Newsletter of the

Society

The Year's Work on Katherine Anne Porter

By Christine H. Hait,
Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina

2001 saw the publication of two books on Porter, one a collection of essays and the other Thomas Austenfeld's much-anticipated book. Porter continues to be read in relationship to other writers, and Porter scholars may find themselves filling their bookshelves with intriguing literary works introduced to them in their study of Porter scholarship. They will also encounter knowledge from a variety of disciplines-medicine, law, ethics, history, and politics-as scholarship on Porter continues to draw on a wealth of fresh disciplinary perspectives.

Books

Porter's writing about Germany is fascinating in its own right but becomes even more fascinating when placed in the context of writings about Germany and Central Europe by American women writers. Thomas Austenfeld's American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman, published by University Press of Virginia, offers this context. Austenfeld argues that the American women writers he studies developed an ethical model in response to totalitarianism, a model that he presents in his final chapter as an "ethic of care." Two chapters provide analysis of Porter's writing. "Winter in Berlin: Katherine Anne Porter's Politics of Emotion" explains Porter's emotional response to her Berlin experience by pointing to, among other factors, her childhood connections to Germany and her experience in Mexico. "Anatomies of Evil and Redemption: Contextualizing Porter's Politics and Boyle's Germany" compares Ship of Fools and Kay Boyle's Generation without Farewell. Austenfeld reads Ship of Fools as "an investigation into the nature of evil" and "not specifically about Germany at all." He considers the novel a masterpiece but argues that "The Leaning Tower," not the novel, provides a "character portrait of Germany." Whereas Porter explores evil in Ship of Fools, Boyle explores the possibilities of redemption in her novel set in post-war occupied Germany. Austenfeld's research and extensive knowledge enrich his readings of Porter, Boyle, Stafford, and Hellman.
The 1998 special issue of Southwestern American Literature dedicated to Porter is handsomely presented in book form in From Texas to the World and Back: Essays on the Journey of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Mark Busby and Dick Heaberlin and published by Texas Christian University Press. Essays from Southwestern American Literature in From Texas to the World and Back include "Writing Home: Katherine Anne Porter, Coming and Going," by Janis Stout; "Katherine Anne Porter's Birthdays," by Darlene Unrue; "Katherine Anne Porter and the University of Texas: A Map of Misunderstanding," by Richard Holland; "Troubled Innocent Abroad: Katherine Anne Porter's Colonial Adventure," by Jeraldine R. Kraver; "Gender and Creativity in Katherine Anne Porter's 'The Princess,'" by Christine Hait; "Trapped by the Great White Searchlight: Katherine Anne Porter and Marital Bliss," by Larry Herold; "Porter and Dobie: The Marriage from Hell," by James Ward Lee; "The Prodigal Daughter Comes Home," by Lou Rodenberger; "Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: Ambivalence Deep as the Bone," by Mark Busby; "Knowing Nature in Katherine Anne Porter's Short Fiction," by Terrell F. Dixon; "A 'taste for the exotic': Revolutionary Mexico and the Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and María Cristina Mena," by Rob Johnson; "Katherine Anne Porter and William Humphrey: A Mentorship Reconsidered," by Bert Almon; and "Memories that Never Were: Katherine Anne Porter and the Family Saga," by Sylvia Grider. New essays include "Katherine Anne Porter's Journey from Texas to the World, by Don Graham, and "Cover-Ups: Katherine Anne Porter and the Economics of Concealment," by Robert K. Miller.

Chapters in Books

Charlotte Beck's The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History, published by Louisiana State University Press, includes a chapter entitled "Katherine Anne Porter: A Gift for Friendship." Beck provides a helpful chronological overview of the various ways in which Porter's association with the Fugitive group contributed to her writing and career. At different points in Porter's career, members of the Fugitive circle served as readers of works in progress, provided publication opportunities, and wrote important criticism about her work. Beck discusses Porter's friendships with Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, making frequent use of letters in the Porter collection.

Articles and Essays

Chlorosis, known as greensickness or "the disease of virgins," reached epidemic proportions in nineteenth-century America. Although "Old Mortality" contains only one reference to the disease, in "The Dis-ease of Katherine Anne Porter's Greensick Girls in 'Old Mortality,'" Southern Literary Journal 33.2 (2001): 80-98, Lorraine DiCicco argues that the disease pervades the text. Citing the work of medical historians, DiCicco provides a fascinating account of the rise and sudden disappearance of chlorosis, which many medical historians compare to our modern-day anorexia nervosa, another illness associated with the difficult passage from girlhood to womanhood. In "Old Mortality," it is Sophia Jane, the grandmother, who suffers from greensickness as a girl. However, other characters in the narrative, including Amy and Miranda, provide further illustrations of young girls whose rebellions against their cultural conditions play themselves out in unhealthy ways.

Glenway Wescott's The Pilgrim Hawk and Porter's "The Leaning Tower" are "texts in conversation," according to Janis Stout, in "'Practically Dead with Fine Rivalry': The Leaning Towers of Katherine Anne Porter and Glenway Wescott," Studies in the Novel 33.4 (2001): 444-58. The quotation in the title comes from Wescott's journals and expresses his deep admiration for Porter's story and envy of her accomplishment. Porter admired The Pilgrim Hawk, too. Stout uses letters in the Porter collection and Wescott's published journals to precisely document the extent to which the two writers conversed during the production of the two texts. Reading the story and the novel, Stout discovers significant connections between them, including their depictions of a world "leaning" toward war and their use of a central controlling image, the leaning tower in Porter's story and the pilgrim hawk in Wescott's novel.

A delightful consequence of my own study of Porter has been the discovery, through her, of other writers. One such writer is Kay Boyle. Through Kay Boyle, I discovered Evelyn Scott. A direct path from Porter to Scott is found in Janis Stout's "South from the South: The Imperial Eyes of Evelyn Scott and Katherine Anne Porter," in Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist, edited by Dorothy M. Scura and Paul C. Jones and published by University of Tennessee Press. Tennessean Scott and Texan Porter are southerners who traveled south, Scott to Brazil and Porter to Mexico. Their travels are reflected in Scott's Escapade and Porter's stories of Mexico. Mary Louise Pratt's 1992 book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation serves Stout well in her exploration of the complex responses of Scott to Brazil and Porter to Mexico and particularly sheds light on key elements in the stories "Flowering Judas" and "Hacienda." Although Porter's writings about Mexico "have a texture of social complexity" lacking in Scott's Escapade, both writers produce texts "impelled by the gaze of imperial eyes."

Dissertations

Like Lorraine DiCicco, Lisa Claire Roney, in "Beyond the Pale: Chronic Illness, Disability, and Difference in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor," DAI 62.12A (2001): AAI3036106, completed at Pennsylvania State University, highlights the relationship between medicine and literature. She argues that "fictional depictions of characters marginalized by various kinds of Otherness" created by Porter, McCullers, and O'Connor, southern women writers who experienced chronic illness or disability, reflect the writers' experiences. She studies attitudes in the first half of the twentieth century in the American South toward "body, illness, disability, race, heredity, and morality." Porter's experience, she argues, resulted in "an obsession with debates about genetic versus germ causes of disease, as well as the ways various social explanations for illness changed and competed over time."

Ticien Marie Sassoubre reads Porter's "Old Mortality" in the context of law and history in "Reimagining Property: Ownership and Identity in American Fiction, 1880-1940 (Helen Hunt Jackson, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner)" DAI 62.10A (2001): AAI3028166, completed at Stanford University. Historically, the shift from an "old order" to a modern world, which Porter's "Old Mortality" explores, included a move away from a "land-based" legal definition of property, a move that resulted for many in both "mobility" and "personal insecurity." "Old Mortality" and the other texts discussed "represent the impact of changing property relations on personal identity."

Porter's lack of a literary agent during most of her career had serious consequences. This is one of the insights that Alexandra Subramanian gained from her extensive research in the Porter collection and that she includes in "Katherine Anne Porter and Her Publishers (Cyrilly Abels, Donald Brace, Seymour Lawrence)," DAI 62.09A (2001): AAI3026413, completed at College of William and Mary. Subramanian explores Porter's "intimate and complex professional friendships" with Cyrilly Abels, Donald Brace, and Seymour Lawrence, concluding that Porter "experienced the publishing world as intimate, familial, and nurturing and also as competitive, results-oriented, and mercenary."

Please send information on any additions that need to be made to this essay to me at chrishait@colacoll.edu so that I may include the information in next year's essay.