The Optimist's Daughter

“What happened didn’t happen to the outside of his eye, it happened to the inside. The flashes, too. To the part he sees with […]”

In referring to the “part the Judge sees with,” or in his case, should see with, this quote spoken by Dr. Courtland goes beyond the physical mechanics of an eye. The quote implies that the problem with his vision or his “seeing” has been going on for a long time. His blindness to reality has been a growing disease, and the doctor hopes that the surgery will get at the deeper issues that exist in the layers beneath one’s exterior.

“It seemed to her that the grayed-down, anonymous room might be some reflection itself of Judge McKelva’s ‘disturbance,’ his dislocated vision that had brought him here.”

The “grayed-down” room is a visual representation of the unspecified and mysterious element in the Judge’s character that doesn’t shine. It is muted by denial and delusion, by the lack of an ability to see. In setting the word “disturbance” off into quotation marks, Welty draws our attention to the notion that it is not really a physiological issue the Judge is experiencing, but a mental uproar and distraction of the spirit. His vision is “dislocated” like an arm, meaning there has been some kind of rupture in his life, most likely Becky’s death, that made it only possible to continue forward without seeing. 

“Laurel could not see her face, but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”

Two interesting points are made in this quote. The first is in its content. The meaning of the quote revolves around the vulnerability and defenselessness of the sleeping form. It is this moment, when Fay is not fighting, that Laurel can see, for the first time, that there might be another side to Fay that she has yet to comprehend. The second note about this quote is its placement. It is the first time that Laurel has a moment of understanding that goes deeper than the surface of her situation. It foreshadows Laurel’s depth and willingness to forgive and to attempt to find meaning in the difficult situation brought on by her father’s death.

“The mystery in how little we know of other people is not greater than the mystery of how much.”

Laurel is beginning to understand more than just what she can see on the surface. Here she is enlightened by the idea that how much we know about a person is equal and opposite to how little we know about them. The quote implies that the more we learn of a person, the more we realize how wrong we might be about them. It also implies that knowing someone more opens up more mysteries about them.

“They might have come out of that night in the hospital waiting room—out of all times of trouble, past or future—the great, interrelated family of those who never knew the meaning of what has happened to them.”

This quote echoes a running theme in the book: the idea of ignorance as an impediment to understanding the commonality of human nature. It is possible that the quote is speaking to larger issues—slavery, the roles of women in the South, and poverty of the type Fay is being judged for and suffering under. Without self-knowledge, Welty implies, we cannot rise above the ignorance that allows us to continue to enact the same detrimental behavior over and over again. 

“[…] this new part of the cemetery was the very shore of the new interstate highway.”

The highway represents modernity and the changing ways of the deep South. It also characterizes the changes that have and will continue to take over Laurel’s life. Here it is meant as a disparagement against what is new, and it is only Fay who recognizes that the past is dead. Laurel has yet to comprehend the nature of the past, and she silently criticizes Fay for choosing the tacky new spot in which to bury her father. By referring to the movement of the freeway, Welty is symbolically calling forth the old adage, “Time marches on.” In this case, even the dead are not immune to the change that comes with modernity.

“Oh, it’s a game, isn’t it, nothing but a game.”

The older women are out in the garden gossiping, a pastime in which Laurel does not participate. As they watch the birds playing with the silver discs of the bird-frightener, Adele makes this comment. It is clear, as Welty’s style throughout the book indicates, that this is meant to be a double entendre: While it appears that Adele is referring to the birds fooling around with something made to frighten them, she is also referring to Fay and her manipulations in landing the Judge as her husband. The implication is that when you play games, someone will get hurt, as did the Judge, who died as a result of his inability to detect and acknowledge that the game was afoot. 

“And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, what they read always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people, every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.”

Laurel reminisces about her parents, who read to each other in the early days of their marriage before her mother got sick. Though not directly stated, it is implied that Laurel experienced this with her own husband. This is a romantic quote suggesting that the language of love that, no matter the words, is pure delight. 

“Her marriage had been of magical ease, of ease—of brevity and conclusion and all belonging to Chicago and not here.”

Laurel must acknowledge that though hers was a marriage that did not suffer conflict, and that the love she and her husband had for each other was uncomplicated, it was also gone very quickly. The second half of the quote shows that perhaps the best things to come to Laurel in her life do not happen in the South but in the North, and particularly in fast-paced, enlightened urban environments. This quote is a statement about cutting ties and discovering life’s joy away from the comforts of home.  

“‘We weren’t laughing at them. They weren’t funny—no more than my mother and father are! No more than all our fathers and mothers are!’ she laughed again, into Laurel’s face. ‘Aren’t we grieving? We’re grieving with you.’”

Lauren’s friend Tish gently reminds Laurel that she needn’t take things too seriously. She announces with finality that she Laurel is not alone and that Tish would never say anything that would deliberately hurt her friend. This quote solidifies the love in Laurel’s life and the power of familiarity with those who are important to her. 

“On this last night, a warm wind began to blow and the rain fell fitfully, as though working up to some disturbance.”

This quote is emblematic of Welty’s style with its symbolic foreshadowing. Personal enlightenment and change, Welty implies, will never be gleaned in calm weather. When things are going well, it’s hard to find a motivation to understand the things that cause personal upheaval of the sort that results in positive change. The storm precedes Laurel’s dark night, during which she sifts through the past to find and claim her own life. That the rain will work up to some disturbance symbolically shows that the only way to get through rough times is to stand in the center of the raucous weather until it passes.

“She ran upstairs, slammed her own door, ran across the hall and finally into the big bedroom, where she put on the lights, and as the bird came directly toward the new brightness, she slammed the door against it.”

The bird, as a symbol of grief and of the past, is persistent. It won’t stop until Laurel shuts the door. However, it has also driven her to the very place she needs to be in order to stop living in the past and diminish her grief—in her parents’ room. Of note as well, earlier Laurel hears Fay slam the door to the bedroom, a sound Laurel never heard in all the years she lived there. In this sudden emotional upheaval, Laurel becomes like Fay, driven by enough fear that she acts angrily and aggressively. Though Laurel doesn’t note this one moment of similarity in slamming the door for the first time ever in her childhood home, the reader may. The door slamming, the running, and the terror she feels at the presence of the bird create the prelude Laurel needs to account for life if she is to live with wisdom and acceptance. 

“It could not get in here. But had it been already? For how long had it made free of the house, shuttling through the dark rooms? And now Laurel could not get out.”

This quote is an example of how Welty uses of symbolic language to develop a metaphor for the way her character feels and acts. Substituting grief over the past for the bird, the question Laurel asks about how long the bird has been in the house takes on new meaning. It is meant to be rhetorical; the answer is the bird has probably been there since her mother’s illness. The “dark rooms” are not literally the dark rooms of the house, but of her heart. She can’t get out because she is figuratively trapped by her suffering. Not until she gets rid of the bird can she escape the morass of her past and the grief that comes with its memory.

“Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in silence, as the dead rest.”

Laurel must learn to speak up. She has said nothing while Fay has taken over the house, turned the drama on, and brought the spotlight on herself. Laurel has said nothing to defend herself or her mother as Fay rips into them both. This quote suggests that the dead cannot rest until Laurel finds the resources to learn who she is, takes the risk of finding her voice, and releases her words to assure the dead their place in eternity.

“For the person who wishes to do so, it is possible to assail a helpless man; it only necessary to be married to him. It is possible to say to the dying ‘Enough is enough’ if the listener who overhears is his daughter with his memory to protect.”

In this quote, Laurel’s thoughts are peripherally geared toward Fay, who has, in anger, shaken her father for not waking up. Laurel has known all along in some ways that her father has been concentrating on dying. The phrase “enough is enough” has two meanings: It represents Fay’s rage, but in a sense, it also represents Laurel’s anger at Fay. She literally overhears her father’s wife and must find her own voice and put an end to Fay’s abuse. Fay may not care if anyone hears her, but regardless, Laurel’s job is to protect her father’s memory. 

“[…] one deep feeling by its right name names other. But to be released is to tell, unburden it.”

This quote again refers to the power of Laurel’s voice to free her from the burden of the emotions that come with holding onto the past. One powerful feeling opens the floodgates of understanding the others, but not until the understanding is released and told can the weight of Laurel’s suffering be lifted.

“The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.”

This quote speaks to the wonder of childhood and the beauty of the world. Laurel is an adult as she considers this from the perspective of her child’s life. The unexpected delight of something beautiful turning up in her life—like her husband—should always arise out of surprise and wonder. Perhaps, as Laurel thinks this as an adult, she is issuing an edict to look at the world and all the gifts that come her way as surprises arising out of the mist.  

“It’s not between the living and the dead, between the old wife and the new; it’s between too much love and too little. There is no rivalry as bitter […].”

Laurel realizes that the material facts of a situation, and the emotions of jealousy, anger, and loss, are not the important aspects of resentment and difficulty with others. It’s more compassionate to contemplate and resolve the “bitter” rivalry induced by one’s perception of whether they are loved than it is to focus on the past and the present. 

“Phil could still tell her of her life. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”

This moment of understanding is Laurel’s great epiphany. What determines her wholeness, even among the ruins of her life, is the degree to which love has accompanied her through darkness and joy. Her relationships with her parents and with Philip are much like the confluence of the rivers, always rushing together in the spirit of love. This is why she can’t kill the bird in the end: There is no avoiding pain and suffering—the bird will always come back—but if there is love, she believes she will survive. She is not an “optimist” like her father, in the sense of someone who turns from the truth. She knows the bird will return. The wisdom she gains, however, from recognizing the continuous expressions of giving and receiving love in her life is her saving grace.

“But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne. Outliving is something we do to them.”

This simple quote is offered as a balm for Laurel’s guilt. When she considers her own guilt of outliving her mother, father, and husband, she knows that it is nothing compared to the pain her loved ones must have felt knowing they were leaving behind all those they loved forever. The guilt, this quote implies, is not only something to be shouldered, but it is appropriate and fitting to feel in comparison to dying first. 

“The fantasies of the dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of the living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of all.”

Laurel considers her thoughts with rigor as she reaches the insight that will allow her to leave her home with grace and face her future with dignity. She stirs together her images of dying and living together in order to understand and accept her grief and loss. The conclusion she makes, however, is that neither dying nor living is quite as strange as persisting past loss and suffering and yet continuing to live.

“For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.”

The moment of this realization occurs during the final confrontation between Fay and Laurel. Laurel realizes that Fay will never understand the value to her of the breadboard, something made with great care by her husband and used with great love by her mother. She knows that she feels hatred toward Fay during this interaction and must find a way to reason with this strong emotion. Laurel understands that the only thing that creates meaning in life is the continuity of love, but she must acknowledge that she will, as part of her human experience, feel both hatred and love. Because we know she highly values the continuity of love as a barometer for a life well lived, by acknowledging the truth—the she is capable of hatred—Laurel realizes that in essence, one can’t know hatred without also knowing love.

“The memory can be hurt, time and again—but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.”

As the book nears its climax, Laurel has pieced together the path that will take her home freed from the suffering of her grief. This can only happen by removing the cloak of the past from her shoulders through the acknowledgment that memory is by its very nature painful. However, there is mercy, she says, in knowing that pain will come again and again as she sifts through the memories of love now gone. Without the certainty of this knowledge, each new experience of pain must seem unbearable, its own entity, related to nothing. The salvation of feeling the pain of the past in light of the present makes a burden easier to embrace without fear.