22 pages • 44 minutes read
Eudora WeltyPetrified Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Outer and Inner Beauty
Welty sets the story in a salon, a place dedicated to altering the clients’ appearances and “gratifying” their desire for physical attractiveness. Attractiveness and desirability are of utmost concern, and each vapid conversation ultimately ends with an assessment of someone’s appearance. For the women of this Mississippi town, a beautifully cultivated appearance indicates a respectable life. Mrs. Montjoy goes so far as to get her hair done while in active labor, because she “just wanted to look pretty while she was havin’ her baby” (7). Even during a normal appointment, the women subject themselves to painful treatments like harsh chemicals that burn their scalps (Mrs. Fletcher does this weekly), but they consider the pain and discomfort the worthy price of physical attractiveness.
The women’s outer beauty, however, is not reflected in their personalities. Welty characterizes them as shallow and vain, and the women’s gossip only reinforces their judgmental and spiteful natures. Leota and Mrs. Fletcher spend the duration of the story staring at their reflections in the salon’s mirror, but at no point do they take the opportunity to contemplate their inner flaws. Nor do they seem to see each other in any real way. Although Leota shares much about her life, holding little back, Mrs. Fletcher consistently focuses her communication on expressing how superior she is to others.
Welty places the traveling freak show next door to the salon, and by dramatically juxtaposing these two spaces, the author suggests that the women’s personalities exhibited in the salon are just as grotesque as the physical oddities on display at the freak show. Welty even goes so far as to have Mrs. Fletcher declare, “I despise freaks,” in just one example of how Mrs. Fletcher holds herself above everyone throughout the story. The women’s vital desire to meet high standards of physical beauty reflects the misogyny and societal expectations of this time and place, but Welty prompts readers to question whether meeting this standard must come at the expense of judging and belittling others.
Social Clout and Small-Town Gossip
The clients of Leota’s salon come not just to get their hair done, but also to get their share of the town’s gossip—Welty describes Leota’s booth as a “den of curling fluid and henna packs” where Mrs. Fletcher can “give her curiosity its freedom” (1). In this feminine hub of information exchange, gossip is as much a service the beauticians offer as a permanent. Gossip, for these women, is a form of societal power in a time when culture relegated a woman’s identity to her role as a wife and mother. Leota and Mrs. Fletcher both emphasize the control they hold over their husbands, but gossiping allows them to subtly wield power among themselves, giving them the ability to cause harm to others’ reputations while inflating their own sense of self. Leota and Mrs. Fletcher are perhaps even more in need of ways to feel powerful because neither one has children (yet), and so neither woman is fulfilling half of her societally prescribed two-part identity.
The rumors and gossip are treated as fact, and neither Leota nor Mrs. Fletcher thinks critically about the information the other shares. This further characterizes them as shallow, exacerbating the already banal content of their dialogue. It also exposes their hypocrisy: Participating in gossip is acceptable, even eagerly sought out, so long as it is not about their own private affairs. In this way the gossip den serves as a place of intimacy and secrets, but not necessarily personal vulnerability.
The gossip of this small town also is contradictory in nature: It enhances the women’s friendships and sense of trust in one another and reinforces the salon as a safe space to talk freely, while simultaneously being divisive and even inciting desires for revenge. However, even deeply personal slights are not enough to keep Mrs. Fletcher away from the salon. She returns a week later for her standing appointment, ready for more hair treatments and especially more gossip.
Depression-Era Gender Roles in the South
In this women-centered narrative, Welty offers commentary on the way gender roles were both upheld and subverted in the Depression-era American South. Leota and Mrs. Fletcher present themselves as fiercely independent, even dominant, of their husbands. Leota is gainfully employed while Fred just “[lies] around the house like a rug,” and Mrs. Fletcher makes Mr. Fletcher complete “bending exercises every night of the world” (5). These details further substantiate the setting of the story, as more women were filling the US workforce during the Great Depression. This fact challenged the traditional role of men as the family provider, threatening their sense of masculinity. Welty only provides readers with Leota and Mrs. Fletcher’s descriptions of their husbands, which effectively petrifies the men in their wives’ subjective perceptions—this immobilization further undermines the control that the men would typically have.
Despite the subversive nature of Welty’s narrative, she does not dismiss traditional gender roles outright. In minor details, Welty reminds readers that even women with amplified independence were upholding traditional expectations. Mrs. Fletcher, for example, never refers to her husband by his first name and repeatedly tries to prove how content she is with her marriage. In this behavior she exhibits some deference to him and shows that she has internalized the expectation that her happiness depends on the quality of her marriage.
Additionally, Mrs. Fletcher suggests that she was considering terminating her pregnancy (6) but is incapable of doing so now that others know she is pregnant. The Depression era saw an increase in abortions, likely due to the inability to provide for children in such an economy, but also saw an increase in the criminalization of abortion. Mrs. Fletcher would be risking not just judgment from her community, but legal repercussions as well. Despite the strong control she keeps over her life and relationships, Mrs. Fletcher is nevertheless confined to the reality of the patriarchal expectations that dictate the circumstances of life in her time and place.
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