The Optimist's Daughter

The chapter begins as a nurse escorts Laurel Hand, her father, Judge McKelva, and his second wife, Fay, into an ophthalmologist’s examination room. The omniscient narrator describes Laurel as “a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark” (3). Fay, who is “small and pale” (3), taps her foot with impatience. Judge McKelva is there to receive medical attention from an old family friend, Dr. Courtland. With the exception of Fay, they all come from a small town in Mississippi called Mount Salus. Fay, who is from Texas, met Judge McKelva at a conference and married him, settling in Mount Salus at the stately McKelva family home. Now they are all in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and Fay not only is upset that she can’t enjoy the party but makes sure everyone knows she is.

At the doctor’s office, Judge McKelva sits on a “thronelike chair” above the doctor’s stool, with the women on either side of him. He explains that while “Fay had slipped out somewhere” (4), he had his eye on the street after pruning proses. Fay defensively says she was “uptown in the beauty parlor” (4). The Judge explains he was trying to prune the “climber,” his dead wife’s fig tree and must have scratched his eye.