Mae Miller Claxton

Western Carolina University

Eudora Welty, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the Modern Garden

In an interview, when asked to name the women she respects most, Eudora Welty named Martha Graham and Georgia O'Keeffe. She explained her choice: "For reasons plain to all--among them, common to both, an inviolate independence of spirit in pursuing their arts, the wholeness of their gifts of the imagination" (Conversations 35). For Welty, O'Keeffe was a role model as a woman artist. Although O'Keeffe, especially during her time in New York, was surrounded by the ideas of the avant garde flowing over the ocean from Europe, she chose her own direction, resulting in both controversy and success. She dared to express her vision boldly, incorporating the modernistic ideas she found pertinent to that vision and reacting against other ideas. Murray Roston explores the influence of these ideas on artists of the period in his book Modernist Patterns in Literature and the Visual Arts. He claims that artists in the modern period were influenced by the milieu, but each responded to the age in different ways. His methodology "posits the existence in each generation of a central complex of inherited assumptions, of emergent ideas and of urgent contemporary concerns; but it sees each creative artist and writer as reacting individually to those assumptions and challenges" (4). Like O'Keeffe, Welty was influenced by the new ideas she encountered as she began her career as an artist, but she, too, quietly created her works as products of her own unique vision, displaying her own "independence of spirit."

In this paper, I focus specifically on O'Keeffe's and Welty's views of nature in relation to a modern world. Their approaches to this topic reflect their roles as female modernists. For many modernist artists, nature provides the antithesis to the destructive aspects of the modern world. It is the source of inspiration, healing, and creativity. Welty and O'Keeffe do incorporate these aspects of nature into their work, but they also acknowledge the complexity of nature, its incorporation of life and death and the natural forces still beyond the control of humanity in spite of all its scientific advances. As Roston states, each artist acknowledges "contemporary concerns," but O'Keeffe and Welty are also "reacting individually" in the work that emerges. I specifically want to examine a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe entitled "Two Jimson Weeds" and "A Curtain of Green," by Welty. Both writers use conventional "female" subject matter in their works, flowers and gardens, but their complex portrayals of nature display their unique individual perspectives.

O'Keeffe had drawn and painted flowers since her childhood painting classes. In her memoir, she recalls her high school art teacher showing the class a Jack-in-the-pulpit. She notes that it was the first time that anyone had ever showed her the details of "any growing thing with the idea of drawing or painting it." In 1924, she created her first huge flower painting (Lisle 137) and explained the reasons for the size of her subject: "If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. 'So I said to myself--I'll paint what I see--what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it--I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers" (Georgia). In her commentary, O'Keeffe repeatedly uses the word "see." Her clearly stated objective is to realign the vision of those who view her flower paintings.

O'Keeffe's famous paintings of flowers were clearly a risk. Her subjects were closely associated with sexuality and the "Woman's" feeling. Anne Middleton Wagner contends that O'Keeffe allied herself with the natural world as a subject, typically a woman's sphere (65). Once the image was firmly in place in the viewers' minds, however, she "could pursue a modernist protocol--the calculated destabilization of the visual field--without too much opposition" (64). Her pictures display comfortable objects, but her use of color, space, and perspective leaves us to question how "natural" her images really are (68). Using O'Keeffe's painting entitled Black Iris III as an example, Wagner states, "O'Keeffe has created an image that, for all its apparent intelligibility, is fraught with local unfamiliarities; she means the sheer strangeness of these painted phenomena to strike us and reorient our vision" (64). The viewer standing in front of the painting, for example, feels diminished. Laurie Lisle claims that "the size of the bloom relative to a member of the human race precisely reflected the relative importance of nature and mankind in the artist's eyes" (137). Thus, nature becomes much larger than humanity. Viewers of her shows felt that they were in alternate worlds, down the hole in Alice in Wonderland, for example (137).

O'Keeffe's painting entitled "Two Jimson Weeds," painted in 1938, provides a particularly interesting example of "alternate realities" and the context brought to the painting by the viewer. In her memoir, O'Keeffe claims that she first encountered the flower outside her house in Abiquiu. It is "a beautiful white trumpet flower" that blooms in the cool of the evening. They are quite poisonous, however, and O'Keeffe notes that she dug them up, but some kept growing persistently. In her painting, O'Keeffe conveys the delicate beauty of the flower in cool blue, green, purple, and white. O'Keeffe once wrote about another white flower she painted: "The large White Flower with the golden heart is something I have to say about White--quite different from what White has been meaning to me. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower--and what is my experience of the flower--if it is not color" (qtd. in Lisle 137). In "Two Jimson Weeds," O'Keeffe conveys meaning through color as well as through her portrayal of the flower.

O'Keeffe includes another comment about "Two Jimson Weeds" in her memoir that adds yet another dimension to the painting. She writes that "Don Juan speaks of uses the Yaqui Indians make of the Jimson weed that almost make one afraid" (Georgia). According to a book on Native American ethnobotany, Jimson Weed is a commonly used hallucinogenic plant used by the shaman in some Native American tribes to "transcend reality and enter other worlds" (Native 194). The shaman could transform himself into other life forms and even visit the land of the dead "returning to the profane world with information useful to his people" (194). During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Native American ceremonial use of these drugs was much publicized. Don Juan was a Yaqui shaman, a kind of "seer" to his apprentice Carlos Castaneda, a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA (Fikes 14). Castaneda wrote several bestselling books about his experiences with Don Juan (he sold over eight million copies of his books). Later, the books were proven to be frauds. As far as O'Keeffe knew when she published the memoir in 1976, Don Juan was a real person, but her mention of him in relation to her painting of "Two Jimson Weeds" displays the need for humanity in a modern age to connect to other realities that lie closer to nature (Fikes 49). In fact, O'Keeffe, whether she knew much about jimson weeds in 1938 or not, chose a plant as her subject that truly represents the beauty, mystery, and danger of nature.

Welty displays a similarly complex view of nature as a realm of alternate reality, creativity, inspiration, and danger in "A Curtain of Green," first published in 1938 in the Southern Review and later published as the title story of her collection A Curtain of Green and Other Stories in 1941 (Polk 366, 7). Like O'Keeffe, Welty takes "feminine" subject matter, a woman and her garden, but she skews the perspective so that the reader sees nature as the writer sees it, as larger than life in contrast to the human beings who attempt to cultivate it. In the story, Mr. Larkin has been crushed by a large chinaberry tree as he arrived home in his car (symbol of the modern world). Mrs. Larkin saw everything from the front porch and said, "'You can't be hurt.' But the tree had fallen, had struck the car exactly so as to crush him to death" (Curtain 214). Seeking answers from the forces that killed her husband, she works feverishly in her garden apart from other human beings. The answer finally comes, but the answer is that there is no answer. Nature is beyond the understanding of humanity. The tree of knowledge is still denied to us. At the same time, Mrs. Larkin receives healing from the same force that caused her pain. At the end, nature allows her to reconnect with another human being, bringing her back from her journey to Hades to a world of creativity and inspiration.

For both artists, nature is a place of fertility, a life-giving force. O'Keeffe's works were often given Freudian interpretations, and many of her flower paintings were seen as female genitalia. O'Keeffe's biographer tells about the owner of an O'Keeffe painting who was shocked one day to find someone standing in front of her painting teaching a child about sex (Lisle 138). O'Keeffe was similarly shocked by her audience's reactions to her work. She reconciled her feelings by saying that people brought their own associations to her work, explaining, "Well--I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't" (Georgia). Perhaps O'Keeffe was unaware of her paintings' association with sex, but the connection is difficult to miss. Their eroticism was clearly shocking to an audience accustomed to female nudes by male painters but unaccustomed to naked natural objects.

Welty's garden in "Curtain of Green" is similarly erotic with her description of its "extreme fertility" (211). Mrs. Larkin makes no attempt to restrain it but lets it flourish uncontrolled. Robert J. Griffin calls the garden a "queer pastoral world which in its excessive fertility ironically images Mrs. Larkin's loss of innocence, her enforced solitude and sterility" resulting from her husband's death (106). As Griffin notes, it is a version of "Eden-paradise" with its lush pear tree in the middle of the garden, except that Adam is dead. Even at the threatened moment of violence as Mrs. Larkin raises the hoe over Jamey's head, however, the image of the "thin, unsunburned whiteness of her arms, the shocking fact of their youth," suggests that Mrs. Larkin's life is just beginning. She will love again.

In "Curtain of Green," Welty displays the influence of modernism as she manipulates time, space, and perspective. She opens the story, "Every day one summer in Larkin's Hill, it rained a little. The rain was a regular thing, and would come about two o'clock in the afternoon. One day, almost as late as five o'clock, the sun was still shining. It seemed to spin in a tiny groove in the polished sky, and down below, in the trees along the street and in the rows of flower gardens in the town, every leaf reflected the sun from a hardness like a mirror surface" (209). The phrase is quite visual with the image of the sun and polished sky, but the narrative technique she uses allows her to suggest both movement and stillness. It is a time outside of time. Time has stopped, and the sun has ceased its movement.

In addition to her innovative use of time, Welty also manipulates space and perspective, constructing a tangled garden surrounded by a border of hedge "high like a wall, and visible only from the upstairs windows of the neighbors" (210, emphasis added). Griffin notes that Welty mentions the neighbors' windows on six separate occasions. He claims that the windows possibly "represent the neighbors' distance and the fact that they can only see, or may even no longer bother to see, the solitary widow working in her strange over-lush garden" (104). Griffin's comments about the relationship of observer to subject suggest another connection to modernism. Suren Lalvani, in his book Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies, claims that vision relates closely to modernism. He comments, "A number of thinkers have argued that modernity consists of the powerful privileging of vision and that it represents a distinctive ocularcentric paradigm (4). Like the camera obscura, each neighbor has a window on the world outside, constructing her own meanings from what she sees. Similarly, Mrs. Larkin has constructed her own space, separate from the outside world, from which she attempts to gain knowledge of the world, to see. Griffin suggests "that Mrs. Larkin's private act is not really private--implying, say, that she cannot completely set herself apart in her sorrow and desperation" (104). Both the neighbors and Mrs. Larkin become part of a complex visual paradigm. The title of the story also suggests a visual connection. A curtain can hide from sight, but it can also reveal. In Welty's story, the modernist dilemma is solved as Mrs. Larkin lifts the curtain of green at the end of the story to rejoin humanity.

Sight, of course, is the modernist dilemma. Michael Kreyling writes of the "buffering function of vision," the modern tendency to see without participating (21). Mrs. Larkin's neighbors see her, but they cannot help her understand. Sometimes, sight fails them. Welty states, "Just to what end Mrs. Larkin worked so strenuously in her garden, her neighbors could not see" (212, emphasis added). It is Jamey, Mrs. Larkin's helper in the garden, who briefly gives her power over his life. He feels her standing behind him but refuses to turn around. At the same time, he hears "the oblivious crash of the windows next door being shut when the rain started" (219, emphasis added). Mrs. Larkin thinks, "Such a head she could strike off, intentionally, so deeply did she know, from the effect of a man's danger and death, its cause in oblivion; and so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability" (216). Even if she did kill Jamey, his death would have little effect on the world. Humanity is too "helpless" to defy these forces (216). O'Keeffe's paintings emphasize a similar theme. Standing in front of her flower paintings, the viewer feels small in proportion to the flower as representative of Nature. If sight can be "buffering" in a modern world, O'Keeffe must knock away the conventional and the representational in order to trick us into seeing and connecting to what we see.

O'Keeffe and Welty, like other modernists, similarly question the ability of language to disclose meaning. O'Keeffe, especially, trusts the meaning of her paintings but doubts the language used to describe them. She writes as the epigraph to her memoir: "The meaning of a word--to me--is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words. I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted. I make this effort because no one else can know how my paintings happen" (Georgia). In "A Curtain of Green," Welty also questions language. Griffin and other critics (including her agent, Diarmuid Russell) have, while generally praising Welty's work, also complained of "obscurity." Griffin refers to the phrase "curtain of green" and claims that Welty is guilty of "an unserviceable obscurity" in not clearly explaining its significance to the story (104). In fact, Welty undermines language throughout her work. Mrs. Larkin whispered to her husband as she saw the tree beginning to fall, "'You can't be hurt,'" but the tree fell anyway. After that, Welty writes, "People said she never spoke" (213). Language had failed her. Sounds become important--for example the sound of the rain falling into a pitcher on the back porch--but spoken language does not come into the story again until the end when Jamey "began to call her name until she stirred" (219). Like many modernist writers of the time period, Welty uses language in many innovative ways. In "A Curtain of Green," the incoherence of the story signifies an understanding that cannot be spoken.

Understanding can be achieved in a connection to place. The connection to place for Welty has been repeatedly documented. For O'Keeffe, the American Southwest spoke to her, inspired her, and became a place of healing. Many of her works emerged from this connection. Sarah Whitaker Peters comments in the introduction to her book, Becoming O'Keeffe, that she was beginning to understand why O'Keeffe distrusted those who "would use words to measure her images" (12). She comments, "I now think that O'Keeffe was a visionary Symbolist artist whose central concern was to cure people's minds and bodies with her paintings . . . While it may not do to press the matter too far, there is some hard evidence that by 1926 she really felt she had tapped the same primordial zone of therapeutic power devoutly believed in by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse" (12). The Yaqui Indians, in fact, believed in the use of ground painting to acquire power (Gale 370). In addition, flowers, for them, had many symbolic meanings. Muriel Thayer Painter writes that "Flower" is truly the symbol for all righteous and holy acts, devotions, duties--all forms of compassionate and religious expression" (100). Whether O'Keeffe's flowers were infused with the symbolic meaning of the Native Americans near her home in the Southwest, we cannot say, but the complexity of meanings surrounding them suggest that O'Keeffe felt a kind of healing power in her representation of them.

Welty's portrayal of nature as a healing force in her story suggests a similar view, but, as with O'Keeffe, nature is never idealized. It suggests mystery and power. The visual images in "A Curtain of Green" further suggest complex meanings that unfold before the perceptive viewer. Both artists were clearly influenced by modernist painters and writers who used the image to suggest multiple meanings, dependent upon the perspective of the viewer/reader. Both also return to primeval worlds in their creations, worlds removed from the modern world of science and technology. Two of O'Keeffe's friends, Louise March and Jean Toomer, were followers of Gurdjieff, who believed that modern man's alienation from nature breeds sickness and malnutrition of mind, body, and heart (Peters 78). Whether or not O'Keeffe believed strongly in the occult as did other Symbolists, clearly she did hold the Symbolist belief in the "curative properties of form and color" (78). But, Peters insists, "Her most permanent authority was the coherence of nature" (79). Welty came after the Symbolist period, but much of her work similarly emphasizes the complexities of nature. A recent article by Susan Haltom, a garden designer and historian, records up to 131 plants mentioned in Welty's works (5). Both artists return to the garden to teach us how to understand the modern world outside of the garden. In an essay about sculptor Jose de Creeft, Welty comments, "In all truly great works of art we find ourselves looking at many faces upon it; many ideas out of other times and countries crowd upon us, as when we look in the vastest pools, a world of reflections strikes our eyes" (Writers 266). I believe that a close look at Welty's work reveals the reflection of Georgia O'Keeffe. Such a study helps us understand both artists as modernists "with an inviolate independence of spirit."

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