Framing in Eudora Welty's "the Golden Apples"

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the analytical and critical vocabulary currently available to scholars in the field of oral interpretation significantly limits what they can see in a literary text and consequently what they can transform into performance. In an effort to expand this vocabulary, the dissertation explores frame analysis as a potential methodology.

Initially developed by sociologist Erving Goffman, frame analysis studies the assumptions underlying the organization of human experience to discover how individuals recognize what is going on in a given situation so they can behave appropriately. While Goffman's detailed vocabulary provides a valuable foundation, his interest in social interaction limits the method's applicability to literature and performance. At the same time, similar studies in how expectation influences understanding have gone on in a variety of fields. The work of performance approach folklorists such as Richard Bauman and Roger Abrahams as well as of literary theorists such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith suggest valuable extensions of framing principles for the study of aesthetic forms of discourse such as literature and performance.

This dissertation applies framing principles to Eudora Welty's cycle of short stories, The Golden Apples. It looks first at immediate frame disclosure in the individual stories to determine what literary features tend to anchor, layer and threaten the stories' frameworks. Then, it examines gradual frame disclosure to discover how Welty teaches readers, through patterns of expectation, to discern an additional mythic-symbolic reality that underlies the entire cycle. Finally, it considers how these discoveries can be transformed into performance.

The analytical and critical vocabulary of framing focuses the ways that readers perceive and understand various realities at work in a given text. In so doing, it also focuses the need for analogous structures in performance. The method's applicability to both the printed text and to performance makes it particularly useful to the field of oral interpretation since it underscores the relationship between the two forms that the field rests upon.