Two special features of the book are its significant reading of sixty-two visual images and its extensive work with Welty's unpublished manuscripts, in particular those begun during the turmoil of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s. Laurel encounters her mothers memory, her fathers life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss and the wave of memories in. These concern the comic woman writer's relationship to issues of class and feminism, her puzzled-over and sometimes joyful rape plots, and her handling of race in fictions written when her region was immersed in its Jim Crow regulation of the black body. Phoenix is an elderly black woman on a long, treacherous journey to the city for reasons that only become clear.
Additionally, Pollack addresses several critical controversies spawned by Welty's handling of other women's bodies. Eudora Welty’s short story A Worn Path follows the story’s protagonist, Phoenix Jackson, as she travels from the remote village where she lives through the dense forest and over hills to the town where she must go to retrieve medicine for her grandson who has taken ill.
Welty's escape from sheltering continues when, after finding herself in love with a man unwilling to acknowledge his homosexuality and so sharing the silence of his closet, she varies the plot of the other woman in a series of midcareer fictions. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty herself seeks a parallel self-exposure both through these stories that pair protected girls with at-risk flashers and through her photography's innovating representations of the black female body. Eudora Alice Welty (Ap July 23, 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. southern body politic, Harriet Pollack traces a pattern in Eudora Welty's fiction in which a sheltered middle-class daughter is disturbed or delighted by an other-class woman who takes pleasure in "making a spectacle" of her corporeal self.
Drawing on the context in which the protection of the white female body is linked with guarding the U.S.