DEATH AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER A READING OF THE LONG STORIES By ERIC RYGAARD GRAY Bachelor of Arts University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma 1984 Master of Fine Arts University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama 1991 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May, 2003 DEATH AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER A READING OF THE LONG STORIES °Q, of th~ Graduate College 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Linda Leavell, who made this dissertation possible and who has been supportive and encouraging for many years. I also want to thank Dr. Linda Austin for her assistance with the introduction, Dr. William Decker for his many reassurances, and Dr. Edward Lawry for doing more than his duty. The suggestions and support of my committee were a great help. Thanks to my family and friends for their love and prodding. I am grateful to Celeste Portier for her proofreading, to Kevin Cleary for his editorial help, to Shawn Crawford for his support, to Mike Gray for his unwavering friendship, to Fred Katz for his lively optimism, and to Steven Woods for his steady encouragement and for his special assistance with the revision of the introduction. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. ! II. MIRANDA IN MOURNING ..... , ............................................................23 III. "HOLIDAY" AND FEMININITY .......................................................... .47 IV. THE DREAMS OF "PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER" ....................................72 V. ''NOON WINE" AND "THE 'UNCANNY"' ............................................. 113 VI. "HACIENDA" AND THE CULTURE OF MEXIC0 .................................. 145 VII. "THE LEANINGTOWER," WAR, SEX, AND DEATH ............................. 189 WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 220 IV 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Katherine Anne Porter's long stories, "Old Mortality," "Holiday," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," ''Noon Wine," "Hacienda," and "The Leaning Tower," are obsessed with death, motherhood, and sexuality. The.separate elements of this trinity have been discussed at least briefly by critics of Porter's work, but the connections between them have not been explored. The area of literary theory most conducive to an exploration of these themes is psychoanalytic theory, and the branch of psychoanalytic theory best suited to a study of Porter's work is classic Freudian theory, for it influenced both Porter and her culture. There are several reasons Freudian theory provides an effective framework within which these stories may be seen more clearly. When Porter was twenty-two months old, her mother died after giving birth to Porter's younger sister; the aftermath of the trauma caused Porter to be deeply troubled throughout her life by death and motherhood, and by their connections with sexuality. These concerns may be evidenced in her stories, for she used her own experiences in her art and based most of her protagonists upon herself, and therefore psychoanalytic patterns can be found within the stories. Porter would have understood the events of her life in the context of her culture. The culture within which Porter lived and wrote---the Western culture of the first half of the twentieth century-was heavily influenced by Freud, and thus popular psychoanalytic processes and allusions are often found within the fiction of most modem American writers. Porter learned of Freudian themes from her culture, and claimed that her approach to writing fiction involved allowing her unconscious to stir her 2 actual experiences until a pattern emerged, which would seem to recognize the mental processes discerned by psychoanalysis. But Porter did notleam of Freud only indirectly. Porter studied Freud closely, reading and rereading his books; her views on human psychology mirror Freud's. Why, then, despite its suitability to Porter's work have the connections between Freudian theory and Porter's aesthetic not been more fully analyzed? The answer lies in a pervasive contemporary reaction to Freud within popular culture and, to an extent, within academia. Freudian ideas have been used to explore Porter's work, but his theoretical framework has not. Porter scholars consistently seem fascinated with her life and use it to explore her stories, where they find ideas that anyone versed in psychoanalysis would recognize as Freudian. Because these critics are not consciously applying theory, the results are erratic and periodically lead them to expressions of bewilderment; at times it seems as if Porter's critics are attempting to independently rediscover Freud's theories, which the current anti-Freudian trend has apparently (and unfortunately) caused them to ignore or to understand only superficially. This is often less true of criticism of other writers, for psychoanalysis plays a major part in literary theory, particularly in gender studies. Porter has long been a favorite of the critics. She is a writer's writer, and her fiction is well-suited to New Critical readings; accordingly, critics tend to focus on creating appreciation for her style, speculating about her influences, connecting her stories to actual events from her life, expanding on her themes, and discussing her characters. Recently, critical interest in Porter as a regionalist has been high. To this point, however, there have been no extended psychoanalytic readings of Porter's work. 3 Not just Freud, but Lacan and the contemporary gender theorists have been largely ignored in the study of her work. Literary theory of any kind is rarely used in the study of Porter's work, although feminist readings of her stories have recently become a popular topic for dissertations. Before 1960.there were only scattered articles on Porter's fiction; the first scholarly examination was a 1940 article by Lodwick Hartley called "Katherine Anne Porter." Two years later Robert Penn Warren published his now classic article "Katherine Anne Porter (Irony with a Center)," which is still one of the most insightful presentations of Porter's themes and methods. The first long critical study on Porter is a pamphlet, Harry John Mooney Jr.'s The Fiction and Criticism ofKatherine Anne Porter; Mooney simply but appropriately argues that Porter's stories explore the predicament of the individual in the modem world. In the 1960s Porter published her novel Ship ofFools and The Collected Stories, and critical attention to her works expanded greatly. James William Johnson's "Another Look at Katherine Anne Porter'' is a serious attempt to classify Porter's stories according to theme, and Edward Schwartz's "The Fictions of Memory" analyzes Porter's autobiographical character Miranda according to her levels of cognitive development. The first major book on Porter appeared in 1963; William Nance's Katherine Anne Porter and the Art ofRejection finds a recurrent theme throughout the fiction, a regular pattern of dismissal in which the protagonist tests and rejects something or someone. Although the prominence of this theme has now been widely accepted, Nance's effort to categorize all of Porter's characters according to how closely they resemble Porter herself has not been widely admired. His discussion of the rejection theme seems careful, and he 4 makes many insightful points; his thinking tends to run along Freudian lines, though he mentions Freud only once, noting that Freud's concept of the death wish seems to be verified in modem Western culture as Porter presents it (24 7). This potential tum to Freudian theory was not fully realized in subsequent scholarship. The first edition of George Hendrick's Katherine Anne Porter appeared in 1965. Hendrick provides a biographical sketch and studies the stories' settings, themes, and literary influences. Hendrick's analysis is accurate but general, providing a safe introduction to Porter's work. Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium is a useful compilation of short criticism, reviews, and interviews with Porter. Ray B. West Jr.' s pamphlet Katherine Anne Porter detects autobiographical elements in Porter's fiction and investigates her use of memory as a writing technique. In the 1970s interest in Porter continued. John Edward Hardy's Katherine Anne Porter examines Porter's treatment of the problem of evil and looks for common themes in her work. M.M. Liberman's Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction looks at Porter's use ofrhetorical devices and classifies her works according to genre. Overall, the early, book-length works of criticism tend to be accurate but general; indeed, with the exception ofNance's book, they often seem indistinguishable. The shorter articles of this period tend to be more original.and insightful, and include a number of good feminist studies. After Porter's death in 1980, more revealing biographical studies of Porter were published. Hank Lopez's Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek is based on interviews he conducted with the elderly Porter. Porter's tendency to dissemble about her personal life leads to numerous factual errors, but a reader who recognizes Porter's deceptions may find the book to be a valuable portrait of 5 her difficult personality. Lopez includes Porter's frequent references to the death of her mother, which he recognizes as important; he seems, however, uncertain regarding how to explain Porter's