32 pages • 1 hour read
Eudora WeltyWhy I Live at the P.O.
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1929, Welty worked as a photographer. Her writing was published in a variety of venues, and she was prominent in the worlds of both radio and newspaper before her fiction found a publishing home.
The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships during the 1940s, Welty traveled to several European countries, including England, Ireland, and Germany. She was published in the Library of America and won several prominent awards during her lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Welty is known for short stories and novels set in the American South. Her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman,” was included in the 1936 issue of Manuscript. Her first published short story collection, A Curtain of Green, includes “Why I Live at the P.O.” Unusual for the time, three of the volume’s stories centered around Black characters. Author Toni Morrison commented that Welty’s writing was “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about” (Marrs, Suzanne. “Biography,” The Eudora Welty Foundation.). In 1963, Welty’s tale of a Southern white man who kills a civil rights leader, “Where is the Voice Coming From?” was anthologized in The New Yorker after the death of Medgar Evers in Welty’s hometown of Jackson, Mississippi.
Welty was known for her realistic observations of both place and everyday life in both her photography as well as her written work. Most of Welty’s works are set in the Mississippi Delta country she called home. In addition to reflecting this setting and Welty’s attention to place and community, “Why I Live at the P.O.” centers on family relationships, a common refrain throughout many of Welty’s novels and short stories. While much of Welty’s work has been classified as “Southern Gothic,” Welty protested this designation.
Welty wrote and published in a variety of genres, including children’s literature (The Shoe Bird), fiction (The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, and The Optimist’s Daughter), and nonfiction.
Sociohistorical Context: World War II-Era United States
“Why I Live at the P.O.” contains several details that reflect its setting in the small-town American South during World War II.
Through references to food, Welty situates Sister’s family within a socioeconomic class that must be mindful of resources, likely due to the rationing present during the World War II era. For instance, the narrator “[tries] to stretch two chickens over five people” (2), noting her concern over the fact that she has two extra mouths to feed. There are also several references to canning and food preservation, such as the narrator bringing watermelon-rind preserves and other canned goods to the post office. Limited meat rations were part of life during the war, along with gardening and canning, which were encouraged by the government to aid the “war effort.” While none of the family is directly involved in the war contemporary to the story’s publication, Sister references Uncle Rondo’s time at Flanders Field, anchoring Uncle Rondo as a veteran of World War I.
The child in the story, Shirley-T., also reflects popular culture references of the story’s time. Shirley Temple, whom Mama says the blonde-haired Shirley-T. resembles, was a popular child actress of the era known for such films as Heidi (1937) and Curly Top (1935). Mimicking her singing, tap-dancing namesake, Shirley-T. sings “Popeye the Sailor Man” as she dances around the house, referencing a popular character first seen in the comic strip “Thimble Theatre” in 1929 who later became part of the televised cartoon canon. Radio—a popular source of both news and entertainment—also plays a role in this story, as Sister takes the family’s radio with her to listen to news about the war.
The story also illustrates changing attitudes about sexuality and the generation gap in the 1940s US. In an attempt to defend Stella-Rondo’s dignity, Mama insists that Shirley-T. is indeed adopted, despite the fact—as Sister argues—that the child looks just like a combination of Papa-Daddy and Mr. Whitaker. Mama’s defense implies that Stella-Rondo having adopted Shirley-T. would be more dignified and proper than having given birth to a child and then leaving the father. This conflict illustrates the ways the stories’ characters struggle to accept the ways culture and society are changing.
Through limited references to Black residents—particularly the family’s reluctant benevolence in granting the “help” the day off for the holiday—Welty also situates the story firmly within the Jim Crow South. In the 1940s, segregation laws remained in force, affecting Black Americans’ rights to vote, purchase homes, move above freely, attend school, and obtain well-paying jobs. Several of the characters in the story express overtly racist attitudes toward Black domestic laborers, and near the end of the story, Sister demands a young Black girl ferry her belongings up a hill. These instances illustrate the prevailing attitudes among many white southerners in a time when Black people were marginalized legally, as well as socially.
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