He was dripping, while her skirt dried on the table so in a manner they had changed places too." "By now the Boy Scout seemed for ever part of Easter and she part of him, he in motion on the up-and-down and she stretched across. Welty uses almost explicitly sexual language to describe Loch's trying to save Easter. These scenes between Easter and Loch provide an almost sexual climax to the story, written in exquisitely elongated passages, a strange mix of sex and death. When he has to resuscitate Easter he pushes the female company away from him, even 'hiding' Easter from the adult camp supervisor Mrs Gruenwald. Loch is a typical adolescent boy, holding all around him - especially the girls he is employed to watch over - in contempt. To have been an orphan."Įaster reaches her mysterious apogee when she accidentally plunges into Moon Lake and is saved by Loch Morrison, the boy scout and life saver. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs Gruenwald, into Twosie - into a boy. It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. All about her." In one pivotal passage, which points to the story's main theme being transcendence, Nina ponders what it would be like to transform herself into someone else, especially "the orphan".
Her very being is so secret that Welty tells us "The night knew about Easter. While it's clear that Easter is a coarse tough girl, she's also a mystery that everyone, the reader included, covets. When quizzed on who gave her this authority, Easter brazenly remarks, "I let myself name myself.". When she writes her name in the sand, she informs her fellow campers that she chose her own name. Easter also considers herself very much her own creation.
Early on she is noted as a leader of the orphan girls, and keeps fast company in the form of Geneva, who starts her holiday at the camp by swiftly stealing Nina's little lead-mold umbrella. She is a tough girl with a blowsy, "whatever" attitude, offering her trademark quip "I should worry, I should care". Most of Moon Lake peers intensely and wonderingly at the orphan girl, Easter. Easter ultimately achieves a supreme and impenetrable mystery when she has a near death experience, and is saved by the surly life saver and boy scout, Loch Morrison. Nina and Jinny Love exhibit an all consuming curiosity with the enigmatic and Sphinx-like Easter. Most of the story finds its focus through Easter. Most of the story concentrates on the relationship between three girls, Nina Carmichael and Jinny Love Stark, and the orphan girl Easter.
The story describes the two different classes of girls mixing and getting to know each other, with the action moving towards a dramatic climax when one of the orphan girls, Easter, nearly drowns. Two groups of girls attend the camp, one being a fairly middle class set and the other a group of orphans who are there on charity. Moon Lake describes the events at a summer camp in the fictionalised area of Morgana. Middle class propriety comes undone when ridiculously trying to assert order amongst the chaos of an amoral nature. Welty also employs a subtle humour that sometimes finds its expression in outright farce. In one scene a prim and proper mother accuses an adolescent life saver of corrupting nature itself: "You little rascal, I bet you run down and pollute the spring, don't you?". Sex and nature are fused in richly organic descriptions that veer towards the perverse. Much of the writing is characterised by sensuous attention to detail, with ethereal characters shimmering through a lush yet ominous landscape. Welty based the story on personal experiences of a girlhood summer camp in Rankin County, Mississippi. It eventually found its way into print in 1949, in Sewanee Review. Eudora Welty's short story Moon Lake was written in 1947 and subsequently rejected by seven magazines.
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