Cassie Morrison, Loch’s older sister, gains deep understandings of the other characters that she is unable to express in “June Recital” and is, as her name indicates, a Cassandra figure. Loch Morrison, the heroic boy who saves a drowning orphan in “Moon Lake,” is a youthful Perseus. King McLain, who has many love affairs and children throughout Mississippi, and who first appears to us in “A Shower of Gold,” is a Zeus figure. We also find counterparts for many of Welty’s characters in myth. And the Golden Apples also refer to the Greek legend in which the apples, as symbols of perfect beauty and passion, were awarded by Paris to Aphrodite, causing jealousy among the goddesses, who became partially responsible for beginning the Trojan War. The title of the cycle is found in William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” which describes the Celtic hero Aengus’s quest for eternal happiness in the form of a beautiful girl. As all people, mythic or mundane, ancient or modern, do, the characters in The Golden Apples seek beauty, love, contentment, and passion, each in his or her own way.
In depicting the residents of Morgana, Welty alludes to Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic myths and legends, Welty’s thematically demonstrating the relatedness of all human communities, regardless of time and place. In the final story, “The Wanderers,” Katie’s funeral takes place and Virgie, who at the funeral recognizes a kinship with the now aged King McLain, finally gets her chance to escape Morgana, completing the cycle.Įudora Welty/National Endowment for the Humanities In the first story, Katie Rainey, mother of the rebellious Virgie Rainey, introduces the reader to Morgana’s residents, especially the promiscuous and wandering King McLain. Each story focuses on different central characters, who also appear on the periphery in other stories at different stages of their lives. This seven-piece cycle covers 40 years in the life of the small community in Morgana, Mississippi. But Welty included the separate pieces from The Golden Apples in her Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980), making it clear that she intended them as stories. When Eudora Welty published The Golden Apples in 1949, critics did not know whether to treat it as an experimental novel or as a collection of interconnected short stories. Analysis of Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples
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