Pale Rider Research Articles

"This strange, old world" and other book reviews

Between 1920 and 1958 Katherine Anne Porter published more than 65 book reviews, many of which are now largely inaccessible. Although several such pieces have appeared in earlier collections of Porter's nonfiction writings, never have so many of Porter's reviews - nearly 50 - been made available in a single volume. Collectively reviews reveal Porter's opinions on topics ranging from nature of art and place of artist in politics and society to feminism and role of female artists. Particularly evident in reviews are critical principles that guided her own work as well as her judgements of works of other writers. In her introductory essay Darlene Harbour Unrue provides biographical information on Porter, traces her career as a reviewer, and links critical assumptions in reviews to themes and techniques of Porter's fiction. Other scholars as well have regarded Porter's critical reviews as valuable tools both for analyzing fiction and for constructing a portrait of Porter artist, primarily because Porter produced so little fiction (three collections of short stories and novellas, Flowering Judas, The Leaning Tower, and Horse, Pale Rider, and a novel, Ship of Fools). In preface to first collection of her nonfiction writings, The Days Before, Porter herself urged readers to look closely at her nonfiction, for there they would discover the shape, direction and connective tissue of a continuous, central interest and preoccupation of a lifetime. Porter's scope as a reviewer was broad. Because she had lived in Mexico City during revolution, had known Diego Rivera, and had studied primitive Mexican art, she was often called on to review books on Mexican art and on revolution. Porter also reviewed many books by or about women. Her reviews of Short Novels of Colette and Katherine Anthony's translation of Catherine Great's memoirs are particularly noteworthy for her comments about women artists and her expression of admiration for women who flout traditional roles.

Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: an uneasy relationship

Anne Porter, best known for her novel Ship of Fools, was an inveterate traveler--a cosmopolitan jet-setter in the days before jets. But she was of humble origins, born in 1890 in the tiny hamlet of Indian Creek, Texas, and christened Callie Russell Porter. For most of her life she maintained a stormy relationship with her home state. That relationship is documented in a book published by A&M University Press in 1990, the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's birth. Edited by Clinton Machann and William Bedford Clark, Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship reveals the sources of Porter's love-hate relationship with Texas. In 1939 the Institute of Letters conferred an award on J. Frank Dobie's adventure saga, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, rather than on Porter's acclaimed short-story collection, Horse, Pale Rider. The favoring of the male-interest, West story over Porter's finely crafted stories, with their female characters and some non-Texas settings, could not have helped Texas' literary reputation. Twenty years later a misunderstanding occurred when Porter thought the University of intended to name a new library after her. As a result of the misunderstanding, she bequeathed her papers and memorabilia to the University of Maryland rather than the University of Texas. Katherine Anne Porter and begins with an introduction by noted folklorist Sylvia Ann Grider. Part I contains the personal recollections of three individuals who knew Porter from very different perspectives. Willene Hendrick became acquainted with Porter by trying to piece together the puzzle of her early life. Cleanth Brooks, the distinguished critic of Southern literature, contributes a cache of fascinating letters received from Porter over the years. Finally, Paul Porter relates in hilarious detail his memories of rambunctious Aunt Katherine, telling, for example, of her samurai-like attempts to carve a leg of lamb at a fancy dinner party. In addition to these entertaining chapters, essays by Joan Givner, Don Graham, Thomas F. Walsh, Janis P. Stout, and Darlene Harbour Unrue search out the imprint on Porter's fiction. Sally Dee Wade contributes an extensive, annotated bibliography of letters, articles, and other writings by or about Porter, all of which document the Texas connection that the cosmopolitan Porter vigorously denied. This bibliography includes description of the correspondence between her and University of officials that sealed her estrangement from Texas.

Death and Repetition in Porter's Miranda Stories

ARLY in Horse, Pale Rider, in one of Miranda Gay's dreams, Katherine Anne Porter introduces the obsessive center of her final Miranda story, indeed of the whole Miranda series: death, specifically Miranda's perception of her own death. (The Grave, Mortality, Horse, Pale Rider-the major titles alone reveal as much.) the stranger [death]? Where is that lank greenish stranger I remember hanging about the place, welcomed by my grandfather, my great-aunt, my five times removed cousin, my decrepit hound and my silver kitten? Why did they take to him, I wonder? And where are they now? Yet I saw him pass the window in the evening. What else besides them did I have in the world? Nothing. Nothing is mine, I have only but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine.' Should Miranda take to this stranger, as her grandfather and the others have done, or flee him? Are the others (and would she be, once dead) anywhere now? And what is this beautifully sufficient nothing allowed by death? Such questions and their possible answers center on the idea of repetition. In Grave, the climactic story in The Old Order, the first of two groups of Miranda stories, Miranda initially rejects the perceived bondage of repeated meaning (the symbolic silver dove's interpretation of death) to embrace the freedom of unconnected existence, of modernity-the freedom of the grave. Repeating that earlier day, however, the story's coda allows the adult Miranda a chance to revise her youthful choice, to reaccept repeated meaning as something other than mere bondage. Moreover, Mortality and Horse, Pale Rider, the second group of stories, together repeat The Old Order. That is, they

Fall and Redemption in Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Fall and Redemption in Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War

This essay is an abbreviated version of a chapter in "No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century," a sequel to The Madwoman in the Attic which I am writing in collaboration with Susan Gubar, to whose inspiration and advice I am very much indebted throughout the piece. The essay also incorporates and elaborates upon some material originally presented in my "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature," Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 391-417, and 1 wish to thank the editors for permission to reprint these passages. In addition, I am grateful to Elaine Showalter, Elliot Gilbert, Garrett Stewart, and the members of the Summer Seminar for College Teachers that Susan Gubar and I codirected in 1981, all of whom have given me useful advice and essential support. Also, I want in particular to thank Gayle Greene (at Scripps College) and David Savage (at Lewis and Clark College), who shared with me two brilliant student papers by Tamara Jones (Scripps) and Elizabeth Cookson (Lewis and Clark), projects whose revisionary research renews my confidence in the contribution women's studies has made to the undergraduate curriculum. Finally, all illustrations in this essay are reproduced with the kind permission of the Imperial War Museum in London.

Part II: Death in Literature. Poetry as Epitaph

Anyone tolerably versed in American literature will realize that we could have devoted our entire collection to attitudes toward death in American literature. Such a collection could be tightly organized and valuable, but it might also be redundant for an audience which consists primarily of loosened‐up literary folk to begin with. So we offer, instead of standard selections, a group of essays which, though they are about death in literature, use literature as a vehicle for discussing either theoretical or practical interpretations of death in American society and letters.Karen Campbell's essay, “Poetry as Epitaph,” uses Emily Dickinson's poetry to illustrate and embody current international theories about death and language. We place this contribution first in this section because it serves as a transition between Gravestones and Epitaphs and Death in Literature: Dickinson was writing at the same historical moment discussed by Kenneth Ames in “Ideologies in Stone,” a fact the reader may wish to remember while reading “Poetry as Epitaph;” and Karen Campbell treats Dickinson's poetry as epitaphic in style and genre. Sonia Gernes' “Life After Life: Katherine Anne Porter's Version” uses Porter's “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” to illustrate and make provocative suggestions about Raymond Moody's theses in Life After Life. Leslier Fiedler's contribution is an extract from a speech given under the auspices of an organization studying the humanist's response to child abuse, and is part of a series of lectures on that subject. He discusses infanticide through literature and then through popular culture. Marvin Kohl takes issue with some of Professor Fiedler's conclusions.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Pale Car, Pale Driver

Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Pale Car, Pale Driver

Katherine Anne Porter's Feminist Criticism: Book Reviews from the 1920's

Katherine Anne Porter is seldom recognized as a feminist, and little known as a literary critic. She was both. No mere stylist-a charge she denies: I've been called a stylist until I could really tear my hair out[1]-Porter exhibits in her work a well-trained critical intellect which frequently addressed itself, particularly during early part of her career, to women's rights and women's concerns. Her book reviews from 1920's provide ample evidence both of her critical abilities and of her commitment to feminist cause. Porter was heavily involved in critical activitieslecturing, essay writing, and book reviewing--during many of her most productive years.[2] A perfectionist about her art, Porter was in no hurry to publish her fiction. But she was writing all along, cutting her teeth as a book reviewer on dozens of other authors' works while she perfected her own. During 1920's, as her first stories began to appear in print,[3] Porter contributed regularly to New York Herald Tribune Books and also wrote for various other periodicals.[4] It was hard work, and good experience. These early book reviews illustrate Porter's forthrightness, her liberal spirit, and her witty mastery of English. They trace formation of her critical tastes and knowledge of her craft. They also help to fill in a somewhat unknown period in Porter's life. Always reticent about herself and evasive with would-be biographers in later years, Porter reveals herself in her early reviews and essays not merely through her stated opinions, but also in her offhand comments, allusions, comparisons, and ironic turns of phrase, as well as in quick glimpses of her social milieu sprinkled throughout these early pieces. They warrant attention not because of works discussed (most of which have long been buried in oblivion), but because they provide a new perspective on author of Flowering Judas, Old Mortality, Horse, Pale Rider, Noon Wine, and Ship of Fools. Book reviews, of course, are assigned; reviewers are often asked to evaluate books falling into what editors believe to be appropriate categories. Porter was frequently assigned books about Mexico, where she had lived, as well as books about art, archaeology, travel, and history. As a woman and a fledgling author, she was asked to review many works by women novelists, poets, and biographers, and books about feminism. The subject of women's rights was so important to Katherine Anne Porter that it appears in a great number of her reviews, just as female characters and women's experience predominate in her fiction. Anyone interested in Porter's personal struggle for independence will find her comments on women and feminist issues very significant. Critics often have overlooked feminist orientation of Porter's work. William L. Nance has called her art the art of rejection,[5] a negative and sub-