Southern Belle In Exile

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) ranks among the most celebrated southern writers of the 20 century American literature. Her most influential novels are set in her southern hometown countryside and narrate the initiation of a southern girl Miranda Gay, which is named by critics as "Miranda saga". Triplets of "Miranda Saga", "the Old Order" (1936), "Old Mortality" (1937), and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1938) represents respectively three important stages of Miranda's childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.The thesis is intended to explore the nature of the Southern Belle complex that pervades "Miranda saga" and its impact on Miranda's psychological development from psychoanalytic and archetypal perspectives. As a kind of old southern myth, the image of Southern Belle used to be a caretaker of the southern tradition, but collapsed gradually under the impacts of the southern modernization at the turn of the centuries. The riddle of this complex is the feminine gender role defined by the old southern patriarchy. Miranda's repulsion at the old order and memories about the past constitute an incurable complex in her initiation.In Porter's "Miranda saga", the heroine's illusion about death and her longing for redemption are refractions of the conflicts between death instinct and life instinct in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. Miranda's struggle within the complex in question also reveals the operation in the structure of personality. Yet for mankind in general, the Southern Belle complex is rooted in archetype of the Earth Mother combined with Jungian anima of human collective unconscious desires. Besides this archetype, "Miranda saga" crams with other symbolic archetypes such as shadow images, variants of the Great Mother, animus, the sacrificial scapegoat. Initiation, the biggest archetypal pattern of heroic quest, is portrayed as an exile from which the heroine eventually achieves to rediscover herself.