“Visible, Unfamiliar, Remarkable”: Private Bodies and Public Policy in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles

Abstract

In the opening line of her tribute to Patricia Yaeger at MLA’s 2015 memorial session, Katherine Henninger recalled the late and great scholar’s legendary proclamation: “‘I want to dynamite the rails’; this sentence launched a fl eet of dissertations.” Henninger’s estimation of Yaeger’s infl uence is no exaggeration; indeed, my own dissertation sails among that armada of scholarship that owes its impetus to the brazen boundary-blasting work Yaeger achieved in Dirt and Desire. Her book became a rallying cry for scholars to consciously and vigorously integrate southern studies across all sorts of ideological boundaries. For me, her emphasis on the interrelation between public politics and private spaces inspired a methodological approach to southern literature that continually guides my scholarship. In her chapter “Politics in the Kitchen: Roosevelt, McCullers, and Surrealist History,” Yaeger demonstrates how: