The optimist of Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter is a Mississippi judge named McKelva, and his optimism is hearty enough, foolish enough, generous enough, to lead him to marry in his old age a young wife, a woman from Texas whom he had met at a Bar Association convention. Wanda Fay Chisom is her name. Had she come to the attention of Faulkner, her name would be Snopes, and if Flannery O'Connor had created her, she would be named Shiflet. She is, in the pecking order of the South, white trash.

Miss Welty has been fascinated before by these rapacious, weak-witted, pathologically selfish daughters of the dispossessed, and likes to bring them into sharp contrast (as in The Ponder Heart) with the decrepit chivalry and good manners of the Mississippi gentry. The result, however complex and sensitive Miss Welty's handling of the misalliance, is always a wail of...