The Robber Bridegroom

An Early American Struggle For Innocence

I was moved to read further in Eudora Welty (1909 -- 2001) after reading her newly published correspondence with her friend, the novelist and editor William Maxwell, as edited by Suzanne Marrs, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. I began with Welty's short first novella, "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942), a work that was new to me. Many of the reader reviews of this book are unusually perceptive and helped me with a book I found enigmatic.

Welty writes with exuberance, in a style filled with brio, fantasy, long descriptive passages, strings of adjectives, and sudden shifts in mood and in written tempo. Although an early book, it shows an author in love with language and with word painting. The book is an amalgamation of different forms. Most prominently, it uses fairy and folk tales and mythology. Stories by the Brothers Grimm, the Cinderella fairy tale, and the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche (The god Cupid carries off a human woman to marry her. He tells her that she cannot see his face. When Psyche takes a peek, Cupid leaves her.) are transposed into a story at an indeterminate time in the 18th Century along the Natchez trail in the deep South. Welty also uses myth in a later work that I have read: the 1949 collection of Mississippi stories called "The Golden Apples". She wants to show how these primal tales of human behavior and motivation carry forward into an American setting.

Besides using myth, Welty's book uses American folk-figures such as the riverboat man Mike Fink (celebrated by Disney many years ago) and the notorious "Harpe" brothers, a pair of robbers and murderers. Together with the bravura, the myth, and the folk history, "The Robber Bridegroom" is marked by gimlet-eyed toughness in a story replete with greed, violence, rape, and ignorance.

The main protagonist of the novel, Jamie Lockhart, is a double-sided figure, a dashing New Orleans businessman on one hand and a thief and killer in the woods on the other hand. He can be remorseless in this latter role but he has a tender streak. The story centers upon Lockhart's rape of and subsequent marriage to a beautiful girl named Rosamond, a pathological liar. Rosamond is the daughter of Clement Musgrove, who has become a wealthy planter. Clement and Rosamond escaped when Clement's first wife and young boy were killed by Indians. Clement then remarries the shrewish Salome, who presses Clement to work, to become wealthy, and to adopt an extravagant mode of life. Salome is jealous of Rosamond and tries to do her in. Her efforts ultimately result in Rosamund's dishonoring by Lockhart. But Rosamund has fallen in love with her assailant and joins him with his gang of thieves in the woods. Much of the story turns on mistaken identity as Clement, whose life has earlier been saved by Lockhart, asks him to kill his daughter's rapist and promises him the daughter's hand as a reward.

Many American books are about the loss of an alleged innocence and frequently tie this loss to one or another historical event. In Welty's book, the innocent person is Clement. The first sentence of the book describes Clement as "an innocent planter, with a bag of gold and many presents." Clement has difficulty seeing the evil and greed in people, including Lockhart, his daughter, and his wife Salome. He tries to live simply and with contentment and says of himself at one point: "I know I am not a seeker after anything, and ambition in this world never stirred my heart once. Yet it seemed as if I was caught up by what came over the others, and they were the same. There was a great tug at the whole world, to go down over the edge, and one and all we were changed into pioneers, and our hearts and our own lonely wills may have had nothing to do with it."

In the course of her tale, Welty contrasts Clement's innocence with Lockhart and with Lockhart's relationship to Rosamond. Lockhart is a criminal but seems from the outset to have some feeling of restraint and decency. He refrains from killing Clement early in the novel when he could have done so and he refrains subsequently from killing "Harp", who deserves to be killed. Although he violates Rosamond, he later treats her with apparent love and tenderness. After many melodramatic tribulations, Lockhart and Rosamond marry and have twins, including a daughter, Clementine. Rosamond almost stops lying. Lockhart becomes a prosperous New Orleans trader. Welty says of him at the conclusion of the story: "Jamie knew he was a hero and had always been one, only with the power to look both ways and to see a thing from all sides."

Clement retains his innocence. When he visits New Orleans to sell his tobacco, he ignores both the beauty and the vice which is about him everywhere. As Welty says, "he was an innocent of the wilderness, and a planter of Rodney's Landing, and this was his good." Clement reconciles with Rosamond and Lockhart, but (Salome gets killed in the course of the story) he declines their invitation to stay in New Orleans with them. He returns to his plantation for the simple, innocent life of his dreams. It is the tension between Lockhart and Rosamond, their sophistication, ruthlessness, and success, and Clement and his struggle to retain his innocence that is at the heart of "The Robber Bridegroom" and of Welty's picture of early America.

There is a tendency to see "The Robber Bridegroom" as simpler than it is. Without trying to overdo it, I think it is a difficult book. I am looking forward to reading more of Welty.

Robin Friedman