When Anne mellows into a gracious mother and wife, smiling gently in the background, her hair easily tamed, what comes next is inevitable. By the final book, Anne shrinks to near invisibility, cut from the title of her own story.
By focusing on women in a kitchen, Welty seems to shrug the mantles that keep her marginalized—regional and gendered—subverting expectations for canonical American literature as public or inhabited by important men.