Warming Reveries: A Mosaic Approach to Reading Eudora Welty's "The Whistle"

The protagonists of "The Whistle" strike the reader as familiar because they conform in many ways to a stigmatype -- to use a neologism invented by sociologist Matt Wray to describe the way epithets such as white trash buttress boundaries in the social hierarchy -- of poor whites in the South. To analyze this story, the author uses several different methodologies in literary analysis and communications, including new historicism, new criticism, rhetorical analysis, content analysis, and ideology critique. This mosaic methodological approach has the advantage of opening a dialogue between methods; one method can fill a gap another one leaves. On the other hand, some deconstructive readings ignore textual evidence that contradicts their approach, despite their creativity. Furthermore, such a mosaic approach is more productive in the sense that each implementation remains incomplete, and therefore invites participation and further research. In the conclusion, he interrogates the purposes and effectiveness of ideology critique in the examination of literature.