Eudora Welty Relationships

Loving Others

Love can significantly impact people’s actions, helping them persevere through hardships to continue communicating with their loved ones. In “A Worn Path,” by Eudora Welty, Phoenix Jackson makes regular trips to the town of Natchez to get medicine for her beloved grandson who swallowed lye. During one of her trips, she encounters many obstacles, including her cataracts and age, a thorny bush, a log laid across a creek, and a racist hunter, though she is able to reach the town regardless of all of them. Once she is there, she purchases the medicine, and with money that she steals and begs for, she also buys a paper windmill for her grandson. Phoenix uses love as a reason to persevere in uncomfortable situations for her grandson,

In “The First Seven Years,” Sobel, the main character, is in love with a shoemaker’s daughter, Miriam. He loves Miriam so strongly that he works for Feld, the shoemaker, for five years so he can marry her, and spends every day at work trying to prove to Feld that he is a worthy husband for Miriam. However, when he finds out that Feld wanted to set her up with Max, a schoolboy who had a formal education, which Feld valued more than the hard work and effort that Sobel put into his job through constant labor, he grew furious and quit working for Feld. When talking to Feld about why he quit working for him, Sobel asked, “‘Why do you think I worked so long for you? … For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life… For Miriam,’ he blurted- ‘for her.’ Sobel forfeits his chances of getting better wages and having a better quality of life for himself so he could be with Miriam. He stays in contact with her through books while he works for Feld, which is enough to keep him happy until she is old enough for him to ask her about marriage. With the little money he gets from being Feld’s assistant, Sobel is only able to afford a “small, poor [room], with a single window facing the street. It contained a narrow cot, a low table and several stacks of books piled haphazardly around the floor along the wall…” (53). Despite having to survive in such undesirable living arrangements, Sobel uses his dream of marrying Miriam to tolerate his lack of a decent home. The books along the wall are his only form of communication with her, and they show the hope he has preserved that motivates him to stay in his situation. Feld’s actions also demonstrate that he loves Miriam dearly. He had planned out a future for her that was better than the one he was living, and asked Max, who he knew was studying to be an accountant, to talk to her