The repeated emphasis in Welty’s fiction on the human community intersecting with the nonhuman community rather than the human community dominating the nonhuman community displays her awareness of the differences between what Patrick D. Throughout her fiction, Welty displays a complex awareness of the relationships between place and the human and nonhuman communities that inhabit these spaces. Readers are left to wonder what kind of medicine can provide healing to the world Phoenix journeys through. In “A Worn Path,” Welty creates a story that contrasts the cruelties and injustices of human nature with the balance and order of nonhuman nature.
The contrast between human and nonhuman introduces layers of complexity into the seemingly simple story of an old African American woman seeking medicine for her sick grandson.
As Phoenix journeys through the forest to Natchez, her path takes her from a nonhuman natural world into a space impacted by human issues of race, gender, and class. In “A Worn Path,” one of her best-known stories, Welty creates a transformative space through which her main character moves. She concludes, “In literature, the new regionalism and the booming field of ecocriticism foreground what had been considered mere background or setting, taking seriously Eudora Welty’s affirmation that ‘fiction depends for its life on place,’ and exploring new relationships between natural places and human culture” (2). Halttunen believes that “space and place have never been more analytically important than they have recently become in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating that globalization-with its acceleration of border crossings-has actually made place more important, not less” (2). Karen Halttunen, in her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, mentioned Welty’s discussion of place in fiction in her call for more attention to fields of inquiry such as bioregionalism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. In 2015, more than sixty years after Welty’s essay was written, our views of “place” and “region” have changed dramatically, influenced by issues ranging from local food production to the global environmental and human devastation of war. She argues instead that most writing could be called “regional” because the writer writes from the place he or she knows (796). Works by southern female writers have often been categorized as “regional,” suggesting that their subject matter is limited, circumscribed, “domestic.” In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty characterizes the term “regional” as “careless” and “condescending” ( Stories 796).
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