Newsletter of the

Society

The Year’s Work on Katherine Anne Porter: 2002 (and 2003)

In previous essays, I and, before me, Janis Stout, reviewed Porter scholarship published two years before the year of the newsletter. This year, with the newsletter going to press a little later in the year, I review Porter scholarship published two years ago and last year.

Books

Adolescent Hero in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter and J.D. Salinger, by Rashmi Gupta, published in India in 2003 by Atlantic, makes connections between the Miranda stories and The Catcher in the Rye. The adolescent hero of Salinger’s novel and the adolescent heroine of the Miranda stories both experience alienation and feel adrift in a modern world cut off from sustaining values and traditions.

Chapters in Books

Not included in last year’s essay, Catholic Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Mary R. Reichardt and published by Greenwood Press in 2001, offers an entry on Porter written by Russell Elliott Murphy. Focusing on Porter’s relationship to Catholicism, Murphy presents a brief biography of Porter, a review of her major themes, and a response to the relevant criticism. Murphy does not survey Porter’s work for specific allusions to Catholicism. Instead he investigates “how its tenets inform her fiction.” He argues that through her protagonists’ “lack of belief in something greater than self,” Porter exposes “the poverty of self-reliance, a perennial Catholic theme.”

The History of Southern Women’s Literature, edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks and published by Louisiana State University Press in 2002, includes an entry on Porter written by Janis Stout. Porter, a “border southerner” and a “genuine cosmopolitan,” offered a perspective on the South uniquely her own. Stout’s essay helps readers to form a full and accurate picture of Porter as a writer with connections to the South; the volume in which the essay is included makes a significant contribution to Southern literary studies and offers an important context in which to view Porter.

Articles

Beth Martin Birky’s “Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘The Grave’: Women’s Writing and Re-visioning Memory,” Journal of the Association of Research and Mothering 4.2 (2002): 51-64, is part of a special issue on “Mothering and Literature.” Using Adrienne Rich’s concept of “re-visioning, ” Birky offers a personal example of how feminist reading offers strategies for survival. She weaves together a discussion of feminist reading, a reading of Porter’s story “The Grave,” and an account of her miscarriage experience in order to demonstrate the “way . . . reading women’s literature can frame the unexpected and incomprehensible moments of . . . life.”

According to Tammy Horn, critics who recognize the importance of dress in “Old Mortality” tend to focus on particular outfits in the story, Amy’s wedding dress and Eva’s second-hand clothes, for example, to the exclusion of others. In “Re-dressing the Past: Dresses as Domestic Texts in Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Old Mortality,’” Kentucky Philological Review 16 (2002): 27-31, Horn focuses on Amy’s Mardi Gras outfits. She argues that Amy “reveals more of herself and her body with each successive Mardi Gras costume” and that the story presents a “steady shedding of the Grandmother’s narratives.”

An 1825 incident known as the Kentucky Tragedy serves as the basis for William Gilmore Simms’ Charlemont (1856). In Simms’ novel, Margaret Cooper, a “beautiful, intelligent, heroine,” is “gradually led astray—deceived, seduced, and abandoned.” Caroline Collins, in “Jilted Southern Women: The Defiance of Margaret Cooper and Her Twentieth-Century Successors,” Studies in the Novel 35.2 (2003): 178-192, compares Cooper to two other misused Southern heroines: Hulga Hopewell of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and Ellen Weatherall of Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Like Margaret Cooper, Ellen Weatherall is “hounded by a relentless inner voice.” Collins points out the striking similarities between the characters’ experience of betrayal.

Porter’s “That Tree” has received little extended critical discussion, so Elena Ortells Monton’s “Teaching K. A. Porter’s ‘That Tree,’” Academic Exchange Quarterly 7.2 (2003): 278-283, is a welcomed addition to Porter scholarship. The story, I suspect, is rarely taught, but teachers who read this article may be inspired to teach it, as the author makes a compelling argument for its value as a teachable text. The story offers the author, who teaches English Rhetoric and Poetics at the University Jaume I of Castello, Spain, an opportunity to apply theories found in Susan Lanser’s The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction and Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Using Lanser’s “poetics of point of view” as a framework, the author helps her students analyze the story’s narrator, an American expatriate in Mexico, encouraging them to pay close attention to the narrator’s stance or “relation to the discourse content or ‘message’ or narrated world.” The article offers teachers specific step-by-step instructions for introducing students to various aspects of the narrator’s stance in the story.

Dissertations

Ruth Frendo, in “The Tyranny of the Soul: Mind, Body, and Humanity in Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, and Flannery O’Connor,” DAI 63.04C (2002): AAIC809598, completed at University of Essex, analyzes representations of the body in the writings of Porter, Gordon, and O’Connor. The authors’ representations reflect both traditional Christian thought and modern ideologies concerning the mind and the body.

Because Porter wrote in a “Freud-saturated culture” and explored the themes of “death, motherhood, and sexuality,” Freudian theory provides an appropriate lens for viewing Porter’s long stories. Eric Rygaard Gray, in “Death and Katherine Anne Porter: A Reading of the Long Stories (Sigmund Freud),” DAI 64.06A (2003): AAI3094048, completed at Oklahoma State University, focuses a different text by Freud upon each of Porter’s long stories. The text by Freud and long story pairings include “Mourning and Melancholia” and “Old Mortality,” The Interpretation of Dreams and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Civilization and Its Discontents and “Hacienda,” and “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “The Leaning Tower.”

Rachel Season Habermehl explores the relationship between the American Transcendental Movement and American Modernism in “Transcendental Legacies in American Modernism (William Carlos Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut)” DAI 64.05A (2003): AAI3090478, completed at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The modern writers discussed in the dissertation share a “preoccupation with the importance of human responsibility.”

Maryann Rosella Donahue finds connections between twentieth-century American women’s travel narratives and contemporary women’s personal essays in “Modes of Motion: Travel in the Nonfiction Narratives of Twentieth-Century American Women Writers,” DAI 64.01A (2003): AAI3079192, completed at University of Tulsa. The experience of difference and “otherness” in foreign landscapes of writers Edith Wharton, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Mary McCarthy, and Porter is compared to the experience of “marginalization and alienation within familiar American environments” of contemporary women writers Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, and Mary Gordon. A chapter of the dissertation “explores how Porter positions herself within a geographic and cultural ‘borderland’ in her travel essays and how Allison achieves a similar effect through her metaphorical ‘excavation’ of confining sociopolitical categories in Skin and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.”

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.