War Games: Depictions of Children's Play in Eudora Welty

Welty often attends to the interiority of childhood in her fiction, which explores the politics of children's lives alongside those of adult characters.One such way her novels and stories do this is through references to children's games.The Golden Apples, in particular, includes numerous games.From the danger of mumblety-peg in "Moon Lake" to children's shrieks that resemble war cries while playing games like tag in "The Wanderers," Welty's narratives often punctuate innocent children's play with violent imagery or feature children playing games that are either figuratively or literally dangerous.Children's games can reflect larger societal conflicts and provide a safe outlet for understanding war and its effects, or as historian Johan Huizinga reminds us, play is never simply play-it is a reflection and function of culture.As Huizinga argues in Homo Ludens, games create a "magic circle" that provides a temporary escape from the harshness of reality (10, 77).Applying Huizinga's theory of play to an analysis of The Golden Apples, this note offers new insights into these stories and the role of children's games within them.Children playacting war as a form of entertainment is not a new phenomenon.Imaginary games, particularly those that involve battle, have been a hallmark of children's play for years.Even today, war games such as cops and robbers and manhunt, which require imagination to cultivate war play, as well as video games, which explicitly depict war and warlike violence, remain popular.In the 1940s, however, war games may have taken on more significant meanings.American Studies scholar William M. Tuttle Jr. argues that during the Second World War, "[i]t was natural that children's play would turn from 'cops and robbers' and 'cowboys and Indians' to war games" (136).As he observes, "school-age children across the country played war games with improvised weapons" (136).Similarly, literary