Drawing on the context in which the symbolic protection of the white female body is symbolically linked with guarding the US southern body politic, Harriet Pollack traces a pattern in Eudora Welty's fiction in which a sheltered middle-class daughter is disturbed or delighted by an other-class woman who takes pleasure in "making a spectacle” of her corporeal self.

HARRIET POLLACK is a professor of English at Bucknell University. She is an editor and coeditor of four collections: Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race (Georgia), Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade?, and Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America.