e their lives and thoughts. The Fairchilds live in a tall, white plantation house called Shellmound, which is full of shabby old rooms (which reminds readers of a mound of shells, piled on top of one another, just as the kids are piled inside every room as they nosily prepare for the wedding). The town is named after the Fairchild family and consists of a store, church, cemetery, a few houses, and a cotton gin. The Fairchild world is viewed from the eyes of an outsider, a visiting cousin, Laura McRaven, who has come into the lives of the Fairchilds at a time when they are preparing for the wedding of her cousin, Dabney Fairchild, to Troy Flavin.
Critics of Welty's novel claim that there is little strategic conception behind the plot, other than that the author was nostalgic over the kind of life that southern plantation society lived in 1923. And, in fact, the author admitted that the novel was developed from a short story she wrote, originally called "Delta Cousins," which her agent suggested was really chapter 2 of a novel. Of all of the author's novels, Welty stated that she just made this story up as she went along and that it was the most "ill-planned or unplanned of books." But, despite her frankness about the novel's accidental beginnings, as this paper will later show, the story does have a point to it. Nevertheless, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer was still chided by a few literary critics who thought that Welty did little to provide any social criticism about "the South" in her novel. Other critics protested becau
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