Katherine Anne Porter

1
Katherine Anne Porter

• born , May 15, 1890, Indian Creek, Texas, U.S.
  died Sept. 18, 1980, Silver Spring, Md.

2

• American novelist and short-story writer, a
  master stylist whose long short stories have a
  richness of texture and complexity of character
  delineation usually achieved only in the novel.

3

• Porter was educated at private and convent
  schools in the South.
• She worked as a newspaperwoman in Chicago and in
  Denver, Colorado, before leaving in 1920 for
  Mexico, the scene of several of her stories.
• Maria Concepcion, her first published story
  (1922), was included in her first book of
  stories, Flowering Judas (1930), which was
  enlarged in 1935 with other stories.

4

• The title story of her next collection, Pale
  Horse, Pale Rider (1939), is a poignant tale of
  youthful romance brutally thwarted by the young
  man's death in the influenza epidemic of 1919.
• In it and the two other stories of the volume,
  Noon Wine and Old Mortality, appears for the
  first time her semiautobiographical heroine,
  Miranda, a spirited and independent woman.

5

• Porter's reputation was firmly established, but
  none of her books sold widely, and she supported
  herself primarily through fellowships, by working
  occasionally as an uncredited screenwriter in
  Hollywood, and by serving as writer-in-residence
  at a succession of colleges and universities.
• She published The Leaning Tower (1944), a
  collection of stories, and won an O. Henry Award
  for her 1962 story, Holiday.
• The literary world awaited with great
  anticipation the appearance of Porter's only
  full-length novel, on which she had been working
  since 1941.

6

• With the publication of Ship of Fools in 1962,
  Porter won a large readership for the first time.
  
• A best-seller that became a major film in 1965,
  it tells of the ocean voyage of a group of
  Germans back to their homeland from Mexico in
  1931, on the eve of Hitler's ascendency.
• Porter's carefully crafted, ironic style is
  perfectly suited to the allegorical exploration
  of the collusion of good and evil that is her
  theme, and the penetrating psychological insight
  that had always marked her work is evident in the
  book.

7

• Porter's Collected Short Stories (1965) won the
  National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for
  fiction.
• Her essays, articles, and book reviews were
  collected in The Days Before (1952 augmented
  1970).
• Her last work, published in 1977, when she
  suffered a disabling stroke, was The Never-Ending
  Wrong, dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti case of
  the 1920s.

8

• Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas, for
  example, echoes and ironically inverts the
  traditional Christian legend.
• http//www.questia.com/PM.qst?actionopenPageViewe
  rdocId78267053

9
Flowering Judas

• Katherine Anne Porter, whose works took the form
  of novelettes and stories, wrote more in the
  style of the Metaphysical poets.
• Her use of the stream-of-consciousness method in
  Flowering Judas (1930) as well as in Pale Horse,
  Pale Rider (1939) had the complexity, the irony,
  and the symbolic sophistication characteristic of
  these poets, whose work the modernists had
  brought into fashion.

10
Setting

• ". . .everything I ever wrote in the way of
  fiction is based very securely on something real
  in life."
• This story is modeled on an incident which
  happened to a friend of hers, Mary Doherty,
  during the Obregon revolution in Mexico. 
• In a 1965 interview, Porter gave this
  information

11
Setting

• "There was a man. . .who was showing Mary a
  little attention. . . .Goodness knows, nothing
  could be more innocent.  But you know, she wasn't
  sure of him so one day she asked me to come over
  and sit with her because so-and-so was going to
  come in the evening and sing a little bit and
  talk.  She lived alone in a small apartment.  The
  way I described the place was exactly as it was. 
  There was a little round fountain, and what we
  call a flowering Judas tree in full bloom over
  it.   As I passed the open window, I saw this
  girl sitting like this, you see, and a man over
  there singing.  Well, all of a sudden, I thought,
  'That girl doesn't know how to take care of
  herself.'"

12
Plot

• The beginning of this story--in fact, the first
  paragraph --establishes the tension that is
  developed in the remainder of the story.
• A close examination of it reveals Laura's
  apparent dedication and self-sacrifice in
  contrast to Braggioni's insolent exploitation. 
• Notice the off-putting description of Braggioni,
  but also the way that Laura avoids the situation,
  staying away from home as late as she can and
  then stoically enduring his presence. 

13
Plot

• This palpable tension between two ways of life is
  developed throughout "Flowering Judas.
• Gradually, the reader recognizes Laura as a
  character whose spiritual betrayal is far more
  profound than the revolutionary leader's
  corruption.
• The ending of this story does not provide a
  simple resolution.
• It is only in Laura's dream at the end of the
  story, a dream brought on by her recognition that
  by betraying Eugenio she has betrayed herself,
  that she comes to a horrifying understanding of
  her condition her fear of love, of life. 

14
Plot

• She awakes trembling at the sound of her own
  voice, "No!," and is afraid to sleep again.  
• Porter ends the story here we do not know if
  Laura's realization will save her from what she
  has become. 
• Her dream, which as Robert Penn Warren wrote,
  "embodies but does not resolve the question,"
  tantalizes us with its implications.

15
Characters Braggioni

• (notice that his name suggests his nature) 
  appears to have betrayed the earnest ideals of
  the movement he leads through his love of luxury
  and his indifference to his fellow
  revolutionaries.
• He so completely savaged by his portrayal that it
  is difficult to take sufficient note of his
  continuing importance in the movement, and his
  necessary emphasis on the movement as a whole
  over mere individual members of it.

16
Characters Braggioni

• Notice that the very traits which have led to his
  lewdly obese insolence--vanity, arrogance,
  self-love, malice, cleverness, love of pleasure,
  "hardness of heart"--are precisely those which
  have made him a "skilled revolutionist."
• He is, on the other hand, a man capable of
  certain sorts of love he can sacrifice himself
  and accept sacrifice from others. 
• He is capable of both revolutionary and amatory
  action. 
• His ability to love begins with himself and oozes
  over those with whom he comes into contact.
                       

17
Laura

• The repressed has betrayed Eugenio--first by
  refusing his offer of love, then by delivering to
  him the drugs he uses to commit suicide. 
• She has betrayed the children she teaches even
  though she tries to love and take pleasure in
  them, they "remain stangers to her."
• Most important, perhaps, she betrays herself by
  rejecting "knowledge and kinship in one
  monotonous word.  No. No. No," and by disguising
  her sexual coldness as earnest revolutionary
  idealism.

18
Laura

• Laura is afraid she cannot live she is "not at
  home in the world." It makes her, finally, a
  "cannibal" of others, a "murderer" of herself. 
• When she eats the "warm, bleeding flowers" of the
  Judas tree in her nightmare vision, she
  symbolically participates in a sacrament of
  betrayal. 
• Laura lives paralyzed. 

19
Laura

• Her ideals remain intact, though she must
  sometimes struggle to maintain them. 
• Her own taste requires fine handmade lace, a
  revolutionary heresy. 
• And she is still, significantly, engaged by the
  faith of her childhood..

20
Laura

• Yet caught between her revolutionary sympathies
  and the sympathies of her own past, she finds the
  experience "no good" and ends by merely examining
  the tinseled altar and its presiding "male saint,
  whose lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his
  ankles."
• In addition, Laura's revolutionary activity is
  unfulfilling.  

21
Laura

• She takes messages to and from people living in
  dark alleys attends fruitless union meetings
  ferries food and cigarettes and narcotics to sad,
  imprisoned men she "borrows money from the
  Roumanian agitator to give to his bitter enemy
  the Polish agitator." 
• She is found to be comforting and useful, but her
  revolutionary ardor is of little use when it
  comes to leading the revolution.

soothing things, drugs
22
Point of View

• The reader must be aware of the extent to which
  Braggioni is portrayed in the story from Laura's
  perspective, and although her perspective
  undoubtedly reveals an important slice of the
  truth, it is nevertheless distorted by her own
  ascetic idealism. 

23
Point of View

• Critics of the story have often noted that the
  background facts concerning Laura are distinctly
  similar to those in Porter's own experience the
  Catholic upbringing, Porter's having been a
  teacher in Mexico, her involvement in
  revolutionary causes there, a stubbornly
  aesthetic sensibility. 
• It is by no means difficult, then to establish a
  biographical basis for "Flowering Judas," but it
  would be a mistake to lose sight of the degree to
  which Porter has transformed the raw data of her
  experience into fiction.

24
Symbolism

• When Laura eats the "warm, bleeding flowers" of
  the Judas tree in her nightmare vision, she
  symbolically participates in a sacrament of
  betrayal.
• Her love of fine handmade lace suggests her
  conflicts with her past versus her revolutionary
  sympathies.

25

• Sacrament is in Christianity, a rite that is
  considered to have been established by Jesus
  Christ to bring grace to those participating in
  or receiving it. In the Protestant Church, the
  sacraments are baptism and Communion. The Roman
  Catholic and Eastern Churches also include
  penance, confirmation, holy orders, matrimony,
  and the anointing of the sick.

26
Symbolism

• In fact, throughout the story, there is evidence
  of this tension between two ways of life--Laura's
  avoidance, frigidity, and inability to love and
  Braggioni's corruption.  
• Braggioni's name suggests his nature   he
  "bulges marvelously in his expensive garments,"
  his mouth "opens round and yearns sideways," he
  "swells with ominous ripeness," his ammunition
  belt is buckled "cruelly around his gasping
  middle" ( pp. 1786-1787).

27
Irony

• Robert Penn Warren's essay, "Irony with a
  Center," is a close reading of a passage from
  "Flowering Judas" --the paragraphs beginning with
  'Braggioni was your friend'  and ending with 'you
  will know that Braggioni was your friend'--(pp.
  1786-1787).
• Early in the story, Laura seems the idealistic,
  perfect revolutionary and Braggioni the
  disgusting, off-putting character.  

28
Irony

• But as the story progresses, it becomes clear
  that Laura is most guilty of betrayal, for she,
  in her inability to give herself, to be intimate,
  to truly give, is guilty of  spiritual betrayal. 
  
• Braggioni, disgusting as he is, is guilty of a
  much less crime.

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Web Resources

• Katherine Anne PorterRead books on/by Katherine
  Porter at world's largest online
  library.www.questia.com
• Katherine Anne Porter Societyhttp//www.lib.umd.e
  du/Guests/KAP/
• Literary Manuscripts, UM LibrariesThe Katherine
  Anne Porter Room http//www.lib.umd.edu/ARCV/kap/k
  aproom.html

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Web Resources

• Katherine Anne Porter... Descendent of Daniel
  Boone, legendary pioneer and explorer, Katherine
  Anne Porterwas born in Indian Creek, Texas, but
  . she grew up in Texas and Louisiana. ...
  http//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kaporter.htm
• PAL Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)http//www.
  csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap7/porter.html
  
• American Masters . Katherine Anne Porter
  PBShttp//www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/databa
  se/porter_k.html