SOURCE: "Life and Death in Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 288-90.

In the following essay, Bartel responds to standard critical interpretations of Phoenix Jackson's character in "A Worn Path, " noting "What concerns me about these discussions is that they treat Phoenix Jackson as a stereotype and allow the obvious archetypal significance of her name and her journey to overshadow the uniqueness of one of the most memorable women in short fiction."

I have found Saralyn Daly's interpretation of "A Worn Path" to be basically sound [Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, Winter 1964], but the more I teach the story the more I become convinced that an additional comment is needed to bring out the richness of the central character, Phoenix Jackson.

As most critics have noted, Phoenix Jackson's first name links her to the Egyptian myth of the bird that...