Settings in Eudora Welty's stories are their mise-en-scFne, the place where things happen to characters and where characters behave in thus-and-so ways. But the fact that Welty's characters take their personalities, mind-sets, assumptions, speech, and all the rest from the physical place they inhabit is especially important to her fiction because the place--the vicinity of the Natchez Trace, a 400-mile-odd stretch of land running generally southwest to northeast from Natchez, Mississippi, which is on the Mississippi River, to Nashville, Tennessee, and touching the Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers--itself has a personality. One aspect of this has to do with topography. The Trace was a centuries-long trade route for Native Americans. Another is that the Trace cuts a diagonal across Mississippi, which is to say across a big portion of the Deep South. Although eventually abandoned as modern transportation routes were added to the region, the Trace continues to resonate as an idea of a specific region of North America. Wilderness forest and rolling-hill croplands give way to delta swamplands along the river--all punctuated by rural towns and smaller cities that are identified with the American South (Crutchfield 19ff).
Eudora Welty is determinedly and decisively a Southern writer, which makes her decisively American but also decisively a recorder and observer of an idiosyncratic environment out of which arise multiple characters whose personae are shaped in part by that environment. That set of master facts, so to speak, is in the background of Welty's novels The Ponder Heart and The Robber Bridegroom and her short stories "A Worn Path" and "The Petrified Man." The content of that background is not only the physical plant for the unfolding of narrative action but also the history and culture--for good and ill--of the South. Thus in a metaphorical sense, the environment in which a Welty narrative unfolds becomes a kind of character, or pl...