We have their beauty strategies that seem to have more of a grotesque effect on their appearances than a beautifying one (although I’m still an avid fan of patent leather, “blood-red lips,” and red fingernails-I’m sporting the latter now) (Welty). We have gossiping, fairly catty women (something about Leota reminds me of Constance Langdon from the first season of American Horror Story) in their “den of curling fluid and henna packs” (Welty). “Petrified Man” has just enough of the grotesque and morbid about it to make it…well, somewhat grotesque and morbid, which are pretty much essential elements-whether overt or very subtle-in things I enjoy. It’s ever-so-slightly Southern Gothic, and I love Southern Gothic. The aforementioned works gave me a newfound appreciation for-or at least identification with-both of these authors.Īlthough I didn’t know anything about Welty’s “Petrified Man” going into it, once I started reading it, I wasn’t surprised I liked it. I knew a bit about both of their authorial personas-Hemingway as the archetypical “man’s man” and Welty as an occasional, kind-of-sort-of semi-icon of Southern Gothic-and had previously read one, perhaps two stories by each.
Heading into this unit, I wasn’t especially familiar with either Hemingway’s or Welty’s work. Of the four short stories we read for this unit, I was struck in particular by Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Each one hit me for fairly different reasons, and since those reasons were not necessarily related to matters of gender, I’m not going to focus particularly on the gender angle for this post (although gender will factor in).
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