SOURCE: Yaeger, Patricia S. “‘Because a Fire Was in My Head’: Eudora Welty and the Dialogic Imagination.” In Welty: A Life in Literature, edited by Albert J. Devlin, pp. 139–67. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

In the following essay, originally published in 1984, Yaeger discusses the stories of The Golden Apples in the context of feminist and postmodernist criticism.

Woman's language has recently become the subject of a set of elaborate and contradictory mystifications. While a number of American feminist critics have begun to join French theorists in asserting that language is a patriarchal institution, French feminists like Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, and Luce Irigaray additionally insist that this institution can be transcended, that woman's writing is an ecstatic possibility, a labor of mystery that can take place in some fruitful void beyond man's experience. “We the precocious, we the repressed of culture,” says Cixous in “The Laugh...