Welty’s style sits somewhere between Mitchell and Faulkner. She does not deal with the South in terms of a grand romance, nor does she fixate on the dark and torturous past. Rather, she is primarily interested in ordinary Southerners and the daily triumphs and tragedies of living. Family is a crucial theme in much of her fiction, including “A Worn Path.” Phoenix exemplifies how loyal devotion to one’s family makes life both exceedingly difficult yet deeply meaningful.

Socio-Historical Context

“A Worn Path” cannot be divorced from the socio-historical context of Jim Crow and the racial segregation that prevailed at the time the story was published. The term “Jim Crow” refers to a popular pre-Civil War minstrel act that featured white actors portraying African Americans in a vulgar, stereotypical way for comedic effect. It perpetuated the view that African Americans were by nature naive, lazy, happy-go-lucky people, reinforcing white supremacist ideology.

After the Civil War, “Jim Crow” came to reference a series of laws that undermined Black liberty and human rights. The culmination of these laws was the US Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. According to the ruling, separate public facilities for white and Black Americans were deemed constitutional. The result, however, was anything but equal, as the laws enforced a view that African Americans were inferior to white people and therefore deserved a lower quality of living. Though segregation and racism existed throughout the country, it was especially heinous in the South, where Jim Crow laws were prevalent. They empowered groups like the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black families; kidnappings, torture, and lynchings were also common. These laws held sway until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Jim Crow permeates “A Worn Path” even though it is not the central focus. The story is not a direct polemical either for or against segregation. Rather, Welty depicts how it informs the daily interactions between white and Black people. The most significant example occurs in the interaction between Phoenix and the white hunter. When Phoenix tells the man that she is determined to get to town, he dismisses her with a laugh and replies, “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus!” (145). He views her through the stereotypes perpetuated by Jim Crow and doesn’t consider that her journey is of dire importance. He points his gun in her face for his own amusement and feigns respect by saying he’d give her money if he had any in deference to her bravery. Phoenix is no fool to the hunter’s conceitedness and dishonesty, and her clever theft of his nickel and refusal to be intimidated demonstrates resistance to white supremacy and the oppression of Jim Crow.