A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Katherine Anne Porter’s Short Stories

Katherine Anne Porter(1890-1980)is an outstanding female writer and stylist in American literature.Her portraits of the complex characters and her exquisite writing skills have made her short stories extremely prominent for which she has won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Awards.Scholars have studied her short stories from the perspectives of her life experience,feminism,and cultural studies.However,there is insufficient attention on her short stories from a perspective of conceptual metaphor with its dynamic relations with characters and themes.The conceptual metaphor is a basic way of thinking and the cognitive mechanism of human beings.This theory exerts a strong influence on literary criticism.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson,this thesis analyzes conceptual metaphors embodied in the plots and characterizations in Porter’s short stories: “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” and “BODY IS A CONTAINER”.The conceptual metaphor “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” is mainly embodied in her two stories,“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”(1930)and “The Journey"(1944),and it includes three supporting metaphors: “Old Days Are Untraceable Journeys”,“Tomorrow Is A Consoling Place” and “Death Is the Final Place”.These metaphors intensively imply Porter’s understandings about life: life is a rough journey and death is the end of the journey,which reflects Porter’s confusion and thinking about life.The conceptual metaphor “BODY IS A CONTAINER” is embodied in her other two stories,“Maria Concepcion”(1922)and “Noon Wine”(1937)and its supporting metaphors are: “Anger Is Heating Fluid in Body”,“Joy Is Soothing Power in Body” and “Despair Is Loss of Power in Body”.Characters’ emotions become the objects inside the body containers.With the changes of emotions,the character’s good and evil sides change accordingly,which reflects that the good and the evil coexist in the complex human nature.However,the definition of good and evil in the social morality cannot summarize the complex good and evil in human nature.This conceptual metaphor not only shows Porter’s exquisite description of the complex human nature,but also embodies her dialectical cognitions of social morality and complex human nature.Through the interpretations of the conceptual metaphors,the thesis reveals the theme of life and death and the theme of the coexistence of good and evil in human nature in Porter’s short stories,then explores Porter’s deep cognitions of human being’s basic living situation and internalized mental state.The author hopes that the interpretations of conceptual metaphors in this thesis could enrich the researches on Porter’s short stories and could help readers have a more intuitive and exquisite understanding of the characters and meanings in Porter’s works.