Eudora Welty A Worn Path

Literary Analysis of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” exemplifies multicultural literature through the characterization of her heroine, Phoenix Jackson, and the development of several prominent themes. Because she is from Mississippi and lived through times of racism, Eudora Welty uses her own history and experience of seeing issues with race and class to tell this story. This essay will feature a literary analysis of the short story “A Worn Path” which will include an examination of the presentation of the character, Phoenix Jackson, and an exploration of several themes such as race, perseverance, and love. “A Worn Path” tells the story of an elderly, African American woman named Phoenix Jackson who is traveling

Eudora Welty carefully crafts Phoenix’s character, and it helps to bring attention to Phoenix’s financial status, physical state, and hardships of the past. The way she is characterized also gives the reader an insight into how being African American in that time period can affect one’s life. In the opening paragraph on page 227, Phoenix’s physical appearance is described for the first time. Eudora Welty writes, “She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock” (Welty 227). It is clear that Phoenix is a frail woman based on this description which is key to understanding the kind of determination it took for her to complete her journey. One of the obstacles she faces is a barbed wire fence. In the story, the way she crawls through the fence is described as “There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps” (Welty 229). As an elderly woman, having to maneuver through a fence in this manner is very difficult. Phoenix Jackson is not going to let a fence deter her from completing her trip to the

The author, Eudora Welty, is a white woman, and this story follows the journey of an African American woman. In her story, Eudora Welty recognizes the difference in the treatment of African American people compared to her treatment as a white person. There are scenes that include distinct differences in treatment based on race, such as the situation where Phoenix runs into the white hunter who is rude to her because of her race. It is also clear that Eudora Welty acknowledges the cycle of race and poverty among African Americans because of slavery in the past. She presents the main character as a poor African American woman who is suffering because of the lasting effects of slavery. An article written by Kevin Moberly, he describes the image of Phoenix Jackson as “a representative of the trope of the African American mother figure but, as the title of Welty's story suggests, as the embodiment of the tradition of the African American journey to freedom, the slave narrative” (Moberly 114). This explanation of Phoenix Jackson pushes the idea of this story being a work of multicultural literature because the treatment of an African American woman by white Americans is representing the slave narrative of finding freedom. Eudora Welty tells a remarkable story with themes that deepen the meaning of the arduous journey taken by Phoenix Jackson, and ultimately