"Clytie" is a short story by Eudora Welty first appearing in The Southern Review (Summer 1941) and first collected in A Curtain of Green (1941) by Doubleday.Johnston, 1997 p. 238: Selected Bibliography

Plot "Clytie" is presented from a third-person omniscient point-of-view, with Clytie Farr as the focal character. The story is set in the fictional village of Farr's Gin in the Deep South during the 1930s.

The Farr family, formerly well-to-do local elites, are now impoverished. The bed-ridden patriarch, "Papa" Farr, suffers from advanced dementia. The mother is deceased. The three surviving children are Octavia, Gerald and Clytie, none of whom have married. The eldest son, Henry Farr, committed suicide with a pistol years before.

Octavia is the matriarch of the household. Gerald is an invalid who rarely emerges from his bedroom. Miss Clytie performs the duties of a domestic servant for the entire family. Octavia is her disciplinarian older sister, subjecting Clytie to petty cruelties. The family is largely isolated from the community. Only one resident of Farr's Gin, the reluctant barber Mr. Bobo, has access to the household: he is admitted once a week to shave the elder Farr. A former black servant for the Farr patriarch, Old Lethy, is barred from the premises, but lurks near the property. Clytie is often observed wandering aimlessly on main street in rainstorms. Regarded as the village idiot, she is both ridiculed and pitied.

When Clytie is commanded by Octavia to collect rainwater from the cistern barrel, she confronts her aging face in the water's surface. In that moment she becomes aware of the depth of her suffering, and casts herself headfirst into the barrel: "When Old Lethy found her, she had fallen forward into the barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs."Welty, 2001 p. 92: See here for quoted material.Johnston, 1997 p. xiii: short plot sketch. And p. 73: See here for a sketch describing Clytie's death.

Narrative style: point-of-view

Literary critic and poet Carol Ann Johnston reports that Welty emulates British author Jane Austen's fiction with respect to her "narrative position" so as to "shape the reader's view of community."Johnston, 1997 p. xii. And see here for quote from Welty's "the Radiance of Jane Austen."Welty, 1978 p. 10

Johnston cites "Clytie" as a superb application of Austen's narrative method to its focal character, Clytie, whose tragic life and death exposes the suffering inflicted by her family: "We could not begin to understand the complexity of tone in the story had it been placed in the wrong frame."Johnston, 1997 p. xiii And: p. 19: "[W]e do not hear Clytie's voice in the story, and rely on the distanced narrator to tell us what is happening."

Author and critic Katherine Anne Porter in her Introduction to A Curtain of Green (1941) comments on "Clytie": "[T]he very shape of madness takes place before your eyes in a straight account of actions and speech, the personal appearance and habits of dress of the main character and her family."Porter, 1941 p. xixJohnston, 1997 p. 161: See here for essay by Robert Penn Warren: "Clytie, isolated in family pride and madness and sexual frustration..."Marrs, 2005 p. 70: "...portrait of a character driven to madness by her isolation..."

Theme: Clytie and Narcissus mythology .Johnston reminds readers that Clytie is the Greek mythic name of a sea nymph and daughter to Oceanus, the god of water. She fell in love with the sun god, Apollo. Welty employs metaphor linking this goddess to Narcissus, in that Clytie's final act is to glimpse her face in a barrel of water, into which she plunges and drowns.Johnston, 1997 p. 111: footnote 38.

Footnotes

Sources Johnston, Carol Ann. 1997. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, New York. Gordon Weaver, general editor. Kuehl, Linda. 1972. Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47. The Paris Review, Issue 55, Fall 1972. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4013/the-art-of-fiction-no-47-eudora-welty Accessed 28 September, 2025. Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Harvest Books, Orlando, Florida. (paperback) Porter, Katherine Anne. 1941. "Introduction" to A Curtain of Green (1941). pp. ix-xix. Doubleday, New York. Welty, Eudora. 1978. "The Radiance of Jane Austen" in Eye of the Story. pp. 3-13. Random House, New York. Welty, Eudora. 2001. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Barnes & Noble Modern Classics edition. pp. 83-92.