The Optimists Daughter: A Look at Death and Dying Essays -- Optimist

The Optimists Daughter A Look at Death and Dying Fay struck out with her hands, hitting at major Bullock and Mr. Pitts and Sis, fighting with her mother, too, for a moment. She showed her claws at bay wreath, and broke from the preachers last-minute fortification and threw herself forward across the coffin on to the pillow, driving her lips without aim against the count under hers. She was dragged back into the library, screaming, by Miss Tennyson Bullock, out of sight fuck the blanket of greenery. Judge McKelvas smoking chair lay behind them, disquieted (86). This is a short excerpt from The Optimists Daughter (1972) by the Pulitzer Prize master for fiction, Eudora Welty. The story is centered around Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who left her home in the South to live in Chicago. dapple in Chicago she meets Philip Hand, and they ar married. Philip, however, goes to war and never returns. Laurel is straight off venturing to New Orleans to be with her dying father. A fter his death Laurel and her obnoxious stepmother, Fay, travel back to Laurels home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi. in one case in Mount Salus, Laurel is greeted with some(prenominal) friends and acquaintances. The whole town has already prepared for Laurel and the remains of her father. The day of the funeral the whole town boodle to pay their respects the school ,the bank, the post office, and the court house either close. The funeral is perfect, but Laurel struggles with letting her father go. Laurels bridesmaids in any case struggle the bridesmaids are Laurels closest friends and range from young to elderly women. After the funeral is over Fay returns with her family to Texas for a few days while Laurel finishes saying goodbye to her octogenarian house. Fay is very bitter t... ...eels about her. Fay, on the other hand, would be muzzy without her Texan accent. The Optimists Daughter opens the mind of the reader to let him see the many reactions of friends and relatives to death and dying. As Fay strikes out during the funeral it is easy to recognize that culture also plays into peoples reactions. When Fay kisses her husband goodbye, while he was in the coffin, it is because that is what her mother would have done. It female genital organ be very hard to deal with the death of a love one, but sometimes it is even harder to deal with how others are reacting. The novel explains that, reposition lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns of restored dreams(179). flora CitedWelty, Eudora. The Optimists Daughter. The Vintage Book 1990 Edition. New York.