The first evident comparison that meets the eye is the constant referral to a long journey. Phoenix Jackson, during her journey to town, symbolizes the walk of life that Christian believers go through as interpreted through biblical understanding and practice. The focus will lie on a single, general, metaphoric concept that is presented in the literature and its comparison with a popular biblical teaching namely Christianity. Although A Worn Path contains many symbols to interpret, this essay will concentrate on a form of comparison through a formalist approach to criticism. The short story is rich with symbolisms and metaphors and a reader has many possible themes to extract from it.
She then states that the hunter is guilty not so much of deliberate racism as of simply of "fail to comprehend the dire necessity of mission, mistakenly believing she is merely going.The short story A Worn Path by Eudora Welty illustrates the journey of an old feeble woman through dangerous terrain in order to get to town and receive charity medicine for her sick young grandson. She argues, for example, that the hunter's treatment of Phoenix "can be explained in terms of accepted social behavior of the rural South in the 1930s and 1940s, which would have allowed a young white man-a simple 'red neck' hunter-some degree of domineering byplay with the curious old black woman" (170). (1) To address these concerns, Butterworth offers her own interpretation of the story's racial incidents-an interpretation that invariably serves to exonerate the story's white characters. Cooley offers in his book Savages and Naturals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modern American Literature and that John Hardy offers in his article "Eudora Welty's Negroes." Faulting both critics for "frequently Welty's portrayals of black-white relations in earlier eras" (166), she accuses them of revisionist criticism, arguing that "uch polemical demythologizings conflict with Welty's persistent refusal to use fiction as a platform, particularly for political or sociological issues, as well as her down-playing and even disavowal of racial implications in her stories" (166). In particular, she criticizes the race-centered readings of Weky's African American characters that John R. Although Butterworth acknowledges the racial significance of many of the story's incidents, she is suspicious of attempts to use Phoenix's race to understand the story.
Nancy Butterworth's "From Civil War to Civil Rights: Race Relations in Welty's 'A Worn Path'" is typical of this treatment. While later readings of Welty's story are more racially sensitive, many tend to apologize for Phoenix's treatment by the white citizens of Natchez, or to universalize her experiences, celebrating Phoenix's December journey as a triumph of her humanity rather than her race. While Ardolino is correct in stating that the encounter is structured around a motif of death and rebirth, his focus on Greek and Egyptian mythology leaves out the fact that Phoenix is an African American woman struggling to negotiate the wilderness of the depression-era South, and that in doing so, she is confronted by a white hunter who levels his shotgun at her in an obvious allusion to Jim Crow racial violence. Frank Ardolino, for example, reads Phoenix's encounter with the hunter as an allusion to the Persephone myth (5). Subsequent attempts to use Greek or Egyptian mythology to interpret the story also gloss over the racial significance of many of the story's incidents. Similarly, Saralyn Daly's careful paraphrase of Phoenix's first-paragraph description omits one word: Negro (134). Neil Isaacs, for example, goes to extraordinary lengths to account for Welty's use of hue and color, but does not address the fact that the text contains as many references to black as it does red, gold, green and silver.
IF THERE IS A COMMON THREAD THAT RUNS THROUGH EARLY CRITICAL readings of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," it is the conspicuous absence of any discussion of the race of the story's protagonist, Phoenix Jackson.
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