Eudora Welty’s “A Memory” is in part the precursor to a coming-of-age story. While the narrative provides no reference to the narrator’s exact age, it is clear that she is on the cusp of a great life transition. Throughout the story, Welty emphasizes the contrast between the narrator’s innocence (which borders on naïveté) and her growing consciousness of the real world. In doing so, Welty hints at a process of maturation that is about to unfold.
The reader is led to believe that the narrator has had a sheltered upbringing. The curated environment of her childhood, which the narrator describes as having been “strictly coaxed into place like a vine on [a] garden trellis,” starkly differs from the “abandonment and wildness” she is beginning to witness in her surroundings. Nonetheless, in spite of the fear and dread that these observations stir up, her urge to incessantly watch the world is experienced as a need, an impulse indicative of a desire to relinquish some of her childhood innocence. On the one hand, Welty’s depiction of childhood love appears to reinforce the protective innocence that the narrator is leaving behind. Lying on the beach that summer morning, the narrator actually calls on the memory of the incident on the stairs to safeguard herself against the “horror” of the bathers. On the other hand, the narrator also seems to see the purity and intensity of first love as something that makes her observe the world around her even more scrupulously. It calls her into a “dual life,” and she ends up straddling two modes of experience: that of the naïve “dreamer” and that of the astute “observer.”
In this regard, the narrator’s experience of first love provokes a “constant uneasiness” within her, as she is forced to acknowledge that both life and love might actually resemble the messiness and chaos exhibited by the bathers, not the unrealistic ideas she has crafted in her imagination. When the disappointment of this realization sets in, she becomes so overwhelmed with self-pity that she bursts into tears. And yet, it is also in this moment, when she is forced to confront her own naïveté, that the potential for maturity and growth emerges.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Childhood Love, Innocence, and Growing Up ThemeTracker
Childhood Love, Innocence, and Growing Up Quotes in A Memory
When a person, or a happening, seemed to me not in keeping with my opinion, or even my hope or expectation, I was terrified by a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow. My father and mother, who believed that I saw nothing in the world which was not strictly coaxed into place like a vine on our garden trellis to be presented to my eyes, would have been badly concerned if they had guessed how frequently the weak and inferior and strangely turned examples of what was to come had showed themselves to me.
My love had somehow made me doubly austere in my observations of what went on about me. Through some intensity I had come almost into a dual life, as observer and dreamer. I felt a necessity for absolute conformity to my ideas in any happening I witnessed.
But this small happening which had closed in upon my friend was a tremendous shock to me; it was unforeseen, but at the same time dreaded; I recognized it, and suddenly I leaned heavily on my arm and fainted.
Still I lay there, feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bullwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around their bodies, which changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm. I looked away, and for the object which met my eye, the small worn white pavilion, I felt pity suddenly overtake me, and I burst into tears.
