Death and Katherine Anne Porter: A reading of the long stories

Katherine Anne Porter's long stories are obsessed with death, motherhood, and sexuality. This is due to the early death of Porter's mother, which caused Porter to unconsciously connect the three themes and led to her lifelong ambivalence towards them. An effective framework within which to explore these themes is provided by classic Freudian theory, which is well-suited to Porter's stories because they were written in a Freud-saturated culture. The place and time of Freud's greatest popularity, Greenwich Village of the early 1920s, coincides with the place and time of Porter's early writing career. Porter learned about Freud from her culture, and she also read Freud carefully; her views on psychology mirror Freud's, and her fiction is filled with Freudian themes and patterns. This can be shown by focusing a different text by Freud upon each of Porter's long stories. In "Old Mortality" Miranda's troubles are rooted in the early death of her mother, for Miranda fits precisely into the pattern of a person in mourning shown by Freud in "Mourning and Melancholia." Freud's theories on female sexuality show that the narrator of "Holiday" is ambivalently drawn toward a mother figure due to her own troubled feelings about relationships, motherhood, and sexuality. The six dreams of "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" fit exactly into the model described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Her dreams show Miranda struggling to overcome the death of her mother by figuring Adam as a self-sacrificing mother-figure. "Noon Wine" is an example of Freud's theory of the "uncanny," which shows that Thompson's insecurity about his own sexuality leads him to create doubles and to kill them. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents analyzes the function of "civilization," and it can show that "Hacienda" is Porter's effort to dismiss Mexican culture as impossibly chaotic due to its tolerance of unrestrained sexual and aggressive instincts. Finally, Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" shows that the protagonist of "The Leaning Tower" is sexually insecure, hostile towards women, and guilt-ridden over the death of a childhood friend. Porter's long stories are Freudian artifacts, and products of her culture.