I Don't Know Why You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Concepts of Place in Eudora Welty's <i>The Optimist's Daughter</i> and Elizabeth Bowen's <i>The Death of the Heart</i>

<p>The Optimist's Daughter and The Death of the Heart reveal that, for Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, place is· more than mere landscape. Place is both the scene upon which their novels unfold and the means by which they convey their abstract understandings of the world. Place provides the physical settings of their stories, but it also reveals something about their psyche or symbolic language. The settings used by Welty in The Optimist's Daughter reinforce traditional notions of place in Southern life and society whereas the settings employed by Bowen in The Death of the Heart exhibit a partiality for mobility over rootedness. In The Optimist's Daughter, Welty's protagonist must confront a possible loss of heart and home, and in The Death of the Heart, Bowen's protagonist is faced with an actual loss of freedom and mobility. Thus, through a study of these two novels, Welty's focus on place as it relates to roots and tradition, and Bowen's fascination with place as it relates to continual movement and progress, become apparent.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2011

Author dc:creator

• Cooley, Emily Frances

Contributors dc:contributor

• Michael Mays
• Kenneth Watson
• Kate Cochran

• Arts and Humanities
• English Language and Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/612

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-1663