Childhood Love, Innocence, and Growing Up Theme Analysis

Eudora Welty’s “A Memory” is in part the precursor to a coming-of-age story. While the narrative provides no reference to the narrator’s exact age, it is clear that she is on the cusp of a great life transition. Throughout the story, Welty emphasizes the contrast between the narrator’s innocence (which borders on naïveté) and her growing consciousness of the real world. In doing so, Welty hints at a process of maturation that is about to unfold.

The reader is led to believe that the narrator has had a sheltered upbringing. The curated environment of her childhood, which the narrator describes as having been “strictly coaxed into place like a vine on [a] garden trellis,” starkly differs from the “abandonment and wildness” she is beginning to witness in her surroundings. Nonetheless, in spite of the fear and dread that these observations stir up, her urge to incessantly watch the world is experienced as a need, an impulse indicative of a desire to relinquish some of her childhood innocence. On the one hand, Welty’s depiction of childhood love appears to reinforce the protective innocence that the narrator is leaving behind. Lying on the beach that summer morning, the narrator actually calls on the memory of the incident on the stairs to safeguard herself against the “horror” of the bathers. On the other hand, the narrator also seems to see the purity and intensity of first love as something that makes her observe the world around her even more scrupulously. It calls her into a “dual life,” and she ends up straddling two modes of experience: that of the naïve “dreamer” and that of the astute “observer.”

In this regard, the narrator’s experience of first love provokes a “constant uneasiness” within her, as she is forced to acknowledge that both life and love might actually resemble the messiness and chaos exhibited by the bathers, not the unrealistic ideas she has crafted in her imagination. When the disappointment of this realization sets in, she becomes so overwhelmed with self-pity that she bursts into tears. And yet, it is also in this moment, when she is forced to confront her own naïveté, that the potential for maturity and growth emerges.