49 pages • 1 hour read
The Optimist's Daughter
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Part 1
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
The chapter begins as a nurse escorts Laurel Hand, her father, Judge McKelva, and his second wife, Fay, into an ophthalmologist’s examination room. The omniscient narrator describes Laurel as “a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark” (3). Fay, who is “small and pale” (3), taps her foot with impatience. Judge McKelva is there to receive medical attention from an old family friend, Dr. Courtland. With the exception of Fay, they all come from a small town in Mississippi called Mount Salus. Fay, who is from Texas, met Judge McKelva at a conference and married him, settling in Mount Salus at the stately McKelva family home. Now they are all in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and Fay not only is upset that she can’t enjoy the party but makes sure everyone knows she is.
At the doctor’s office, Judge McKelva sits on a “thronelike chair” above the doctor’s stool, with the women on either side of him. He explains that while “Fay had slipped out somewhere” (4), he had his eye on the street after pruning proses. Fay defensively says she was “uptown in the beauty parlor” (4). The Judge explains he was trying to prune the “climber,” his dead wife’s fig tree and must have scratched his eye. Dr. Courtland tells the Judge that he will need surgery. Fay is upset and whines aloud, “I don’t see why this had to happen to me” (8).
The surgery is scheduled for the following day, but Fay grows upset and suggests they just let nature heal him. She tells the doctor, “Before I even let you try, I think I ought to know how good he’ll see” (8). Much discussion follows about what the Judge has failed to see with the damaged eye and what he will see once it’s better. When Dr. Courtland warns the Judge that there’s no certainty, Judge McKelva says, “Well, I’m an optimist” (10). The doctor laughs, saying he didn’t think “there were any more such animals” (10). Also during the appointment, Laurel and Dr. Courtland discuss Laurel’s mother’s protracted illness and death. Dr. Courtland reminds Laurel that this isn’t the same thing; when her mother lost her eyesight, it was “just a part of it” (9), meaning just one symptom of a very long illness. Fay exhibits much hysteria at the closeness of her new husband, his daughter, and the doctor. Before her father is taken by ambulance to the hospital, Fay questions the doctor’s motives. She wonders out loud why the doctor is “being so polite” (11). She says, “I bet when the bill comes in, he won’t charge so polite” (11). Judge McKelva tells Fay he’s in good hands as Fay continues to complain.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
As Fay and Laurel wait for Judge McKelva’s return from surgery, Laurel listens quietly while Fay complains about it being Mardi Gras. She tells Laurel that her Laurel’s father didn’t keep his promise to take her to Carnival and instead is making her go through this. Soon, the Judge moves into recovery, and his prognosis is good. The doctor tells the women that the Judge now has a “beautiful eye.” Fay is upset when she sees the Judge and scolds the doctor for not telling her that her husband would appear so weak and sick.
For Laurel, the hospital room is “like a nowhere” (14), gray and depressing, like a “reflection itself of Judge McKelva’s disturbance” (15). When the Judge wakes up in a haze, he accidentally asks Laurel how her mother is, and Fay throws a fit. Dr. Courtland warns Fay to stay away from the eye. Later, Fay tells Laurel there’s no point for Laurel to be there, but Laurel says she is staying. The Judge later asks Fay what time it is, and she teases him meanly and doesn’t answer him. The Judge seems very quiet, but the doctor isn’t concerned by the judge’s silence: “He’s just possuming” (16), the Judge says.
The two women stay at a rooming house called the Hibiscus, “a decayed mansion on a changing street” (17). They take one room that is partitioned in the middle by a flimsy wooden wall. Laurel can hear Fay on her side of the partition as she complains and insults Laurel and her dead mother. Fay and Laurel decide that Laurel will go sit with her father in the morning and during the day, and Fay will go at night starting at seven o’clock. This way they never have to see each other.
When Laurel sits with her father, he wants to know what time it is. He is not very talkative, and he doesn’t ask Laurel anything about herself, which is unusual. She knows he loves being read to, so she reads to him from a stack of detective novels. He doesn’t interact with her; he just wants to know the time: “What occupied his mind was time itself; time passing: he was concentrating” (19).
A new patient arrives in Judge McKelva’s room wearing striped pajamas and a broadbrimmed felt hat. Laurel notices how worn out the man appears to be and notes “red dust” from the road on his hat. The old man has pulled up the window blind, which is too bright for her father. The nurse tells the old man to put the blind down. The man, whose name is Dalzell, is rocking and seems delusional. Laurel doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, but the nurse says, “He’s blind and nearly deaf in the bargain” (20). He has some kind of “malignancy” and speaks nonsensically. When he talks about how he pulled up the blind he says, “I had to pull the vine down to get the possum” (20).
Dalzell is from Mississippi and is convinced that the judge is his long-lost son Archie Lee. Over the next few days, Dalzell babbles nonstop. The nurse tells Laurel that her father just “lets Mr. Dalzell rave” (21). She tells Laurel, “Mr. Dalzell’s nothing you go to worry about” (21), stressing the man’s name as if implying there is someone else, perhaps Fay, whom she might need to worry about.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Laurel grows concerned because the recovery is taking so long. The doctor keeps saying her father is “still keeping as good as gold” (23), but Laurel is nervous. To Laurel, “her father seemed to be paying some unbargained-for price for his recovery” (22). One day she finds an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. It is one of her father’s favorite books, and she reads it to him, but he doesn’t seem interested. Laurel’s worry grows as she notes: “He didn’t try anymore to hold her in his good eye” (24).
Meanwhile, Mr. Dalzell continues saying strange things to the judge, thinking that he is Archie Lee. After three weeks, Laurel asks the doctor if the drugs are what is making her father seem so far away. The doctor tells her people are different. Laurel responds, “Mother was different” (25).
One day, Fay comes in and catches Laurel asleep with her glasses on. Fay wakes her up with an insult, then says about her father, “I told him if he hadn’t spent so many years of his life poring over dusty old books, his eyes would have more strength saved up for now” (25).
Another day, Fay comes into the room with pretty green earrings. Later she shows the Judge a pair of green shoes she bought with spiked heels to match the earrings. She says to the judge, “Don’t you want to let’s go dancing?” (28). Later Fay complains to Laurel that if she ever wore those shoes out, the Judge would be mad: “ […] would he ever let me hear about it!” (28).
Laurel asks her father where he met Fay. He tells her at the Southern Bar Association, where she worked as a pool typist. He brought her home to Mount Salus a month later and married her in the courthouse. Now Laurel regards Fay, who is “bony and blue veined” (26), and suspects she was malnourished as a child. Laurel remembers that when she flew down from Chicago to be present at the wedding, Fay said to her, “It wasn’t any use in you bothering to come so far” (27). Laurel decides to tap on Fay’s wall at the Hibiscus to try and get to know her better, but Fay wants nothing to do with her. Fay tells Laurel that she has no family left and then insults her about moving to Chicago to go to art school: “I wouldn’t have run off and left anybody that needed me. Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money” (28).
Fay and Laurel continue to keep vigil. Laurel tells her father it’s about time to try the glasses that the doctor has for him. She’s worried, thinking, “He, who had been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope” (29).
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Laurel is at the Hibiscus taking off her clothes for bed, and then for some unknown reason, she dresses and rushes to the hospital. She catches a cab that “reeks of bourbon” (30), and there are cheap green beads from Mardi Gras all over the floor. People roam about everywhere, many drunk, and it takes a long time to get to the hospital.
When she arrives, there is chaos in her father’s room. Laurel hears Fay screaming, “I tell you enough is enough” (32). She hears Fay whining that it’s her birthday. The nurse rushes past and drags Fay out of the room, shouting, “She taken ahold of him. She was abusing him” (32). The nurse, a “Mississippi countrywoman,” frantically screams that Fay was trying to get him out of bed. Laurel has been struck immobile by the chaos, but now she runs to her father’s room. She looks at her father and realizes “he’s no longer concentrating” (33). The doctor rushes in and lays his head on her father’s chest, and then the doctor closes his eyes. The doctor tells Laurel to leave and wait for him in the waiting room. As she leaves the room, she kicks the fallen window blind that Mr. Dalzell was playing with earlier. Mr. Dalzell is no longer there. His personal items are neatly folded and piled on his bed. As Laurel leaves the room, she hears the doctor say, “The renegade! I believe he just plain sneaked out on us” (34).
In the waiting room, Laurel notices Fay being hugged by an old woman. Fay cries and complains about how the Judge has kept her up night after night. When Laurel tells Fay she thinks her father is dying, Fay spits at her. The old woman tells everyone to have a seat, and Laurel notices five or six grown men and women sitting around. They appear to be in the middle of their supper. They talk and holler to each other. They are clearly relatives of Dalzell because Laurel hears one of them say, “Go in there Archie Lee, it’s still your turn” (36). He is being told to go in and see his father, Mr. Dalzell, who has just undergone surgery. The old woman strikes up a conversation with Fay. All the while, the other family members of Mr. Dalzell continue talking and interrupting each other, including the “wizened daughter” and the son, Archie Lee. Fay complains and joins in with the banter, outraged that she’s had to wait around for her husband for two weeks. Laurel is upset by all the loud banter and hysterical laughter. Finally, Dr. Courtland arrives, standing in the doorway “with the weight of the watch in his hand” (40).
The doctor takes them into the elevator and tells the women the Judge has died. Fay screams, “He picked my birthday to do it on!” (40). The doctor looks at her as if “he had seen many like Fay” (40). He tells Laurel how her father helped him through medical school and kept him going when his own father died. He invites Laurel to stay at his home with his family, but she declines. He offers to give the two women something to help them sleep and a ride back to the Hibiscus. Fay screeches, “All I hope is you lay awake tonight and remember how little you were good for” (42).
The doctor ignores her and tells Laurel he will phone his sister, Adele, back in Mount Salus and that she can take her father home tomorrow. Fay screams, “Thank you for nothing” (43). They take a cab back to the Hibiscus through the throngs celebrating Mardi Gras, and while Laurel goes to her room, Fay sobs and pities herself because it’s her birthday. She shrieks about the doctor and the horrible things that have been done to her. Laurel stays up all night listening to her. She never sleeps. In the morning, they take the train to Mount Salus. Fay falls asleep, and Laurel has strange dreams until they arrive home to Laurel’s childhood town.
Part 1 Analysis
The Optimist’s Daughter is told in the third person, but with a perspective that is distantly limited to Laurel’s point of view. Readers are immediately confronted by the conflict between the two most important living women in Judge McKelva’s life: Fay and Laurel. Fay expresses her animosity toward Laurel without any attempt to hide it, while Laurel uses her good Southern manners to keep mostly quiet and to act sensibly. It becomes clear that one of the author’s intentions is to discuss class. Laurel represents the well-heeled, educated South, while Fay comes from a poor family not keen on keeping to the rules of polite social interaction. Each woman has her own ideas about the way to treat Judge McKelva, and they are never the same. When the Judge sits in a “thronelike” chair, the author conveys his position in the family. The two women, clearly rivals, stand on either side of him as if in homage to their king.
The Judge’s vision is damaged after he tries to cut back the vine his dead wife, Becky, started growing years ago. The damage is not just physical, however. The Judge, who calls himself an optimist, sees the world a certain way. The irony of his optimism is that, in choosing to find an optimistic outcome or possibility for the troubles in his life, he ends up metaphorically blind. In other words, his choice to be an optimist makes it impossible for him to comprehend the truth. In this first chapter, the Judge has failed to see the way Fay treats him—with sarcasm and indignation. Moreover, Fay’s defensiveness about where she was when the Judge hurt his eye suggested she has cheated on him. When the doctor performs the surgery, his hope is that the Judge will finally truly “see”—which is the author’s symbolic way to convey that the Judge has yet to understand the reality of his marriage and the unsuitability of his choice for a spouse.
Readers learn about Laurel’s mother’s death in the first chapter. This information functions as a foreshadowing of the reckoning that Laurel will make regarding her mother’s death and her relationship with her parents as the novel unfolds. For now, this place marker looms large; the Judge can barely stop thinking or talking about his dead wife, Becky.
In Chapter 2, the tension between Fay and Laurel increases as they wait for Judge McKelva to get out of surgery. Fay’s complaints about not being able to enjoy Mardi Gras emphasize her self-centeredness. Through her complaints, it is clear Fay cares more about missing out than about her husband’s precarious situation. The “nowhere” quality of the hospital for Laurel foreshadows the liminal state her father will be in as he lies in his recovery bed. As the description implies, he is not really anywhere but rather existing some place between the living and the dead.
The Judge is consumed by time and by wanting to know what time it is. Fay denies her husband the answer when he asks what time it is, but soon, Laurel begins to see that her father, in not improving, seems to be marking time and concentrating. What he’s concentrating on is left unsaid, but the implication is that he’s passing the time before he dies. Laurel has yet to believe this is the case, but she is clearly concerned, while Fay, true to her character, is still upset that she can’t enjoy Mardi Gras.
The conflict between the two women is established in the second chapter. When the doctor tells Fay that her father is “possuming,” he refers to the fact that he is acting like a possum in nature; a possum plays dead when it can’t scare off a predator. The symbol of the possum, which repeats in later chapters, stands as a metaphor foreshadowing the Judge’s pending death. Despite popular belief, possums are not blind, so it is clear Welty uses this symbol to denote the similarity between the Judge’s and the possum’s behavior. The predator is not just Fay but, the author implies, is also representative of the Judge’s poor choices that have driven him to this precarious place.
Because it’s Mardi Gras, there are a limited number of hotels, and Laurel and Fay are forced stay at the rundown Hibiscus rooming house. Symbolically the hibiscus flower is often equated with feminine beauty and glory, so the name of the rooming house is ironic. The faded glory of the past is an ever-present theme in the novel, as Fay begins to represent a new narrative evolving out of the marriage to McKelva. The two women arrange their schedules so that their sittings with the Judge don’t overlap, but they are both forced to deal with the Mardi Gras revelers as they go back and forth between the Hibiscus and the hospital. It is no accident that Welty has chosen Mardi Gras as the background for the unfolding dramatic narrative. The highly celebratory nature of Mardi Gras juxtaposed against the dire situation faced by the Judge highlights the disconnect between Laurel and Fay, the former more serious and sensitive and the latter crass and narcistic.
When Laurel watches her father, she reads to him, but he seems uninterested. Laurel can’t understand why he isn’t responding since she knows he loves to be read to. This moment is a foreshadowing for a later moment when Laurel realizes why he was not interested in the books she chose for him.
When Dalzell arrives, he speaks about the possum hiding in the vine. The references to the “vine” and to the “possum” are shadow references to both the vine planted by the Judge’s wife that scratched his eye and the Judge telling Laurel that in his recovery, her father is just “possuming.” Welty seems to be attributing some mystical powers to the delirious man, as if Dalzell is actually speaking about the Judge—how he hid, possum-like, in his wife’s trailing vine, waiting to ward off death, instead of confronting his new wife on her whereabouts.
In Chapter 3, the tension begins to rise as Judge McKelva’s condition doesn’t change. Once again, the author uses irony to cleverly disguise the reality of the situation. When Fay comes in and sees Laurel asleep with the glasses on her head, she insults the Judge, suggesting that the Judge probably wasted his eyes on reading books no one can understand. This is yet another reference to the class differences between Fay’s upbringing and Laurel’s—clearly Fay is uneducated—but also, Fay caught Laurel unawares; the tools with which Laurel normally “sees” (her glasses) were not in use.
When Fay shows up wearing pretty green earrings and holding matching green shoes, the author is showing the reader the qualities of Fay’s frivolous choices and her desire for material things, which stands in contrast to the conservative ethos of Laurel’s family’s life. The color green shows up often throughout the novel, and in this context, the green symbolizes money, ambition, greed, and jealousy. Fay wants to go dancing and whines that it won’t happen. She also complains that even though she has the shoes, she knows her husband will disapprove if she wears them out. Again, readers see the crass nature of Fay against the old-world Southern restraint and manners of Laurel and her father.
At the end of the chapter, Laurel encourages her father to try on the glasses that the doctor has fashioned to help him see. The glasses are a metaphor for seeing, a replacement for the eyes that failed to understand the reality of his life. Laurel realizes that though her father claims to be an optimist, he shows no hope of recovery, thus reinforcing the idea that optimism as a way to see the world doesn’t always produce the hoped-for rewards; perhaps in calling himself an optimist, he is just bluffing his way through crises.
Chapter 4 begins with Laurel’s premonition that leads her to return the hospital. As she is driven by a cabbie whose car smells of liquor, she sees the cheap green beads on the floor. These beads are yet another image of greed, only this time, the beads are faded and broken, signifying that money doesn’t last. When Laurel walks in on the chaos at the hospital, Fay’s character is plain to see. Her narcissism and selfishness have driven her to abuse Laurel’s father, and her abuse presumably kills him. Fay appears to be terrified that with his death, the Judge won’t be able to provide her the lifetime of money she wanted. Fay is beside herself that the Judge has died on her birthday—yet one more indication of Fay’s self-centeredness.
The next section, in which Fay is comforted by the large, poor, and uncouth family in the hospital waiting room, foreshadows what is to come when Fay’s family, of similar temperament and economic standing, arrives later at the funeral. The scene in the waiting room is grotesque, loud, and filled with inappropriate laughter. When the doctor arrives in the waiting room after the judge has died, he is holding the judge’s watch, which is described as “weighty,” appearing to represents her father’s death.
As Fay, Laurel, and the doctor leave the hospital together, the doctor is bereft with grief and sad that he will not be able to witness how well her father might have seen his life after the surgery. Now that he is dead, no one will ever know if he would have come to his senses about Fay and seen the truth. Faith cries about him dying on her birthday and takes it as a personal insult that he would die on such an important day. Laurel remains silent—she is a woman of few words. The two women drive back to the fading rooming house through the throngs at the height of Mardi Gras, the last night before the solemn start of Lent. The ghoulish and ghastly costumes frighten Fay, and the entire party atmosphere has a murky, nightmarish quality. The non-stop party also offers a contrast between the celebration of the partiers and the somber grief of the Judge’s two women.
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