The Language of Eudora Weltys Losing Battles :: Eudora Welty Losing Battles

The Language of Eudora Weltys Losing BattlesIn his essay, The Languages of Losing Battles, Mr. Bass contends that the form of oral communication used by two major characters in Eudora Weltys Losing Battles, Julia Mortimer and Granny Vaughn, serves as a challenge to the male-authored decrees (Bass) found throughout the book. Julias idioms ar teaching, writing, and books, (Bass)while Granny Vaughn, on the other hand, uses oral language to transmit family history. While Julias province is unrivalled of ideas and abstraction in the write interchange, Granny Vaughns stories be concrete, empirical, and rooted in actual events and real people. How these two methods of questioning male authority are used by the two characters is discussed at length by Mr.Bass, and this parole comprises much of the bulk of this article.The male-authored decrees challenged by the two women throughout the bookare numerous, and Mr. Bass makes use of only a few of these to make his point. Intruth, although his thesis is strong and well composed, most this article consists of a preferably opaque banter of biblical symbolism, and how its various applications in thenovel rival to Granny Vaughns mouth folk myth. In Losing Battles,Julia has writtenher own apocrypha (Bass) on leaves torn from her bible. This is used by Bass as a effigy of written challenge to male authority. In about way, Bass contends, thewritten word of Julia is a counterweight to Grannys dominance of the family, althoughJulias words must be taken for what they are, since she is not alive to interpret them.While the written word moves outward toward the abstract or conceptual and awayfrom the concrete center, the spoken language of Granny Vaughn and others draws inclose to make the emblematic concrete, familial. (Bass) What just this balance does for the furthering of the womens influence in the book is a question that seems to achebeen left for the reader to answer.Included in the piece is an interesting discussion of banners and battles, andthe way that these images mark the main conflict of the novel between local anaesthetic andabsolute.Bass uses the emblem of Jacks torn sleeve that flowed free from hisshoulder like some old flag carried home from far-off battle. to represent a intersection point of a banner with a battle.Mr. Bass has taken a risk with his attempt to convince his readers that