SOURCE: Schmidt, Peter. “Misogyny and the Medusa's Gaze: Welty's Tragic Stories.” In The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction, pp. 49–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

In the following essay, Schmidt argues that Welty's most successful stories amalgamate the forms of tragedy and comedy.

From the very beginning of her career as a story writer, Welty tried her hand at writing tragedy. The earliest tragic story of those included in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1936), the first of a series of stories about troubled male wanderers; the most recent stories in the same collection, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) and “The Demonstrators” (1966), depict an entire society that seems tragically to have lost its bearings. Reynolds Price has argued that at the beginning of Welty's career she kept her tragic stories strictly separate from her comic ones, whereas later she...