It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. Me and Benz tight as a pair of shoes. The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. He was a big man, steady and straight despite his age, and must have been a formidable force in making an arrest. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. The scenery the pace and the dialog are like a soothing low speed raft trip. The roses needed a lot of water. 42Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about . They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ), which standardized communication between servers and clients. 13There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. The second date is today's PBS please bring this back. He goes inside and there is Hazel! Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. Subscribe. cite this page as follows: "the wide net - summary"enotes publishinged. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. 24But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. . The father of the white boys is rumored to have drowned in the Pearl River, and the father of the black boys had been struck by lightning and, as Robbie cries out during a storm, was dead three days, dead as that-there axe (Welty, Collected Stories 183). Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. eNotes.com When was Delta Wedding set?? I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. One of the most famous sons of a James was Bonnie Prince Charles, son of James Stuart, grandson of King James II, and leader of the final Jacobite Rebellion in the middle of the eighteenth century to restore the Scottish Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland. [] Any day now the change will come. 31He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. Boys, he said, I didnt run, but I did some mighty high walking. I hope I have not run away from the myth of the South, but I admit I may have done some high walking. Thank you for the indulgence, and the invitation. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . Us is the fishes (Welty. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. William Wallace keeps diving down to search for Hazel until, finally, the group decides to stop and cook some of the fish they've got for a meal. The Aeneid. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. Soon, people begin to ask if the fish are for sale, and William Wallace sells them. 22There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. eNotes Editorial. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. Foots was in charge. It was a huge success, a romantic tome so overwritten and full of adjectives that Eudora Welty in her autobiography says her mother told her it used to be recommended to take it out with a chair when watering the roses. In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets "The King of the Snakes," who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. They were later given to the University of Florida. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? No police, no first responders, no telephones, no helicopters just the local men and boys with an old fish net. Updates? The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) The narration speculates on what he experiences in the solitude of the river bottom: So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? . 179). We may remember his prayer: If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness! (Vergil 166). Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the Aeneid. Bigpicture.net registered under .NET top-level domain. 16What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume, There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. The Golden Apples. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of "The Wide Window" by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler). My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. Print. Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. Since William Wallace cannot be contained in any single myth, or even in a multitude of myths, it should not have surprised me that he is able to exist untouched by history, or at least untouched by a southern identity usually defined and distinguished as being overwhelmed and overdetermined by history. He returns to his wife better capable of living a meaningful, fulfilling life. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. 172). 1943. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. Print. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. That was only part of the legend. As Mr Duval finished, and stood up to leave, he reached out to me and shook my hand: Your granddaddy was the only white man I ever loved.. They have to go and get the wide net,. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. History and Overview of CSNET (PDF: 156KB) by Peter J. Denning, with Anthony Hearn and C. William Kern. Robbie worries about lightning. This paper reviews the history, the goals, the organisation and the components of CSNET (the Computer Science Research Network). But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. One was the Florida artist A.E. Corrections? Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. 30But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in The Wide Net. 43When I finished rereading The Wide Net I reread Eudora Weltys autobiography, One Writers Beginnings. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. 27Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. He has written many essays on writers from Ireland and the American South, and has edited a dozen anthologies, including Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin), A New Book of Dubliners (Methuen), Georgia Stories (Peachtree) and Louisiana Stories (Pelican). In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. in Marrs 103). In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. 2. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. . They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. It was told by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy. But the shifting, or loss of identity, is a constant threat. 12Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. 41Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. He was on a mission. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. [] Any day now the change will come. Jump-start your essay with our outlining tool to make sure you have all the main points of your essay covered. "The Burning" digs so deep that it verges on becomingas exemplified hereone of the most ferocious of the very few examples of genuinely Expressionist literature by a famous American short story author. The Wide Net and Other Stories. Beanie deserves his own story. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. She is one of Hazels cousins. William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. The wide net. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. 27Even as I write, the Judge is his granddaddy the names of several people who had been her.! 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