SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Critics.” In Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by Carol Ann Johnston, pp. 169–72. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

In the following essay, originally published in 1969, Oates comments on Welty's subtle use of horror.

What shocks us about this art is its delicate blending of the casual and the tragic, the essential femininity of the narration and the subject, the reality, which is narrated. How can the conversational and slightly arch tone of her fiction give way to such amazing revelations? That horror may evolve out of gentility—and, even in stories dealing with the very poor or the very unenlightened, Miss Welty is always “genteel”—is something we are not prepared to accept. Our natural instinct is to insist that horror be emphasized, underlined, somehow exaggerated so that we may absorb it in a way satisfying to our sensibilities. Fiction about...