To the Trees: Sex and Escape in Welty's The Golden Apples

Abstract

While many scholars and critics have evaluated Eudora Welty’s stories through a feminist lens, including comparisons of plant imagery to female genitalia or characteristics, I intend to argue that Welty’s plant imagery in The Golden Apples transcends gender and instead represents what Michael Kreyling describes as a “call to growth, a summons to fulfillment” for the legitimate and illegitimate children, both male and female, of the story’s mysterious legendary figure, King MacLain. (Kreyling, Achievement 79).