Petrified Man (1939). Content and Description

As she works on the hair of the newly pregnant Mrs. Fletcher in a rundown beauty parlor in a small southern town, Leota describes her friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Pike, who recently have moved from New Orleans and are renting rooms from Leota and her husband. Amid much gossip and local social commentary, Leota describes a visit she and Mrs. Pike recently made to a traveling freak show, where they saw, among many other curiosities, a petrified man who could move his head only a quarter of an inch.

Later Leota describes how Mrs. Pike, while reading a cheap crime magazine owned by Leota, spotted a picture of Mr. Petrie, an escaped rapist from California, who Mrs. Pike immediately realized was not only an old neighbor from New Orleans but also none other than the petrified man in the freak show. Mrs. Pike was thus able to turn him in and claim a $500 reward, much to Leota’s frustration, since the magazine belonged to her.

Like many of Welty’s stories, this one is full of vivid characterizations of small-time, small-town southerners; its tone is comic, and much of its humor depends on dialect, dialogue, and odd-yet- somehow-oddly-familiar behavior. Nothing much “happens” in the tale, and there are no profound moral issues at stake (as there often are, for instance, in the comic works of Flannery O’Connor, another southern woman writer whose works are almost always set, like Welty’s, within her own region).

Welty’s main interest is in peculiarities of character—peculiarities of thought, speech, and conduct that are rendered in a tone that is, for the most part, gently amusing, although it sometimes contains a sardonic or satirical edge. In her superb overview of the history of, influences on, and critical responses to this tale, Diana R. Pingatore notes the ironic fact that when the editors of the Southern Review asked to have a second look at the text (which they had already once rejected), Welty, frustrated that the work had already been turned down by that journal and a number of others, had already destroyed the work.

The tale as it now exists, then, was reconstructed from her memory; she was able to perform this feat rather easily (she claimed), because the story depended so much on reported speech. She was thus able to recall and rewrite it because she had memorized it almost as if it were a tape recording (Pingatore 29-30).

In the course of characterizing so many others, Leota inevitably characterizes herself—a standard technique in much of Welty’s fiction, especially in such works as “Why I Live at the P.O.” The success or failure of a tale such as “Petrified Man” depends on Welty’s ability to capture convincingly the speech of the people she depicts, and there is no doubt that she achieves such success in the present story. In this as in a number of her other works, she reveals a flair for dramatization; her characters use the kinds of words, phrases, intonations, and bits of slang and dialect that make them seem real.

This work, like so many of Welty’s writings, is partly an example of the “local color” tradition in American fiction: It takes us into the typical life of a locale that may seem ordinary in some respects but also seems intriguingly off- the-beaten-path in others. There is a sense in which we, as readers of “Petrified Man,” make a visit to a kind of freak show in much the same way as the characters in the story do. We enjoy observing (and listening to) Welty’s characters perform their peculiar antics and speak their exotic English, yet our attitude toward them is less one of condescending superiority than of amused identification. Although in some respects they seem caricatures presented mainly to make us laugh, in other respects they are recognizably human, with all the foibles and stubbornness that can make people both endearing and sometimes a bit exasperating.

Some readers of “Petrified Man” have found the tone of the work more satiric than comical. To these readers, the three main women characters (Leota, Mrs. Fletcher, and Mrs. Pike) are less amusing than vulgar, and their attitudes toward (and treatment of) the male characters have sometimes been seen as emasculating and even as symbolically castrating. According to this reading of the tale, Welty is mocking the mental and spiritual shallowness of the three women, who in turn represent the mental and spiritual shallowness of a certain kind of small town life and of a certain kind of aggressive female psychology (Pingatore 33-35).

From this perspective, the women embody and epitomize the most superficial aspects of modern life, while the various tensions between males and females in the tale reflect the age-old battle of the sexes—a battle in which Welty seems less sympathetic to the women than one might have anticipated. Surprisingly, some early commentators even expressed a certain degree of admiration for the alleged rapist, Mr. Petrie, whom they saw as a male who had defied domination by women.

Recent analysts, though, have been far less inclined to endorse this view (Pingatore 36). For most readers, however, the enduring interest of the tale is probably less the result of any themes it explores than the consequence of the vivid details of Welty’s phrasing and characterizations. Leota, in particular, is hard to forget once we have met her—a fact that makes it completely believable that Welty could reconstruct the whole tale simply by remembering Leota’s voice.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast this work with Welty’s later story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” How are the works similar and/or different in setting, tone, technique, perspective, and final impact? What is the purpose of each work, and how do those purposes differ from or resemble one another?

2. Discuss the use of satire, the techniques of characterization, and the depiction of relations between the sexes in this work and in Flannery O’Connor’s tale “Good Country People.” Does one (in your opinion) have more philosophical or moral depth than the other? If this is the case, does such a difference make one work more significant than the other? How and why is comedy used in each work? Does one work appeal to you more than the other? If so, explain why.

3. How does the depiction of small town life in this work resemble or differ from the depiction of such life in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town? How are the works similar or distinct in tone, method, characterization, and underlying purpose? Could Wilder’s play have been set successfully in the South? Could Welty’s story have been set successfully in a small New England town? What do your answers to these questions imply about the use of local color in literature?