The two women travel back to the judge's home in Mount Salus, Mississippi for the funeral and are received by close friends of the family. To the distress of all who knew him, the judge dies after his wife throws a violently emotional fit in the hospital and confesses to cheating and interest in his money. Fay begins to show her true self as the judge's condition worsens. During this time, Laurel begins to get to know her outsider stepmother better, as she rarely visited her father since the two were married.
Laurel's father remains in the hospital for recovery for several months. Laurel Hand, the main character, travels to New Orleans from her home in Chicago to assist her aging father as a family friend and doctor operates on his eye. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and she leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.
Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss as well as the many memories.
#EUDORA WELTY THE OPTIMISTS DAUGHTER FULL#
Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and leaves for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. There, Laurel is immersed in the good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his hometown, Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Her father's second wife, Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Judge McKelva fails to recover from this surgery, and as he dies slowly in the hospital, Laurel visits and reads to him from Dickens. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina.
It was first published as a long story in The New Yorker in March 1969 and was subsequently revised and published in book form in 1972. The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning short novel by Eudora Welty.
0 kommentar(er)
