Why I Live at the P.O. (1941). Content and Description

Sister, the speaker of this tale set in a tiny southern town, mentions the pleasant relations she once enjoyed with the rest of her family (including Mama; her grandfather, Papa-Daddy; and Uncle Rondo) before her younger sister, Stella-Rondo, returned from a brief stay in Illinois, where she had been married to a man named Mr. Whitaker (who had once shown an interest in Sister herself) and where she also acquired a young daughter named Shirley-T., whom Stella-Rondo insisted she had adopted but who Sister loudly claimed was Stella-Rondo’s own child.

One by one (at least according to Sister), Stella-Rondo succeeded in turning each of the other family members against Sister: She told Papa-Daddy that Sister disliked the long beard in which he took such pride, she told Uncle Rondo that Sister had mocked the way he was dressed, and she even stirred up trouble between Sister and Mama. When Uncle Rondo retaliated against the alleged insults by setting off firecrackers in Sister’s room, Sister decided that she had had enough: She gathered up her belongings and moved into the small post office where she worked, and it is there that she tells her tale and nurses her grievances.

This tale is one of Welty’s most famous, partly because it is a bravura exercise in the art of storytelling, both by Sister and by Welty herself. By creating such a memorable character and putting the whole narrative entirely in her mouth, Welty breathes vitality into her text. Sister is driven by a lifetime of sibling rivalry, a raft load of recent frustrations, and a crushing burden of feeling conspired against and unappreciated. Welty expertly captures the subtle inflections of Sister’s anger and exasperation, and it is not difficult to imagine a real human voice speaking to a presumably sympathetic listener.

Sister can recall every precise detail of her recent humiliations, and in the process of remembering them she re-creates all the detailed texture of a complicated family life. Admittedly, this family is perhaps more full of oddballs and kooks than most, and sometimes Welty seems to be treating them as eccentric caricatures in a situation comedy rather than as fully credible human beings. Nevertheless, the story achieves some measure of complexity thanks to the comic distance we achieve from Sister’s belligerent perspective.

Although Sister sometimes pauses to address her listener directly (for example, “Do you remember who it was really said that?” [64]), it is hard to take her account entirely at face value. In any case, it does not much matter who is right and who is wrong, who is aggrieved and who does the aggrieving; the chief interest of the tale results from Welty’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the realistic minutiae of life and the real rhythms of southern speech. As Ruth M. Vande Kieft memorably states it:

Sister’s monologue is comic not only because of the apparent illogic of her logic, but because of her manner of speaking. One can see the fierce indignant gleam in her eye as the stream of natural Southern idiom flows out of her: at once elliptical and baroque, full of irrelevancies, redolent of a way of life, a set of expressions, of prejudices, interests, problems, and human reactions that swiftly convey to the reader a comic and satiric portrait of this Mississippi family. (55)

Critical response to the story has often centered around the question of whether Sister may be crazy (or at least clinically paranoid). Welty herself disputed this interpretation, arguing that Sister was merely isolated and therefore (partly as a result) in love with drama, exaggeration, and self-centered storytelling (Pingatore 73). The story clearly shows that individuals adopt (and adapt) their personal identities in response to family dynamics, and although the work is comic in many respects, it also offers a fairly unsentimental view of family relations (as when Sister reports, “ ‘I told you if you ever mentioned Annie Flo’s name I’d slap your face,’ says Mama, and slaps my face” [62]).

It seems both appropriate and ironic that the story takes place on the Fourth of July—appropriate since the events of the day lead Sister to declare her own independence, but ironic because Independence Day is ostensibly an occasion to celebrate a joyous new union, the creation of a new national family. The comic tone of Welty’s tale suggests that this family will eventually heal its wounds, but in the meantime they (and we) have at least learned the limits of Sister’s patience. The story is a particularly memorable contribution to the long southern traditional of oral storytelling, conveying in a few thousand words a memorable sense of a particular time and place and a vivid style of speech.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. How is Welty’s depiction of complex family relations in this story similar to and especially different from Theodore Dreiser’s depiction of such relations in “Old Rogaum and His Theresa”? Discuss the works in terms of such matters as tone, technique, style, and narrative point of view. How is geographical setting used effectively in both works?

2. William Faulkner’s tale titled “Barn Burning” also deals with a central character in conflict with many other characters in the story. He also feels, as Sister does in Welty’s tale, increasingly isolated, and he takes steps to isolate himself even further. Compare and contrast the two works in terms of their tones, settings, characterization, and final outcomes.

3. Like Welty’s story, John Updike’s “A&P” is told from the perspective (and in the voice) of the central character. How do both authors use diction, slang, dialogue, and tone to characterize their protagonists? How are the plots of the stories similar, especially in their movements toward the increasing isolation of Sister and Sammy? How and why does each author use comedy effectively?