TOW #7 - "A Sweet Devouring"

By Eudora Welty

     In "A Sweet Devouring," author Eudora Welty focuses on her various romances with books that she first developed in her kitchen room. After her first encounter with Five Little Peppers, Welty cannot help but ask her mother whether her family was rich or poor; she was dying to hear that they were poor. Immensely fascinated with the main character Poppy, her greatest desire was to bake "a cake in a stove with a hole in it" (246) and channel her inner Poppy. This character played a big role in driving her literary tastes, because after reading about the troublemaker Poppy she concludes that "trouble, (was) the backbone of literature (and)...the original property of the fairy tale" (246). Welty grows her obsession with such books until "Snap" (246), she had finished all the books on the shelf. 

     Welty, in the early stages of reading, did not know what she liked. All she knew was the "pleasures of reading itself" (247). There were so many books that she could not have or did not know existed that for a long time, she could not find books that fit her taste and had meaning. When she discovers series books, she feels as though she had been saved. If she could not find quality, she could at least have quantity. As she begins her rampage of book reading, she would often make two trips in a single day, "running back [to the library] with any book on the same day [she] took it out" (247). Come Christmas time and she purchases the false "Camp Fire Girls" series, Welty is neither fascinated nor brought to a pause. Although she always loved the opportunity to read a new book, at this point all she wanted from her books was to "have ten to read at one blow" (250). She had begun to lost sight of the initial attraction that sparked her romance with books, and when she realized this growing disinterest, she wonders if it is "a flaw of the heart" or if she had simply grown "tired of not having any taste" (250). 

     Just when she feels lost in her world of books, she returns to her home and finds "Mark Twain -- twenty-four volumes, not a series, and good all the way through" (251). She had come back to the roots, the source, of where her love of literature had started, and the spark had been reignited. She could once again bask in the beauty of literature. Her journey to reach this state of mind had surely been "a sweet devouring."