ayer, in the tale. Only in settings that are nonneutral, that have forceful personalities, would this be possible. For example, the worn path that Phoenix Jackson walks to get to town for her grandson's medicine is a naturally occurring obstacle course. By the time Phoenix has gotten tangled in and extricated herself from the brambles, squeezed under the fence, trod through the furrows and weeds, drunk from the spring in the ravine, fallen in the ditch, been rescued by the hunter, and made her way to the wagon path, the reader has a strong idea of the lie of the land. Isaacs refers to the story as emblematic of "road" literature a la Kerouac (48).
The worn path Phoenix takes is perhaps not inconceivable in any other place, but the peculiar character of the landscape is nevertheless material in the halting progress that Phoenix makes. Equally, the setting of Phoenix's journey makes clear a number of things that are never said directly. She is and always has been the poorest of the Negro poor, and this Christmastime walk is not the first time she has made the trip. No bus or taxi runs from her homeplace in the country to the city hospital--assuming she had the fare, which she does not. Once she arrives in town, the journey is no less arduous psychically than the hike was physically: At the hospital she is "Granny" and "Aunt" and "Charity"; she does not have a name or an honorific "Mrs." to precede it. Perhaps it does not matter at this point, since the reason for her long walk into town has briefly slipped her mind: "My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming" ("Path" 148). So it is for the little old Negro granny in 1941 Mississippi.
Because Welty's fiction is so firmly anchored in the culture of the South, some critics have described her as a "regional" writer--and in the process relegated her texts to an also-ran status while such American fiction writers as William Faulkner (whose main corpus is set i...