Ideology, Ethnicity, and Performativity in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles

Abstract

This chapter evaluates Losing Battles as a response to Civil Rights ferment, regarding the novel broadly through the prisms of Eagletonian Marxism and speech act theory. The analysis argues that the text’s primary formal characteristic, its epic blending of scores of vocal performances, typically spoken by senior members of the Beecham-Renfro family, disseminates and enforces a range of ideological conformities, including but not limited to those policing ethnicity. Through the delivery of these speeches, characters engage inadvertently or otherwise in speech acts that traumatize and dominate and reproduce chauvinistic and belligerent cultural narratives. Namely, Losing Battles reveals the mechanism of Althusserian interpellation as it operates in southern culture; however, outsiders and even a few insiders escape the authority of received ideas and, therefore, reveal emancipatory potential.