January 1, 2025

Adult Daughters and Gendered Deathwork in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

Key Points

Both Welty's and Ward's characters navigate grief in the context of caregiving, reflecting the emotional burdens women often bear.
Adult daughters in literature serve as crucial voices on the complexities of loss and familial obligations, illustrating gendered experiences.
The analysis employs materialist feminist theory to reveal how culture and family shape women's grief and caregiving roles.
Emphasizing the regional context, the essay argues that intersectional differences complicate the representation of care in Southern families.

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines the gendered labor of grief and caregiving in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing . Focusing on the role of adult daughters as end-of-life caregivers, grieving mothers, and subjects of shifting temporalities, it contends that both Welty's Laurel Hand and Ward's Leonie are consumed by the grief of intimately bearing witness to dying parents and that their complex grief shapes their connectedness with place, their bodies, their families, and time. This exploration of gendered labors of care uses affect and materialist feminist theory to question how culture, family obligation, emotional effects, and cultural obligation influence the ways Welty's and Ward's women grieve, thus highlighting how their representations of loss illuminate broader tensions between the burdens of care in the South for women caregivers of intersectional difference.

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