SOURCE: "Microparasites, Macroparasites, and the Spanish Influenza," in To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 127-55.

[In the following excerpt, Leavy discusses works by Wallace Stegner and Katherine Anne Porter in which the influenza epidemic of 1918 figures prominently.]

The influenza pandemic of 1918 has been called by one of its historians "the most appalling epidemic since the Middle Ages," but, according to another who has studied it, the "average college graduate born since 1918 literally knows more about the Black Death of the fourteenth century" than about the epidemic. The disease came to be called the Spanish influenza and sometimes, more colorfully and perhaps more insidiously, the Spanish Lady, the feminization of influenza perhaps not as dangerous as the portrayal of syphilis as a woman, but nonetheless contributing to the stereotype of woman as polluter. In any event, there is indeed a glaring disparity between the dramatic possibilities of describing the pandemic and the relatively slight impact it has made on the consciousness of the world and of the United States, where it coincided with America's entry into World War I. And this disparity has caused puzzlement:

The important and almost incomprehensible fact about Spanish influenza is that it killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since.

If it does exist for some as a "folk memory," it has nonetheless failed to produce any enduring folklore, for it has been claimed that the "Spanish Lady inspired no songs, no legends, no work of art." In American literature, however, the influenza pandemic has provided at least two authors, Wallace Stegner and Katherine Anne Porter, with major subject matter and themes for fiction. The former has used the outbreak of influenza as a motif in several works, one of which, his "Chip off the Old Block," is on its way to becoming a classic short story. The latter's novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, is acknowledged to be "one of the twentieth century's masterpieces of short fiction," a work that also provides the historian with a "most accurate depiction of American society in the fall of 1918," synthesizing what otherwise could be gleaned only from the popular press.

Both Stegner and Porter make use of the coincidence of two of what each author would call plagues, the war and the flu, a conjunction that supplies a blatant instance of McNeill's depiction of human life as caught between macro- and microparasites, it being an additional point of interest that the influenza epidemic would strike hardest at the same segment of the American population as would the war. As Alfred Crosby has described it,

The interweaving of the war and the pandemic make what from a distance of a half-century seems to be a pattern of complete insanity. On September 11 Washington officials disclosed to reporters their fear that Spanish influenza had arrived, and on the next day thirteen million men of precisely the ages most liable to die of Spanish influenza and its complications lined up all over the United States and crammed into city halls, post offices, and school houses to register for the draft.

In Stegner's work, war and flu spell the end of the American dream, whose demise renders futile the attempt to achieve a personal identity that presupposes its existence. For Porter, who depicts the ironic death of a soldier, not from wounds suffered in battle but from influenza, the disease has a broader and more existential symbolism where it comes to her heroine's quest for self-definition. For despite the existence in Pale Horse, Pale Rider of religious themes in which some readers find Porter's belief in personal redemption, the American scene depicted in her novella comes very close to resembling the absurd world of Camus's The Plague.

Wallace Stegner tells the story of twelve-year-old Chet Mason, who becomes the man of the house when his father, mother, and brother—all ill of influenza—are taken to their town's makeshift hospital. His father's condition is complicated by frostbite incurred during a journey to purchase the whisky believed to be an effective medicine for flu. While his family is recovering, Chet remains in contact with the infirmary, supplies it with the excess milk piling up at his house, hunts for meat as food, wards off with a gun the half-breed Louis Treat and an unnamed companion intent on stealing the brew, sells the liquor for more money than his father would have charged, and, when the end of World War I is announced, holds a party to which he invites neighbors who were spared during the epidemic or were already released from the infirmary. At this celebration the whisky is imbibed freely, and in the midst of the merrymaking, Chet's father returns home and angrily confronts his son, accusing him of mishandling affairs while the family was away.

There are two ways for a reader to experience Chet's encounter with the pandemic believed to have killed over twenty million people throughout the world and to have infected about five times that number, the infection rather than its threatening fatality being central to Stegner's themes, since in this story no important character dies of the flu. The episode appears in Stegner's saga of the Mason family, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and is alluded to again in its sequel Recapitulation. It also exists as a separately published short story. The context supplied by the novels reveals Chet to be a relatively minor character compared to his father and brother, but only in the novels is it clear how pervasive are Stegner's metaphors of disease. The Big Rock Candy Mountain begins with the early life of Chet's mother and the death of his grandmother from what appears to be tuberculosis and thematically concludes with the death of Chet' s mother from cancer and with the impact of her illness and death on her husband and surviving son, Bruce. For by this time, Chet too is dead, his earlier triumph during the epidemic rendered ironically futile not only because he escaped the flu only prematurely to die of pneumonia while still a young man, but also because of the bleakness of his young manhood and the hopelessness of his future. As Stegner critics suggest, the Mason family deaths parallel the demise of the myths upon which America was supposedly built. There is a bitter irony that Chet's end comes about through the transformation of nature into a commercial venture by the society that trapped his father in the perpetual quest for the quick buck:

If Chet had not been generous and good-natured, he would not have worked up a sweat on a cold and windy day, helping dig somebody's car out of the snow at the Ecker ski-jumping hill outside of Park City. If he had been born luckier, he would have waited to catch pneumonia until after antibiotics had tamed it. Being generous, unlucky, and ill-timed, he dug and pushed, he got overheated, he fell sick and he died within six days. … Then he escaped from his future, which was drab, and his marriage, which was in trouble, and abandoned to others the daughter he had conceived before he was legally a man.… Like his catch-up reading, his instruction in real life had much ground to cover in only a little time.

In effect, the brevity of Chet's final illness mirrors his life, and, significantly, the short tale Stegner carved out of his long novel commences with a passage about time:

Sitting alone looking at the red eyes of the parlor heater, Chet thought how fast things happened. One day the flu hit. Two days after that his father left for Montana to get a load of whisky to sell for medicine. The next night he got back in the midst of a blizzard with his hands and feet frozen, bringing a sick homesteader he had picked up on the road; and now this morning all of them, the homesteader, his father, his mother, his brother Bruce were loaded in a sled and hauled to the schoolhouse-hospital.

The requirements of short fiction necessitate such condensation of events, and in "Chip off the Old Block," genre actually duplicates the quick course of the disease, and, symbolically, the brief span of a human life. Such a connection between form and content is implied in Stegner's 1989 foreword to his Collected Stories. He describes how "increasingly, in [his] own writing the novel has tended to swallow and absorb potential stories," how he "found fairly early that even stories begun without the intention of being anything but independent tended to cluster, wanting to be part of something longer."

In life as well, incidents become part of what will hopefully constitute the extended biography of the individual self. As the celebrity queried about his feelings about having reached a quite advanced age replied, he felt very well considering the alternative. One wants to survive, to make each event part of something longer. Mortality in general and plague in particular threaten this hopefulness. The rapidity of Chet's sudden passage from youth to young adulthood in the short story, and the successive failures of the generations of Masons are as in all family sagas—actually condensed in Stegner's long novels. Time bears an uneasy relationship to narrative, and, again, genre itself mirrors history, the relation of incident to the larger picture. The promise and collapse in rapid succession of the American dream parallel Chet's story, which is but part of the family chronicle treated in the novels. Similarly, in Europe, where World War I had crushed hopes that the Congress of Vienna marked the end of such global battles, the apparent progress of a century was suddenly rendered a mere illusion. The appearance and disappearance of the influenza pandemic that came to be known as the Spanish Lady, virtually personified the grim reality of the era, joining with the war to mock the human hope to achieve that which endures.

To read "Chip off the Old Block" outside The Big Rock Candy Mountain is, however, to view Stegner's metaphors of disease through a more optimistic lens, to avoid learning that Chet was untouched by the influenza epidemic and its often-fatal respiratory complications only to succumb in early adulthood to pneumonia at that very time when the early hopefulness of his life was past and the discovery of antibiotics was not far off. Time creates in Stegner's work the gap between promise and reality, but in this story, despite its explicit introduction, time can be ignored. There are, in addition, formal benefits to reading the story in isolation, for by itself it obviates the criticism that has been leveled at The Big Rock Candy Mountain, that whatever its power, it is structurally flawed, lacking a consistent focus of interest (is it primarily about the patriarch Bo Mason or about his son Bruce, and in either case, why does the novel begin and end with the lives and deaths of Bruce's grandmother and mother, with so much of the narrative being about his mother's life?); without a consistent point of view; and deficient in the literary use of "myth, symbol, current psychology, or neo-theology" that are among the elements of a great novel. Joseph Warren Beach has asked of this novel, "what of the distinctive pleasure which one takes in a work of art?" and he continues with gentle reproach that Stegner, committed to realism, "refrains from using the 'distortions' of art, and … does not greatly command the finer tools of irony, suggestion, pathos, fancy, or intellectual abstraction, which variously serve in the masters to give esthetic point to a neutral subject."

By itself, "Chip off the Old Block" meets these objections and is a satisfying work. It has a consistent focus of both interest and point of view, Chet himself, and it employs the art of fiction to write about the impact of a plague on the developing identity of the young boy. There is no doubt that for the youth the influenza epidemic has accelerated the inexorable movement towards adult responsibility and adult consciousness. One of Chet's activities during his lonely hours is to write a story in which a young explorer encounters many dangers, among which are menacing snakes he significantly mislabels "boy constructors." From the real perils he faces, and from the narrative he invents, Chet creates his own rite of passage.

Stegner's depiction of influenza and its impact on a small western American town is accurate. For example, Chet wonders at his father's contracting flu, he being a man "who seldom got anything and was tougher than boiled owl." In fact, Chet's father is particularly ill, and it is reported to his anxious son that at one point his survival had been in doubt. That influenza hit hardest such a man, in the age group of twenty to forty, who, because he lived in a rural area isolated from the illnesses prevalent in the cities and thus had not built up many antibodies to disease, is part of the history of the 1918 pandemic. McNeill contends that when a population is depleted of persons in such an age group, its leaders and most productive workers, the community is likely to suffer a greater demoralization than when the very young or the very old suffer the highest mortality rate. Again, the age group described by McNeill corresponds to that of the soldiers likely to be lost in the war that was at that time still raging. But it is Katherine Anne Porter, not Stegner, who makes use of that coincidence.

Moreover, Stegner's story combines naturalistic detail with popular belief, such as the relationship of plague to sin (more about that shortly). Finally, "Chip off the Old Block" is almost a perfect rendering of McNeill's description of human life participating in a universal food chain in which one creature feeds off another and normal existence is capable of being expressed in images of hunting, warfare, and disease. At one point Chet affirms his ability to take care of himself while alone by reporting, "I shot rabbits all last fall for Mrs. Rieger.… She's 'nemic and has to eat rabbits and prairie chickens and stuff. She lent me the shotgun and bought the shells." And at the conclusion to the story, when the struggle between father and son reaches a boiling point, the angry but also proud parent invokes a cannibalistic figure of speech to proclaim of his son, "He'd eat me if I made a pass at him." If the generation gap is, as Stegner's critics argue, a primary theme in his fiction, then fathers themselves are macroparasites against which sons must defend themselves, and Bo Mason's imagery could extend from the universal but naturalistic food chain to the myth of Cronos, who literally swallowed his own children in order not to be symbolically swallowed by them.

Indeed, the structure of "Chip off the Old Block" persistently involves the interaction of micro- and macroparasites. Stegner draws heavily on the coincidence of World War I and the influenza epidemic: it is the war rather than the pandemic that one of his characters labels a "plague." Thus the "emancipation" of Chet's father from the "dread sickness" is writ symbolically large in the "emancipation of the entire world." Chet himself had been entrusted to "hold the fort" of the familial house, and had warded off the invasion of Louis Treat. And, of course, the father-son relationship is depicted as it often is in literature, as an archetypal battle. When Bo Mason berates Chet for wasting the whisky he had almost died to procure—"Will you please tell me why in the name of Christ you invited that Goddamned windbag and all the rest of those sponges over here to drink up my whiskey?"—Chet declines to "defend himself." "The war was over," he says, taking the offensive. "I asked them over to celebrate."

Stegner employs a biting irony when the elder Mason invokes Christ and God in proclaiming his patriarchal right of property, for this family can be read as a figure for American society, oscillating as it does between nurturing generosity (feeding) and exploitation (eating). Chet selflessly hunts animals for the woman whose anemia requires meat; he unquestioningly acts as part of the community in donating bedding to the hastily constructed infirmary; he takes the initiative in donating milk that collects and that will go sour if not used. But he also luxuriates in the increased self-esteem he enjoys after selling the supposedly medicinal whisky for even more profit than his father expected to make. What the pestilence has done is to bring into sharp relief the contradictory elements intrinsic to American life. And as Chet crosses the line from youth to adulthood, he carries with him these conflicting reactions to the plague-created crisis:

"People wanted [the whisky] for medicine," Chet said. "Should I've let them die with the flu? They came here wanting to buy it and I sold it. I thought that was what it was for."

His father articulates an older, but no less contradictory ethic that eschews price gouging: "'You didn't have any business selling anything,' he said. 'And then you overcharge people.'"

Stegner's ironic perspective on the relation of business to crisis appears reflected in one of the townspeople, Vickers, who comes to collect the bedding for the infirmary and stays to buy some whisky. As he and Chet negotiate the price of four dollars or four-fifty for a bottle, "Vickers's face was expressionless. 'Sure it isn't five? I wouldn't want to cheat you'." When Chet sets the price at four-fifty, Vickers buys twenty-seven dollars worth and asks with what is presumably both an approving and knowing laugh, "What are you going to do with that extra three dollars?" On a larger plane, the cost of things threatens to spill over into a major social problem, and one of the characters in the story recognizes that the community will be put to a test both as individuals and as a group concerning how far it is willing to go to help those left helpless by the death of the persons who were their support.

He wouldn't be surprised if the destitute and friendless were found in every home in town, adopted and cared for by friends. They might have to build an institution to house the derelict and the bereaved.

Stegner is considered a regional writer, a describer of the American West compounded of raw nature and legend, the writer invoking and at the same time debunking traditional myths. The town in which the Masons reside is no Eden, but the image of an earlier paradise is implied when the same character worries that after the epidemic, "the town would never be the same." "Chip off the Old Block" employs images of a fall and of an expulsion, both of which inform the themes involved in Chet's maturity and his defense of his own disobedience when confronting a threateningly punitive patriarch, his father. Much later, in Recapitulation, Bruce Mason contemplates the search for a new Eden:

But Paradise.… He feels that quiet back lawn of the city of his youth as a green sanctuary full of a remote peace. "Paradise is an Arab idea," he says. "Semitic, anyway. It's a garden, always a garden. They put a wall around it because that's how their minds work, they're inward-turning, not outward-turning."

"Paradise," he concludes, is, however, "safe, not exciting," like the "lawns of his youth." This nostalgia for security illuminates "Chip off the Old Block." It is out of the relative security of childhood that Chet is about to be thrust as he confronts the epidemic.

Chet, who "resolved to be a son his parents could be proud of," stands at a boundary not only between the world of children and that of adults, but also between a safety perhaps as illusory as paradise itself and adventure, symbolic of the promise that will be extinguished with his life. The boundaries that separate the ideal and the real are also those that separate nature from culture, and it is here that the story of the "boy constructor," the tale Chet writes for himself, picks up significance, for it is about the quest for a "lost city" of gold. Even Chet's title, "The Curse of the Tapajós," contains echoes of the punishment motif attached to the fall. First the young author "hunts up a promising locale" (emphasis added), which he finds in an uncivilized tributary of the Amazon. He then "created a tall, handsome young explorer and a halfbreed guide very like Louis Treat," the predator whom Chet runs out of the Mason family home with a gun. Later, when his fictional counterpart must not only dodge the snakes too "thick" (undoubtedly in both size and number) to handle, but also evade the halfbreed guide "who was constantly trying to poison the flour or stab his employer in his tent at midnight," Chet begins to wonder at his own story and to ask himself "why the explorer didn't shoot the guide." Now Chet is stymied by his own tale, whose ending he cannot yet glimpse, and intuitively he collapses predators and infectious disease into a collective vision: "And then suddenly the explorer reeled and fell, mysteriously stricken, and the halfbreed guide, smiling with sinister satisfaction, disappeared quietly into the jungle."

The explorer, Chet's persona, probably refrains from killing the half-breed because of Chet's natural identification with the menacing guide (who may also be a figure of his father). Like Caliban, Louis Treat is an image of the wild man, neither pure nature nor assimilated to culture. Chet remembers what his father had told him, that "you could trust an Indian, if he was your friend, and you could trust a white man sometimes, if money wasn't involved, and you could trust a Chink more than either, but you couldn't trust a halfbreed." In this ethnic and ethical scale is laid out the history and the paradoxes of the American scene, a scale that, in a time of plague, picks up particularly disturbing reverberations. Nature, like Indians, could be trusted if its benign face was turned toward one (as it never is in a time of pestilence); and culture, in some high form, such as that represented by China, held out at least the possibility of a social ideal. Neither nature nor culture in their pure forms match the reality of America. In another Stegner short story, "The Chink," an inhabitant of the town in which the Mason boys live, Mah Li, is from the point of view of its inhabitants as much an "other" as if he were not human, "as much outside human society as an animal would have been." The narrator, this time Bruce Mason, tells how "I loved Mah Li as I loved [a] colt, but neither was part of the life that seemed meaningful at the time."

In a disquieting fashion, Stegner reveals the parallels between the supposedly civilized white man, who sells medicine, and the half-breed who tries to steal it. Like Caliban, who uses the language Prospero has taught him only to curse his master and wish a visitation of the Red Plague upon him, Chet's half-breed guide is associated with the "curse" of the Tapajós, slinking away as the explorer-hero is mysteriously stricken with illness. Chet has difficulty fathoming his own tale and its meaning:

It was going to be hard to figure out how his hero escaped. Maybe he was just stunned, not killed. Maybe a girl could find him there, and nurse him back to health.…

Just as the expulsion from Eden is sometimes joined to the promise of a female redemptress with her heel on the neck of the deceitful serpent, so is the curse of the Tapajós and the jungle full of snakes mitigated by the healing presence of a young girl. This female function is exemplified, significantly, during the party to celebrate the end of the war, during which one of the guests makes two toasts, the first being to "those heroic laddies in khaki who looked undaunted into the eyes of death and saved this galorious empire from the rapacious Huns." It is only through aggression that men can achieve selfhood in the terms established by patriarchal culture, and at one point Chet revises his story and imagines that in the jungle there is a "beautiful and ragged girl, kept in durance vile by some tribe of pigmies or spider men or something," so that he would need to "rescue" her and "confound [her] captors." Consistent with such an image of female helplessness is the other toast, made to "those gems of purest ray serene, those unfailing companions on life's bitter pilgrimage, the ladies." The possible blurring of "laddies" and "ladies" paradoxically only serves to intensify the distinction made in the toasts.

In "Chip off the Old Block," the nurturing woman is Chet's mother, mediator between the boy and the fearsome patriarch, Bo Mason. Her role is echoed by another female character, Mrs. Chance, who in the face of Bo Mason's anger pulls her husband away from the party with a "quick pleading smile" that virtually epitomizes woman's function in the aggressively interactive world of men. But the importance of Chet's mother extends beyond the traditional parallels between the good mother archetype and the gentler side of human culture. In Stegner's story, the maternal figure also suggests an artistic ideal, although one more likely thwarted than fulfilled in time of plague. The relation of gender to the redeeming potentialities of language can only be apprehended, however, after recognizing communication itself to be one of Stegner's themes in "Chip off the Old Block."

By writing so much of what he only partially comprehends in his own story, Chet, as youthful author, represents the uncertainties of an authorial voice. In this way, Stegner may join Boccaccio and Poe in confronting the marginality of literature, Stegner perhaps formulating a new metaphor: the author as half-breed, inherently "other" in the practical world yet necessary because it is the coherence of language that bestows structure on the incoherence of events. The difficulties surrounding language become motifs woven through "Chip off the Old Block." For example, when Louis Treat faces Chet in his attempt to take the whisky away from the young boy by pretending he had been sent to fetch medicine for the community, he tries to reduce the struggle between them to one of mere language: "'-We 'ave been sent,' Louis said; 'You do not understan' w'at I mean'"—to which Chet replies, "-'I understand all right'." But Chet's composition, the story within Stegner's story, suggests that narrative can only struggle to comprehend and be comprehended. Chet will never develop sufficient self to grasp the possibilities of his own symbolic autobiography, which is probably why—to invoke Stegner's metaphors of disease—he will eventually succumb to infection. For he is a chip off the old block, and his life will end, as the passage from Recapitulation suggests, as an unfinished story.

"Chip off the Old Block" parodies the literary endeavor itself in the person of a character nicknamed Dictionary Chance because "he strung off such jaw-breaking words." He is described at one point as "voluble to the last," and it is he who takes upon himself the role of bombastic party speechmaker and who makes a defense of Chet's celebratory party when Bo Mason's son stands silent before his angry parent. A survivor of the flu himself, Chance had also brought Chet the frightening news that his father almost died as well as the reassuring news that Bo Mason did recover. Chance's connection with language points to how plague strikes at verbal communication itself, a theme that Camus insistently and profoundly explores in The Plague. Stegner, like the French author, creates a world in which surviving the influenza epidemic is as arbitrary as dying from it. That is why Dictionary Chance, whose name signifies not only a capricious universe but also the tenuous relationship of language to events, does not tell Chet his father is all right before he tells Chet that Bo Mason almost died: words can be as confused and confusing as events.

It is therefore only an added irony that Chance does not see matters this way and that there is a darker side to eloquence, for he depicts a world in which epidemics are part of some horrific moral order. Like a pompous preacher he instructs Chet to "mark [his] words" and heed his prophesy that the epidemic signals the decline of the town. Chet listens to Chance "tell [stories] about the Death Ward," but these prove to be moral exempla. On one side Chance tries to be kind to the young boy who is alone, tries to substitute as father, playing the part of good father in contrast to Bo Mason's wielding of power over his son. But all Chance really does is manipulate words for authority where the elder Mason is more likely to exploit the paternal role and the privilege he assumes with it.

Like some kind of hell-and-damnation preacher—he is described as dominating the Mason kitchen like an "evangelist"—Chance associates the pestilence with sin and punishment. Describing the horrors of the makeshift infirmary, he refers with disgust to a "hard to kill" townsman whose incontinence, the result of his illness, necessitated that his bed be cleaned six times a day.

"I hesitate to say before the young what went on in that ward. Shameful, even though the man was sick." His tongue ticked against his teeth, and his eyebrows raised at Chet. "They cleaned his bed six times a day," he said, and pressed his lips together. "It makes a man wonder about God's wisdom," he said. "A man like that, his morals are as loose as his bowels."

Stegner's imagery involves not only language but also the mechanics of articulation as well as the gap between the mouth that moves and the silence that is always, in this story, ominous. Chet writes his story with "his lips together in connection"; he "gnawed his pencil" as a sign of his struggling over his tale of the Tapajós. Chance's tongue ticks against his teeth and he presses his lips together in a sign of moral disapproval when he describes the incontinent influenza patient. There is a distinction drawn between the party guests who imbibed Bo Mason's whisky and "smacked their lips" in noisy pleasure, and the "moment of complete silence" that follows Bo's return home and his obvious displeasure.

Although Chance's wife, elsewhere described as "incoherent" and portrayed at one point as crying "every time she spoke," protests against her husband's harsh view of the ill man, Chance wagers "that a man as loose and discombobulated as that doesn't live through this epidemic." It is telling that Chance's so-called eloquence should always hover on the verge of becoming a kind of verbal diarrhea: Bo Mason contemptuously dismisses him as a "windbag." At the same time, it is Chance whose dissonant volubility expresses the ambivalence of his community. He links the influenza epidemic, the "terrors of the plague," with the "dread plague of war," but it is only the former that he views in terms of a moral and social decline. As influenza attacks his microcosmic world, he envisions his town as irrevocably changed by the epidemic, a fallen place. His choice of words suggests equivocality: he "wouldn't be surprised" if the destitute were found in every home; the town "might" have to build institutions to house them. Bo Mason may be correct in repudiating Chance's verbiage, but his dismissal picks up disturbing intimations if it can be read as applicable to the narrative voice itself.

Having created a youthful persona whose use of language falls short of what in any event he can only imperfectly comprehend, a patriarch who almost deliberately surrounds himself with his family's silence, and a parody of the writer who distorts language because his own vision is sometimes clear and sometimes twisted, Stegner is hard pressed to create a model character who can uphold language, and—by extension—literature. In the end, he may have taken recourse to a device used by many male writers who wish to create a fictional perspective that is both within and outside the dominant society: he creates a symbol for literature out of the female voice.

At the beginning of "Chip off the Old Block," Chet has received his father's instructions, expressed negatively in terms of what his son should not do, as well as his mother's "words," a "solemn burden on his mind." Mrs. Mason is more than mother: she stands as a verbal intermediary between father and son, concerned to explain the husband who "didn't understand" his son and who in any event will not "admit he was wrong." As mediator, she hopes to close the gap that separates father from son. But the mother who can use language to break through silence must remain subordinate to the husband she must interpret and in effect give shape to. In contrast to Mrs. Chance's wordless tears, language is available to Chet's mother but the only time when she is named in the story she is called "Sis," a diminutive that reduces the matriarch to the role of another child. Ultimately, the only real metaphors available to the redemptive female are those of a man's world. It is his mother who metaphorically draws on a world of aggressors when she tells Chet to "hold the fort" while the family struggles with influenza.

"Chip off the Old Block," like its miniature analogue "The Curse of the Tapajós," ends inconclusively. Chet's parents are proud of him, but the tensions within the family are as unresolved as the fate of Chet's imagined hero-explorer; no one can see the direction of his or her personal narrative. In the end, Chet's experience with plague is that of an author for whom plot and language remain uncertain in a world embroiled in a persistent struggle to ward off micro- and macroparasites.

According to Crosby, Pale Horse, Pale Rider lacks attention outside of literature courses because "it is about a person undergoing a traumatic experience as the result of something most people do not recognize as having been of much importance: the 1918 pandemic of Spanish influenza." When the novella begins, Miranda experiences the first symptoms of flu; at the end, she emerges transformed as a person from a long bout with the illness. In between, as her headaches increase and she becomes convinced that something terrible and perhaps fatal is about to befall her, her increasingly tenuous connection to external reality brings into sharp relief her struggle for other kinds of survival. But even those likely to teach Porter's novella do not appear to view Miranda's illness as critical to a reading of it. Usually the disease is treated as but a metaphor: the "influenza epidemic is also, of course, the physical counterpart of the illness of society at war." As is true of Stegner's story, however, it is the coexistence of micro- and macroparsites that lends Pale Horse, Pale Rider its thematic intricacy and depth.

The structure of Pale Horse, Pale Rider can be described in two ways, one of them having to do with the external events surrounding Miranda's fight with influenza, the other with a series of dreams and visions, among them what Porter later described as the "Beatific Vision, the strange rapture that occurs, and maybe more often than we can ever know, just before death," a religious concept that has strong psychological significance for Miranda's attempt to achieve personal identity in the face of threats to her body and to her striving to maintain individuality. Miranda's delirium during the flu allows the reader the sense of experiencing a character's struggle for self-hood from within that place where the struggle is actually taking place, the unconscious. The perspectives of "Chip off the Old Block" and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, that is, are quite different. Stegner's young Chet projects his developing self onto the narrative he invents of the young explorer who falls stricken with a mysterious disease in a jungle he cannot imagine his way out of. Miranda's self remains internalized, persistently subjective. She too has visions of a jungle, a "writhing terribly alive and secret place of death," and part of the ambiguity surrounding her recovery from influenza, her sense that in being alive she had been "condemned" to the "dull world" whose efforts "to set her once more safely in the road … would [only] lead her again to death," has to do with whether she too is trapped in her symbolic jungle.

Miranda is a young journalist who with a female coworker named Towney (she writes the town gossip column) had once suppressed a story about a scandalous elopement in order to protect the reputation of a young woman and her family. When another paper was therefore able to scoop the story, Miranda was demoted from reporter to theater reviewer. Even her profession, that is, can be conceived of in terms of hostile invasions of people against others: the young woman who had attempted a flight to freedom is described as "recaptured." Miranda's unwillingness to participate in this mutual aggression makes her susceptible to attack: her illness is both real and historically based in the 1918 pandemic but also a sign of her alienation in her world. The very place in which she lives, an impersonal rooming house, can hardly be called home, nor can it promise another home to be shared with Adam, the young soldier who takes up a brief occupancy there until he is sent overseas to serve with the ground troops, his coming back a "returned hero" unlikely. Despite this unfriendly place in which they meet, however, Miranda and Adam try to escape the real world for the brief few days in which she pretends to hope. But it is difficult to maintain her illusions: "' I don't want to love,' she would think in spite of herself, 'not Adam, there is no time and we are not ready for it and yet this is all we have'." Their situation is glossed by Camus's The Plague, in which the narrator relates how "plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty" of love, "since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments." But even such precious moments are cut short when Miranda collapses with flu. It is Adam who nurses her through the night before she enters the hospital, perhaps contracting the illness in that time, for it is he who dies—not of war, but influenza. Miranda must face a life without her Ferdinand, not in the brave new world of Shakespeare's heroine, but in what she perceives to be a "world" in which there is "too much of everything" threatening and hostile. Wanting only to sit down and die, she can be contrasted with Miranda of The Tempest, and perhaps for this reason it is significant that she also wants to lose her memory and "forget [her] own name."

An important feature of Pale Horse, Pale Rider that sets it apart from other works of plague literature is that it is written by a woman about a woman. Miranda must not only establish her individual self in a world resistant to its development but also affirm a female identity. Gender plays an obviously important thematic part in the story, war particularly differentiating male and female roles. One of the characters, Miranda's coworker Chuck, is particularly important in this sense. His own lung disease disqualifies him for battle, a matter about which he is particularly defensive. It is he who vehemently protests against what he views as the feminization of war:

"It was Florence Nightingale ruined wars.… What's the idea of petting soldiers and binding up their wounds and soothing their fevered brows? That's not war. Let 'em perish where they fall. That's what they're there for."

At the same time, from the male-dominated view of his own culture, Chuck exhibits sex role confusion. Miranda is demoted from reporter to a "routine female" job when she is made theater critic, the very position Chuck wants. And although he maintains a hard attitude toward a war he cannot fight in, in his own personal war with an alcoholic father, Chuck evidences the same kind of softness that had led Miranda to suppress the story of the elopement.

Meanwhile, Miranda's reluctant contribution to the war effort involves participation in areas filled with woman's work, such as rolling bandages, knitting socks and sweaters for the troops, visiting the wounded in hospitals, or attending social events in which, for example, women dance with lonely soldiers and generally provide companionship for them. When Towney is found knitting a rose-colored garment, Miranda asks her what soldier would be the recipient of this gift with such a sprightly (and, implicitly, decidedly feminine) color, to which Towney replies, "Like hell.… I'm making this for myself." In general, however, Towney does not allow this minor rebellion to interfere with her doing what was expected of a woman during the war. In contrast, Miranda's resistance presages a conflict with Adam had they ever had the time for their relationship to develop. Several examples could be cited, but one telling one should make the point clear. Adam knows very well that Miranda does not easily wear woman's role:

"I can see you knitting socks," he said. "That would be just your speed. You know perfectly well you can't knit."

"I do worse," she said, soberly; "I write pieces advising other young women to knit and roll bandages and do without sugar and help win the war."

"Oh, well," said Adam, with the easy masculine morals in such questions, "that's merely your job, that doesn't count." (italics added)

The final ambiguity is hardly accidental. What does not count? That Miranda urges other women to knit rather than knitting herself, or her job, her source of her meager income but, nonetheless, her independence?

Miranda has been held to be typical of Porter's female protagonists in illustrating

a basic psychological conflict … [between] a desire, on the one hand, for the independence and freedom to pursue art or principle regardless of social convention, and, on the other, a desire for the love and security inherent in the traditional roles of wife and mother.

Adam's death from influenza not only deprives Miranda of his love and the possibility of fulfilling such traditional roles, but it also, and perhaps more significantly, thwarts Miranda's ability to work through her ambivalence.

In an important letter, Porter responded to an essay about her work she professes to have loved but whose basic tenet she attacks thoroughly, rejecting both Freud himself and any Freudian theory (such as female penis envy) that would result in the idea that what Miranda wants in Pale Horse, Pale Rider is to be a man. It is, writes Porter,

almost impossible for any woman to convince any man that this is false.… What [women] really want, I think, is not a change of sex, but a change of the limited conditions of their lives which have been imposed because of their sexual function.… A woman who knows how to be a woman not only needs and must have an active force of character and mind, but she has invariably, I have never known it to fail, an intense self-respect, precisely for herself her attributes and functions as a female.… What she wants is the right really to be a woman, and not a kind of image doing and saying what she is expected to say by a man who is only afraid of one thing from her—that one day she will forget and tell him the truth!

Porter continues with a point quite significant for a reading of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, because it suggests that Adam's nursing of Miranda through their last night together may be the only ministering to her needs that he could ever really be capable of, his concern for her body's health, however tender, being another manifestation of the sexual desire that draws him to her. To provide in addition any essential support for her attempts to establish an autonomous female identity would require a transcendence of gender conflicts he could never achieve. Porter writes in the same letter,

I know that when a woman loves a man, she builds him up and supports him and helps him in every possible way to live.… I never knew a man who loved a woman enough for this. He cannot help it, it is his deepest instinct to destroy, quite often subtly, insidiously, but constantly and endlessly, her very center of being, her confidence in herself as woman.

One of the poignant aspects of Pale Horse, Pale Rider is that Adam and Miranda seek to know each other during their brief time together. Again, a tender and caring person, Adam is nonetheless stereotypically masculine. He wants to be an engineer and does not read much beyond engineering textbooks. He loves driving his roadster very fast and sailing a boat. He would have preferred to be a pilot than part of the ground troops, but he had given in to his mother's hysterical fear, she, implicitly typical of a woman, not realizing that flying is safer than what he is fated to do.

During his talking about himself, "Miranda knew he was trying to tell her what kind of person he was when he had his machinery with him. She felt she knew pretty well what kind of person he was." But when he says he wants to know about her, her answer is significantly vague: "There's nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came. So now it's nothing much." They are "two persons named Adam and Miranda," but he knows far better than she who he is. Her identity is less clear to her precisely because she is a woman. And when, during an "instant that was a lifetime," she is struck by "the certain, the overwhelming and awful knowledge that there was nothing at all ahead for Adam and for her," the insight may go beyond the war and the plague of influenza. In a work of fiction whose essential theme is survival, what is at risk for Miranda is that in any permanent union with Adam, she could not preserve a hard-won female identity.

It is survival itself that creates a thematic conjunction out of the historical coincidence of World War I and the influenza pandemic, both of which were conflated in the popular imagination. Plagues are often blamed by some people on others, who become scapegoats, as the Black Death was attributed to Jews who poisoned drinking water, or AIDS to female poisoners or white scientists committing genocide against black people. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, influenza is discussed as an instance of germ warfare by the Germans against the Americans, the conversations betraying an insularity that ignores the prevalence of the illness throughout the world. The reportage is evocative of Defoe's account in his Journal of the kind of ignorant superstition the poor in particular were prone to. In Porter's work, a more sophisticated class becomes the carrier of rumors:

"They say," said Towney, "that it is really caused by germs brought by a German ship to Boston, a camouflaged ship, naturally, it didn't come in under its own colors." (italics added)

At first she pretends to think the report "ridiculous," but as she continues, the space between herself and the "they" whose beliefs she is reporting narrows:

"They think the germs were sprayed over the city—it started in Boston, you know—and somebody reported seeing a strange, thick, greasy-looking cloud float up out of Boston Harbor and spread slowly all over that end of town. I think it was an old woman who saw it."

Miranda also absorbs the local folklore, for she too has merged in her conscious mind the plagues of war and influenza, tracing the start of her bad headache to the beginning of the war. Her doctor has a German-sounding name, Hildesheim, and while she is delirious in the hospital, the physician becomes transformed in her vision into a killer, "his face a skull beneath his German helmet, carrying a naked infant writhing on the point of his bayonet, and a huge stone pot marked Poison in Gothic letters." But for Miranda, the confrontation with an enemy other is also an extension of a widespread indifference shown by people to each other, fear of contagion during plague thus being merely a literalization of a prevalent human alienation. When Adam returns Miranda to her room after an evening together, she is surprised that he watches her up the stairs:

Miranda hardly ever saw anyone look back after he had said good-by. She could not help turning sometimes for one glimpse more of the person she had been talking with, as if that would save too rude and too sudden a snapping of even the lightest bond. But people hurried away, their faces already changed, fixed, in their straining towards their next stopping place, already absorbed in planning their next act or encounter.

It is only an additional irony that Miranda's focal point for a generalized social paranoia, Dr. Hildesheim, should be the one to preserve the life about which she is so ambivalent but which she cannot give up. Miranda's drive for physical survival is portrayed at the beginning of the story in the first of her visionary experiences—this one in a dream. It is here that she appears as the rider on a pale horse engaged in a race against another rider—death—that she is determined to win: "I'm not going with you this time—ride on!" When she thinks of the miracle of meeting Adam, it is in terms of their being "alive and on the earth at the same moment." The two of them engage in conversation about their health, for example the dangers of smoking, and Miranda is filled with wonder that despite the perils of war he faces in just a few days, he "looked so clear and fresh, and he had never had a pain in his life," not knowing, of course, that this is precisely the profile of the person attacked most violently by the influenza. In contrast, she, whose way of life involved "unnatural hours, eating casually at dirty little restaurants, drinking bad coffee all night, and smoking too much," strives successfully during her illness "to keep her small hold on the life of human beings … no matter what," to the point that she cannot submit to her beatific vision of pure being, instead living to join the "dead and withered things that believed themselves alive."

But the struggle merely to exist goes beyond Miranda's health, for her entire life is engaged

in a continual effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a series of feats of sleight of hand.

At one point she asks Adam, "Don't you love being alive?" But there is something hysterical in the question, because for Miranda, being alive is to engage in the unremitting effort to remain fit enough to live, the "disturbing oppositions" in her life being not only the conflict between herself and her environment but also the conflict between her instinct for survival and a very pronounced death wish. Part of Miranda's struggle has to do with her resistance to the forms of society, supposedly constructed to insure individual survival but inevitably antithetical to the self s endeavor to preserve itself.

That is, the social contract is as thematically important to Pale Horse, Pale Rider as it is to Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year. In theory, the contract is an antithesis to chaos and a reference point for civic duty, which is itself a possible antidote to a person's alienating fear of others in the world. In times of plague—as has already been argued—the tensions in the social contract emerge to disclose the separateness of human beings, fear of contagion—again—literalizing an essential antipathy toward others, or, at best, a drive toward self-preservation that under stress alienates even well-meaning individuals. But whereas works such as Defoe's Journal affirm the viability of the social contract, Pale Horse, Pale Rider looks at it from the opposite point of view. The collective itself becomes a macroparasite against which the individual needs protection. It is interesting in this regard to note David Richter's suggestion that the name of Miranda's "respectable and suspicious" landlady is Miss Hobbe, for in this work in which names are so important, the landlady's name

recalls that of the seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who postulated that man originally inhabited no peaceful Eden, but a land of perpetual warfare, where every man's hand was against every man, and where life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Richter's suggestion reinforces the parallels between Miss Hobbe's rooming house and the state whose preservation was the point of the Hobbesian conception of the social contract. For although the good of the individual is inferred by the agreement people enter into for mutual protection, individual needs rarely prevail. When, for example, Miranda asks for better curtains than the thin ones that do not adequately keep the light out of her room in the morning, she is promised new ones that do not, however, appear. And when Miss Hobbe learns that Miranda has influenza, she orders the ill woman back to bed immediately, not for Miranda's good but for the protection of herself and her other tenants. She is determined that Miranda be sent to the hospital without delay, and protests,

I tell you, they must come for her now, or I'll put her on the sidewalk… I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I've got a houseful of people to think about!

That Miss Hobbe's house cannot support itself, that is, "was not paying," may symbolize the precariousness of the state based on the social contract, whose initial premise is the war of all against all. Only the force of punishment (a symbolic as well as real eviction) can guarantee the conformity of a person to the requirements of the group and preserve the abstract whole.

In Miranda's delirious vision, the hospital becomes a place to which criminals are sent, the plague a crime rather than the traditional punishment for one, and the health care workers "executioners" in league with death itself. The old man in the next bed who dies of influenza appears to her a pitiable criminal being dragged away protesting that the "crime of which he was accused did not merit the punishment he was about to receive." In her delirium, Miranda conflates original sin, the fruits of which are plague and death, with the unknown sin of the individual against an order from which the person is essentially alienated. As the "executioners" advance, the

soiled cracked bowls of the old man's hands were held before him beseechingly as a beggar's as he said, "Before God I am not guilty," but they held his arms and drew him onward, passed, and were gone.

Miranda and Towney are very conscious of punishments meted out in a world in which individual initiative is discouraged. When they had suppressed the news story of the elopement (a symbol of personal choice whose punishment was to be public scandal), they had been virtually court-martialed, their ranks broken. Having "taken their punishment together, [they] had been degraded publicly to routine female jobs." This juxtaposition of punishment and gender creates an added level to the conflict between individual and society, here disclosed as a confrontation between the female condemned and the patriarchal sentencer. Miranda, as already noted, comes out of her bout with influenza to think of herself as "condemned" to live.

The male representatives of the persecuting and prosecuting state are both insignificant and powerfully insidious— the Liberty Bond salesmen. Miranda's fear is that she will be punished for her failure to buy one. Richter has pointed out that "the name of the bond is an irony Porter did not have to invent." In terms of a social contract, there is additional irony attached to the word bond (which Porter later uses to describe the weak relationship Miranda has to the men who return her after a date to her rooming house). The war against Germany presumably represents a solely external threat, the war bond drive the intended mutual cooperation of American citizens to win that war. Instead, those in charge of selling bonds engage in internal warfare, become the aggressors, another group of invading macroparasites against which Miranda feels as helpless as against war and influenza. The man who issues unspecified threats if she does not purchase a bond is an apt candidate for Hobbes's nasty and brutish human being, an enemy attacker or criminal in the war against his own kind: he had a stony stare, "really viciously cold, the kind of thing you might expect to meet behind a pistol in a deserted corner." Miranda and he face each other as enemies, one of them trying in self-protection to avoid the inevitable confrontation. "Usually she did not notice [him and his partner] at all until their determination to be seen was greater than her determination not to see them." It is only a sardonic feature of this symbolic military engagement that her antagonists invoke the common struggle in which supposedly they are all embattled as part of their attack: "We're having a war, and some people are buying Liberty Bonds and others just don't seem to get around to it." Miranda remains "desperately silent," trying to decide on some tactical defense, her words to herself creating an ambiguity about just which battle she is contemplating:

[Miranda] thought, "Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war?"

The entire world of Pale Horse, Pale Rider seems made up of macroparasites. Miranda thinks about the invasion of her private territory at work: "reminded of the way all sorts of persons sat upon her desk at the newspaper office," she wonders "why won't they sit in the chair?" Her job as theater reviewer breaks out as another kind of war, one in which she is both aggressor and attacked. Her reviews of performers are, she realizes, an assault not only on their performances but also on their selves, and she wishes they did not care what she thought. It is when she understands how badly she has hurt someone with a review that she decides, in a weary gesture of identification, that she wishes to die. The object of her review, in turn, says he is "going to take the goof who wrote that piece up the alley and bop him in the nose." When he actually threatens physical violence, he is driven off by Miranda's friends as if repulsed in battle, but not until his own bellicosity is revealed. A seeming antithesis to this pitiable figure turns out to be as pathetic but also insidiously macroparasitic. This is Chuck's alcoholic father, who "beamed upon [his son] with the blearied eye of paternal affection while he took his last nickel." Porter's story shares with Stegner's the image of the universal food chain, as Miranda describes another bond salesman: "Just another nasty old man who would like to see the young ones killed; … the tom-cats try to eat the little tom-kittens, you know." In such a world only survival counts. It is because Chuck cannot fight the war and therefore need not live through it (although, ironically, he has to worry about his lung disease) that it ceases to mean anything to him: "I don't care how [the war] started or when it ends.… I'm not going to be there."

But among the different kinds of survival dealt with in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, survival of the individual self prevails as that under which all other survivals are subsumed. That Porter is portraying Miranda's striving toward selfhood is a point about which most Porter critics agree. Robert Penn Warren contends that there is in the story a "paradoxical problem of definition," a "delicate balancing of rival considerations." Philip Yannella has given Miranda's conflicts an historical context, noting that 1918 was a "crucial year in the history of modern selfhood" and that Porter's novella makes some "acute observations about the attrition of nineteenth-century definitions of selfhood, the development of the twentieth-century self, and the failure of the twentieth-century self to establish suitable patterns of behavior." Thus, according to Thomas Walsh, influenza does not so much cause Miranda's despair as bring "to the surface" what already "lay submerged in her character." The specific rooting of Miranda's problem in her southern origins is added by James Johnson, who says that in Porter's fiction is found the theme of the "individual within [her] heritage." Related themes are cultural displacement and, finally, a slavery to nature and "subjugation to a human fate" that dooms a Porter character to "suffering and disappointment."

But the quest for self in Pale Horse, Pale Rider exists as a theme very much as Miranda herself exists, on "multiple planes" of being. But "planes" is perhaps inadequate to Porter's own purposes as Miranda experiences "tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them." Her predicament is more complex than such an image suggests, involving paradoxes whose elements are difficult to separate. As Richter points out, for Miranda "to summon the will to live that will enable her to survive her illness, she must detach herself from all the values that have given her life meaning and, though she ultimately survives, she pays a price that may not be worth the empty life she regains." Miranda is transformed from a potentially loving young woman to one who subsists on her own indifference. What can be inferred from Richter's argument is that Pale Horse, Pale Rider addresses the difficult philosophical issue of just what survives in survival. The novella, that is, raises the body-mind problem. Porter is not, of course, a systematic philosopher, and the problem is depicted not through logical analysis but through the images and visions that make up Miranda's conscious and unconscious responses to both body and mind.

One result of Miranda's illness is that it allows her out-of-body experiences. While she lies ill in the rooming house, she has one of her visions, imagining herself sailing into a jungle that—it has already been noted—represents death. The jungle probably also represents her unconscious, in which unformulated terrors and her persistently resisted death wish are revealed. The language of her vision includes words and phrases such as "screaming," "bellow of voices all crying together," "a writhing terribly alive and secret place of death," "danger, danger, danger," and "war, war, war." Miranda's reaction is not to recoil, however, but eagerly to meet these dangers, and in a moment of dissociation one part of her observes the other:

Without surprise, watching from her pillow, she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed, and the slender ship spread its wings and sailed away into the jungle.

Later, in the hospital, Miranda experiences a more intense form of dissociation, the struggle between a death instinct and the will to survive described in an image of fission:

Her mind, split in two, acknowledged and denied what she saw in the one instant, for across an abyss of complaining darkness her reasoning coherent self watched the strange frenzy of the other coldly, reluctant to admit the truth of its visions, its tenacious remorses and despairs.

It is at this point that she approaches what Porter was to call her beatific vision, which Miranda responds to "with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it." What she envisions are "pure identities," without material bodies (although, of course, Porter must use the language of bodies to describe them) and without the conflicts that can result in a mind that "split in two."

Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew them every one without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them.

The Miranda thinks she knows them is susceptible to several explanations, but clearly they correspond to very deep wishes on her part to be free of the "disturbing oppositions" that engage her in her unremitting struggle merely to exist. That her visions are "pure identities" means of course that they are free of personal identity, for it is the survival of her individual self that causes Miranda the most difficulty. What Georges Rey says in his essay "Survival" supplies an interesting commentary on Pale Horse, Pale Rider, supplying it with the philosophical context it evokes. Rey writes that the "possibility of an entirely disembodied, yet still somehow personal, existence seems simply capricious: idle 'image mongery."'

We are led, then, both by the presuppositions and by the failure of a purely psychological criterion, to our bodies. We were really led there already by considerations of the causal basis of our survival at a given time.… We might have been led there independently by even a casual inspection of the notion of a person: whatever the details, such creatures consist at least of a complex of capacities, abilities, dispositions; and, as such, as many writers have rightly insisted, they cannot float about somehow unanchored in space and time.

And, indeed, through the ministering of doctors and nurses as well as through the tenacity of her own will, Miranda comes out of her ecstasy and, as John Donne's famous poem describes the ecstatic out-of-body experience, descends to her body.

The body supplies Pale Horse, Pale Rider with much of its imagery, for Porter is always specific about the concrete details of her characters' physical existence in their environment. Miranda's conflict is as immaterial as the mind itself, but her emotional withdrawal from a hopeful commitment to her world is described in specifically physical terms: "her hardened, indifferent heart shuddered in despair at itself, because before it had been tender and capable of love." Earlier her body had been foreign to her. She had even asked herself, "Do I even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my modesty?" Adam's very health causes her to think of his body as a monster, an image she also evokes for herself, but from a different emotional perspective, Miranda being estranged from her body whereas Adam is comfortable in his. In the hospital, Miranda experiences not relief but entrapment when she recovers from influenza, thinking how

The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there? Is it possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? … Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself.

For Adam, it is the body that is tantamount to personal identity. When Miranda, who is profoundly depressed by the war, tells him that it is what war "does to the mind and the heart" that is so awful, adding, "you can't separate these two—what it does to them is worse than what it can do to the body," Adam pragmatically replies, "The mind and the heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it's just out of luck, that's all." Richter points out that the tragic ending to Pale Horse, Pale Rider rests on the irony that "contrary to what Adam thinks, the body may well 'get another chance,' but the heart and mind, once altered, are changed forever." This is perhaps another way to say that for Adam philosophical issues of personal identity are not important, whereas for Miranda they had been critical. She has, in short, resolved the problem of survival by, in the end, adopting Adam's view and abandoning the quest for self-definition. The body that was once alien to her because she sought an identity that was more than it alone could supply is now all she has—or wants.

Richter's argument that Miranda summons the will to survive at the expense of the values she had lived by—that is, in effect, by abandoning that self that is more than just body—touches on another plane of meaning in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The story is illuminated by a concept of selfhood that comes from self psychologist Douglas Detrick, who parallels the tension between the individual and the group with the historical evolution of the unconscious:

I believe that until the modern era, the archetypal collective unconscious organization was more or less adequate for humans both in the cultural and personal domain. However, this organization was slowly undermined over the last two millennia by the expansion of the personal unconscious.

Among the forces that Miranda must ward off to preserve her personal identity are the archetypes that make up her heritage. According to Robert Penn Warren, Miranda's final insights become her personal myth, and she "must live by her own myth. But she must earn her myth in the process of living." Such a reading may, however, be too optimistic, for the dual plagues of war and influenza may indicate that in her culture, Miranda must learn to live without myths.

If, as Thomas Loe contends, Miranda's visionary experiences involve a symbolic "journey of initiation, necessarily internal," then Miranda is on an archetypal quest to free herself of archetypes. The very opening of the story reveals the tension between the constraints of a heritage and the striving of the individual. In Miranda's first dream, a sign of the onset of influenza, she "knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in" earlier. She was in a "room she had known somewhere," and she feels the need to get up, to leave while some unknown they "are all quiet." But she cannot at first find her (again, vaguely described) "things," that which is hers alone: "Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like." An ambivalent fondness for and rejection of those who crowd upon her, her past and still too much a part of her present, become mixed up with images of death and survival, illustrating Detrick's concept of a struggle between the archetypal and personal unconscious:

Faces will beam, asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? … How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines. Too many people have been born here, and have wept too much here, and have laughed too much, and have been too angry and outrageous with each other here. Too many have died in this bed already, there are far too many ancestral bones propped up on the mantelpieces, there have been too damned many antimacassars in this house, she said loudly,

and oh, what accumulation of storied dust never allowed to settle in peace for one moment.

The passage seems almost an extension of sections in Old Mortality in which Miranda, who had when too young entered into an unfortunate marriage (this is not mentioned in Pale Horse, Pale Rider), visits her southern home:

"Ah, the family," [her cousin Eva] said, releasing her breath and sitting back quietly, "the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth. It is the root of all human wrongs." … [Miranda] felt a vague distaste for seeing cousins. She did not want any more ties with this house, she was going to leave it, and she was not going back to her husband's family either.… She knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place with anyone that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said "No" to her.

And yet Miranda asks in Pale Horse, Pale Rider about that which anchors her in a concrete world of familiar realities her grandfather, great-aunt, cousins, a decrepit hound, and silver kitten "What else besides them did I have in the world?" When she thinks she is going to die, she wonders if she should go home: "It's a respectable old custom to inflict your death on the family if you can manage it."

One way to define the conflict in Miranda's relationship with Adam is to realize that he represents a series of archetypes, whereas she struggles to free herself of the archaic organization of her world. They are, as earlier noted, two persons named Adam and Miranda. As Adam's name suggests, he is the first man, an original (Richter points out the significance of his surname, barclay). Like Adam in Genesis, Adam Barclay is doomed to fall, "not for any woman, being beyond experience already, committed without any knowledge or act to his own death." He is also archetypally American, a Protestant (Miranda is Catholic), as well as a model for the American soldier. "He was wearing his new uniform [which is custom made to fit him exactly], and he was all olive and tan and tawny, hay colored and sand colored from hair to boots." Stereotypically masculine, he is one of those concerned that wearing a wristwatch (as soldiers had to) would make him a sissy. But he is also a figure of the saintly martyr, and in one of Miranda's visions, they are both shot through with arrows of death, he perishing while she is cheated of this release. Perceived by Miranda to be pure, "all the way through, flawless, complete, as the sacrificial lamb must be," he represents all the soldiers that were to die at the front. And only a few words later, she hopes they "don't come to a mud puddle," for he will carry her over it like the archetypical courtier.

Not that Adam wears his archetypes comfortably. He is described as "infinitely buttoned, strapped, harnessed into a uniform as tough and unyielding in cut as a strait jacket." But then, that is the point about past heritages: in their repressiveness they are never easy to bear. But only Miranda seems to know this. Her very name—borrowed from Shakespeare—promises her release from the burden of her past, represented in part by cousins named Eva and Maria. In these names, of course, are the most basic Western archetypes of woman, the temptress and the redemptress, the one causing the fall, the other the archetype of the good mother who redeems the world after the sin of her counterpart. But Shakespeare had created in The Tempest not only the possibility of a brave new world but also a woman free of the archetypal dichotomies implied by Eve and Mary: Miranda, innocent and uncorrupted to the end. To repeat a passage already quoted, it is when Porter's Miranda can no longer bear the world she lives in and wants only to sit down and die that she despairingly says, "I wish I could lose my memory and forget my own name." Shakespeare's Miranda will remain free of Caliban and the Red Plague with which he curses her father; Porter's Miranda will succumb to pestilence. When she emerges from her physical crisis, there will be no "more war, no more plague" but also, in the most profound sense, no more Miranda.

It is therefore quite significant that it is Towney who comes to the hospital when Miranda is ready to be released, and that at this point Porter's reader is reminded of Towney's real name, Mary Townsend. And it is as Mary that Miranda addresses her, longing for some spiritual anchor in the world that she can no longer provide for herself: "Do you suppose, Mary … I could have my old room back again?" Mary reassures her that her possessions had been stored with Miss Hobbe, a symbolic confirmation that Miranda has given up striving for individuation. And when the nurse informs her that the taxi that will take her away from the hospital is waiting, "there was Mary. Ready to go."

Interpretations of the conclusion to Pale Horse, Pale Rider vary from the extremely pessimistic, to the neutral or mildly hopeful, to the affirmation of Miranda's spiritual rebirth. The story does end with a validation of Eudora Welty's conviction that time is the critical theme in Porter's fiction: the last sentence reads, "Now there would be time for everything"—even, supposedly, time for Miranda to begin again to recreate her self, although Porter critics frequently point out that Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the last of the author's Miranda stories. But, in fact, time did play an important part in this piece of fiction that has its roots in Porter's own struggle to survive influenza during the pandemic of 1918. For after almost twenty years, Porter turned her bout with an almost fatal illness into the work considered her masterpiece. Interestingly enough, she writes in a letter to Robert Penn Warren that she is searching for another title; but the title she retained after obvious contemplation may supply Pale Horse, Pale Rider with its most obvious hopefulness.

On the night before she enters the hospital, Miranda tells Adam she knows "an old spiritual," which she begins to recite: "Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away." He responds that he had heard it sung by the black workers in Texas oil fields, and reminds her that there are "about forty verses, the rider done taken away mammy, pappy, brother, sister, the whole family besides the lover." Miranda corrects him:

"But not the singer, not yet," said Miranda. "Death always leaves one singer to mourn. 'Death,'" she sang, "'oh, leave one singer to mourn—.'

This image of an enduring art that in its own way recreates the world can be found in Old Mortality, in which Miranda and her cousin Maria attend concerts and theaters to discover that there

was then a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next; such episodes confirmed for the little girls the nobility of human feeling, the divinity of man's vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death, the depths of the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy.

There are correspondence between this passage and Porter's description of a transcendent beatific vision. And while there is nothing romantic about influenza in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, there is in it an expression of the romantic value of tragedy, the word tragedy itself inferring not only a catastrophic event but also its rendering through an artistic genre. Like the monument to the surviving singer in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," that is, the spiritual itself, Porter's novella is a testament to that which can survive even plague, that for which there might always be time, perhaps even enduring through time—the literature of plague.