SOURCE: Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “Alas, Alack! or A Lass, a Lack? Quarrels of Gender and Genre in the Revisionist Künstlerroman¹: Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 4 (fall 1991): 391-409.

In the following essay, Hankins tries to come to a clear definition of the female künstlerroman through an analysis of Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.

All of Eudora Welty's writings interrogate the possibilities of art. Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Optimist's Daughter, probing again and again the complex web of relationships between women and art, would seem to fall naturally into the Künstlerroman genre of novels about the artist and art. But an odd thing happens on the way to the genre—the path turns into an obstacle course. Why? Critics' difficulties identifying the artist figures in these texts hint at the problem.² Why aren't the women in these novels—Virgie, Laura, Laurel...