Uncle George is the hero of the family who also seems to buck expectations the most, particularly with his marriage to the ‘low-born’ Robbie Reid, who has just left him when the story starts. There are many passages where characters go into deep contemplation about their family, namely their Uncle George. However, Delta Wedding can also be a difficult book at times. These are the aspects that I adore about Delta Wedding, and what made it quite accessible when I first read and loved it as a senior in high school. The dialogue, especially between large groups of people talking over each other, is lively and often humorous, with India getting some of the best lines. Woe to those perceived as outsiders by the family. It’s as if the outside world doesn’t exist and it is just their family. The Fairchilds, whose cotton plantations sustain a small town named after them, are self-absorbed when they are all together at the family home of Shellmound. The family is almost a character of its own, analyzed by themselves and by outsiders as a single entity. Forthright Aunt Tempe reminds me so much of certain people I know. Sure, I have my favorites, such as impish nine-year-old India and Shelley, the oldest daughter who keeps a journal. The characters in Delta Wedding are best appreciated as an ensemble. At the other end of the room the Victrola stood like a big morning-glory and there, laid with somebody’s game, was the card table Great-Grandfather also made out of his walnut trees when he cut his way in to the Yazoo wilderness.
In Welty’s hands, descriptions of rooms and houses drip with atmosphere and are suffused with the human personalities that inhabit them.Ī spready fern stood in front of the grate in summertime, with a cricket in it now, that nobody could do anything about. I can often be bored when authors trot out dry descriptions of a room’s features. The viewpoint shifts throughout the book between various female characters, but mostly rests with Ellen Fairchild, the mother of those nine children Laura, a young cousin whose mother has recently died and Shelley, the oldest, unmarried Fairchild daughter.ĭelta Wedding is a story driven not by plot but by characters, dialogue and a deep sense of place. The Fairchild family, with nine children, is already large, but is made larger and even more chaotic with the arrival of extended family and their range of personalities. Harcourt Brace.įor the challenge: Flashback Reading Challengeĭelta Wedding portrays the lives of a Mississippi Delta planter family in 1923 as they prepare for the wedding between their second eldest daughter, Dabney, and their overseer.