49 pages • 1 hour read
The Optimist's Daughter
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Making Peace with the Past
Through the character of Laurel, the author contemplates the challenge of reconciling the past and the present in order to move forward. Laurel embodies the seeking character’s struggle to find her way among the ashes of her life. The deaths of her father, mother, and husband, and the present circumstances involving Fay’s new ownership of her childhood home, put Laurel in a nearly untenable conflict. She must navigate the grief of her father’s death, and the loss of her mother and her husband, under the hostile eyes of Fay, who cares nothing for the past and fails to gain any insight into Laurel’s struggle with loss and grief. As Laurel soon realizes, Fay and her family are incapable of understanding the deeper meaning of the events that unfold in their lives. Laurel, however, is stuck in the past, and she must understand it before she can imagine her future. Through Laurel’s character, the author shows that only when we make peace with our past, and understand that it is not memory but love that binds us and creates continuity in our lives, can we forgive and experience both suffering and joy at once.
Juxtaposed against Fay’s refusal to respect and honor the past, Laurel’s challenge is to recognize how easy it is to hold onto lies and stories of what really happened. Laurel does not want to move forward without a greater understanding of who her parents were and how they navigated their love under the duress of her mother’s illness. Laurel leaves Mount Salus a wiser person, having reconciled the past with the truth. Her parents, she’s come to understand, were not perfect, and her marriage was too brief, but Laurel returns to Chicago secure in the knowledge that memory exists not in objects but in the heart, alongside love.
Romantic and Familial Love
The Optimist’s Daughter addresses two different types of love, the love between family members and the love between romantic partners. We see the struggle to understand and hold love mainly through the character of Laurel, who must reconcile the truth of her parents’ marriage with the reality of it, as well as manage the grief of losing the love of her life.
Family love is also illustrated, albeit with different cultural mores, in both the Dalzell family at the hospital and the Chisom family at the McKelvas’ home. As the author paints the picture of a family’s dynamic, she highlights a key difference between Laurel and Fay: Laurel is motivated to understand the nature of love and its passage through her life, whereas Fay doesn’t care about the past and has no desire for insight.
When she enters her parents’ bedroom on the night that the bird is trapped in the house, Laurel is forced to face the truth about her parents’ relationship. Though she understands that there is no doubt about her parents’ love for each other, it was a love that was fractured by illness and by the inability of both parents to communicate. Laurel comes to see that when you can’t face the reality of someone’s suffering, as the Judge could not do for his wife, Becky, then you can’t ever resolve the pain of conflicted love. In this regard, the author implies that complete love requires courage, and in the case of family dysfunction, resolution only comes when facing the truth.
Likewise, with the important symbol of the confluence of the rivers, the author imbues Laurel with the ability to make sense of her grief over the loss of her beloved husband. In romantic love, Laurel realizes that the joining of two lives is like the joining of two rivers and that the confluence of a marriage rests in the individuals’ commitment to their union. Laurel also understands that her husband’s death does not mean that the love she felt for him and he felt for her is over. Love, whether familial or romantic, is eternal—it resides in memory and binds people together forever. For her parents, Laurel realizes that though the end of her mother’s life illuminated the differences in her mother’s and father’s manners of dealing with tragedy, her parents did not dislike each other. In fact, she realizes they loved one another. However, as the author implies through Laurel’s character, understanding only comes after facing the truth. When Laurel does so, the weight of the family dysfunction is resolved, as is Laurel’s confusion about the death of her husband.
The Danger of Delusion
Eudora Welty, who grew up in the South and was familiar with the shameful past of slavery, the Jim Crow laws, and attempts to preserve the old ways of living at all costs, was accustomed to ignorance and delusion on the large social and cultural scale. To ignore hatred and ignorance in order to maintain the status quo is to live in delusion, and eventually the delusion will kill.
Welty uses what she knows about the macro view of cultural delusion and applies it to the micro view of her characters’ coping skills. Through the character of Judge McKelva, readers see what happens when he refuses to see his reality, both past and present. Judge McKelva calls himself an optimist, but in fact, his optimism is blind hope. His hope is always that if you don’t look too hard at reality, you will be just fine. It is an attempt on the Judge’s part to keep pain and suffering at bay. If he can’t see it, it must not exist. He is “blinded” by the fig tree that his wife planted and can’t “see” beyond it to the truth. He has failed to perceive and manage the sometimes painful reality of his life, and as a result, his blindness kills him.
Welty illustrates that once you metaphorically close your eyes to pain and suffering, a chain of denial develops. The Judge, afraid to face the truth of his wife’s illness, does not grasp that his role is to comfort and allow the inevitable to happen. Instead, he deludes himself about the truth. As a result, he betrays Becky by not being present for her as she suffers. She dies in a rage, aware of his lack of moral courage. Likewise, the Judge fails to grasp Fay’s vulgarity and turns away from the clarity of her ambition to marry well. The assumption behind the marriage is that the Judge cannot accept the reality of his old age and the sickness and death that lie before him. His optimism is a bluff; it is an alternative to enlightenment and conceals his inability to know the truth.
Laurel realizes that he was not able to truly grasp or “see” the tragic events of his first wife’s death. She acknowledges that guidance would be the only way to help him comprehend and accept reality. In her loyalty, she defends him. Laurel, the heroine protagonist, realizes that, like him, she lives in the past. Unlike him, however, she is not blind. She chooses to live her life differently. Her struggle to seek and understand the truth about love and death is Welty’s way of furthering the theme that delusion or enlightenment is a choice. When you can’t see the truth, Welty implies through the arc of Laurel’s character, you die both spiritually and literally.
Unlock all 49 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Eudora Welty
