Like so much American writing—particularly Southern writing—Katherine Anne Porter's stories of the Old South ("The Old Order" series and "Old Mortality") based on her family past in antebellum Kentucky and Texas during the Reconstruction Era offer a statement about the past and its impact on the present. At the same time, these stories provide a way of approaching Porter as a woman writer. Like Faulkner—also writing about the Southern past in the mid-1930's—Porter takes as her subject the artificiality and inhumanity of the Old Order, presenting it from the standpoint of the woman's experience. While Faulkner emphasizes slavery and racial injustice, Porter takes as her subject the rigidly circumscribed experience and sexual repression of the white Southern woman—kept like the blacks in submission and fear by the doctrines, taboos and social realities of a paternalistic culture.

This theme is not restricted to Porter's stories of her native South. The theme of woman's oppression, especially emotional and sexual inhibition, may be found in everything she wrote. A feminist critical stance is a primary element in her view of American society—a view confirmed by her experience as an expatriate living in Mexico during the 1920's. Compared with the vividness of Mexican life, particularly the simplicity and spontaneity of the Mexican Indians, American culture seemed emotionally impoverished, narrowminded and dishonest. The damage to women in such a society appeared even more obvious to her. During this period Porter frequently attacked the "puritanism" of American culture, joining in with other critics of the twenties, and along this line she began a fictional biography of Cotton Mather which portrayed him as a sanctimonious hypocrite whose wife suffered martyrdom under his tyranny—jointly condemning self-serving Puritan piety and male-dominated marriage. (pp. 48-9)

Woman's emotional frustration, sexual repression and subjection to the laws of a man's world constitute a major theme in Katherine Anne Porter's fiction. Female characters, who predominate in her work, are typically damaged by their experience. Family ties, marriage and love are threats to freedom; those women who attempt to escape are usually thwarted; and even those who gain independence achieve it at great cost. For many of Porter's heroines, like those of "Flowering Judas," "Theft," and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, escape takes the form of inner withdrawal from life. Although she has long maintained an enigmatic silence about herself, the insistence with which Porter returns to the themes of female entrapment and resistance, the damage of sexual inhibition and the failure of love in the lives of women, tempts one to speculate about the personal statement embedded in her work. Her autobiographical stories may provide us with some clues.

The stories of the Old South are central to Porter's oeuvre, illuminating the fiction leading up to them and following them. They are unusual in several ways: they are openly autobiographical; though written over the span of a decade, they fall into a pattern, being united around the heroine and called the "Miranda stories" (together with Pale Horse, Pale Rider); they present a wide variety of characters illustrating the kinds of feminine models Porter grew up with, thus providing insight into her ideas about herself and woman's role in society.

These stories make it clear that Porter's childhood experience offered her no acceptable models of womanhood. No "normal," happy young women, no satisfying or fulfilled marriage relationships are described in the Miranda stories. Closely following the author's own life, the stories tell us that Miranda's mother died when she was two, and her father is a shadowy figure. Men are usually weak, or absent characters; Miranda grew up in a matriarchal household dominated by [Sophia Jane] her grandmother, a figure (modeled on Porter's own grandmother who raised her from infancy) who stands in striking contrast to the many trapped and damaged females found throughout Porter's work.

Miranda's grandmother illustrates the only kind of freedom or self-sufficiency a woman could achieve in Porter's childhood world, yet she achieved it only after long obedience to the conventional role of wife and mother, slowly surmounting the limitations of that role, and finally freed from it only by her husband's death. A woman must be alone to be free. (pp. 49-50)

But the alternative roles are no better. Another, very different response to the woman's situation under the Old Order is exhibited by the spirited and flirtatious belle, Miranda's Aunt Amy; but Amy's capricious behavior became self-destructive, and she had died young. Amy had capitulated to the sexual role demanded of her in many ways. But she refused to relinquish her supremacy as a coquette, a sought-after object of male desire. She resisted marriage because it meant giving up her freedom.

Miranda's cousin Eva, a homely spinster, illustrates a third alternative: having failed in the sexual competition of her youth, never having found her "definition" in marriage and maternity, she had compensated by becoming self-supporting as a teacher and campaigner for women's rights. Yet Eva is bitter about her past: independence was thrust upon her because she did not succeed in fulfilling the expected feminine role. Indeed, none of these women fulfills that role—that impossible combination of beauty, charm, chastity and grace which flowers into the capable wife and devoted mother, upholding the moral, religious and cultural standards of the household, while remaining submissive to her husband and the traditions of society. Clearly, Porter finds the demands of "Southern womanhood" to be incompatible with actual experience.

Miranda's response, finally, is to reject all these roles, to reject family, even love. The basic theme of the Miranda stories is "growing up female," and for Miranda, growing up entails repudiation of her family and her past. Each story centers on a crucial event or revelation which marks a stage in Miranda's awakening to the world—as a child of five or six, or eight, nine or ten. At the end of "Old Mortality" we glimpse her at eighteen, having emerged from the secure yet limiting world of her youth, renouncing all ties, "loving and being loved," committed to resistance and flight. (p. 51)

Miranda finds it hard to reconcile her grandmother's rigid authoritarianism with the story of her youth. The grandmother she knows is the embodiment of order and security who strives to instill in her grandchildren discipline, obedience and proper manners. And yet that very grandmother had suffered great trials, had worked with her hands to raise the food with which to feed her family. Her story exhibits a model of self-sufficiency and defiance of the established order which could not fail to stir Miranda's young imagination. Life had been a battle from which Sophia Jane had emerged triumphant, but she did not win that battle by remaining submissive to any code of genteel femininity. (p. 52)

The sufferings of Sophia Jane's life, as Porter sees it, resulted directly from the moral and social values of the Old Order—values she associates with the men who dominated it. Porter exalts her heroine in proportion to her resistance to that order. Built on the immorality of slavery, locked in the unrealistic dream of a labor-free existence for the privileged rich, not only denying the humanity of an entire race, but denying women like Sophia Jane the natural fulfillment of their protective and nurturing functions, the Old Order destroyed human character.

Through the grandmother, Porter extols womanhood, and at the same time demonstrates through her story the weakness of the men corrupted by a dishonest society, as well as the obstacles that lay in the grandmother's path as she tried to express her character and virtues. Clearly it was largely by chance that Sophia Jane was forced to win her freedom.

Many other women of that hard time had not survived, among them her own daughters and her daughter-in-law, Miranda's mother, who died in childbirth. Whatever strength the grandmother had acquired was the result of a desperate struggle, and was not to be transmitted to succeeding generations. (p. 55)

The legend of Miranda's Aunt Amy, described in "Old Mortality,"… also comes out of the past. Amy was a beautiful belle excelling in every feminine grace; but, ailing and unhappy, she had gone unwillingly into marriage and had died six weeks later, perhaps by her own hand. Amy's whole life had been a struggle against confinement and convention, personified in her strict, repressive father who made life "dull" and unendurable. Yet her story comes down to Miranda clothed in the irresistible aura of romance.

Miranda understandably identifies with such a passionate and defiant spirit. Throughout the Miranda stories there are hints that the little girl recognizes the narrowness of the role she is destined to fill; she resents the tight solidarity of the family which surrounds her, lectures her and admonishes her, and she recoginizes in her beloved grandmother the principal opponent of her freedom. She begins to realize that the restrictions placed on her have something to do with her sex. In "The Grave" (1935) nine-year-old Miranda learns the truth about her future procreative function when her brother kills and opens the belly of a pregnant rabbit. He swears her to secrecy: this is forbidden knowledge, and he should not have allowed her to see what she had seen. At last grasping the secret of her own sexuality, and the taboo accompanying this knowledge, Miranda senses a mysterious threat in her femaleness which will bind her still more closely to the rules of feminine decorum. (pp. 55-6)

"Old Mortality" describes how an ideal of femininity is communicated to the young Miranda—at ten, then at fourteen, acutely conscious of her approaching maturity…. Miranda wants … fervently to be like Aunt Amy, beautiful "as an angel," unequalled as a horsewoman, lighter and more delicate than any dancer before her time or since, remembered for her quickness of wit, her daring, and her devastatingly charming ways with men. (p. 57)

The romantic appeal of the legend is finally destroyed when eighteen-year-old Miranda returns home for a family funeral—her first visit home for more than a year. After she had run away from school to get married, her father had found it difficult to forgive her. Miranda meets her elderly Cousin Eva, a chinless old-maid schoolteacher and suffragist who had been tormented in her youth because of her homeliness. Eva presents a merciless view of the young girl's experience in the old days: the girls pitted against each other in desperate competition, their future contingent upon success in the marriage mart. "The rivalry … you can't imagine what the rivalry was like," says Eva bitterly. "Those parties and dances were their market." And behind all the delicacy and coquetry, "it was just sex … all smothered under pretty names … their minds dwelt on nothing else."… Eva particularly remembers Amy, who had mocked her because of her lack of chin: "Well, Amy carried herself with more spirit than the others … but she was simply sex-ridden, like the rest."… (pp. 58-9)

Although Miranda recognizes in Eva's savage account a distortion of truth as romantic as all she had heard before, though she hears in it Eva's bitterness at her own failure in the sexual contest, Eva's suspicions destroy the fairytale legend Miranda had so long accepted. Miranda despairs of trusting anyone else's version of the past, and resolves not to be "romantic" about herself: "At least I can know the truth about what happens to me," she tells herself…. But she does not realize how far she has already been shaped by romantic traditions; in her rebellion she imitates many a spirited family heroine who resisted having to define herself in terms of men. Miranda vows to escape family bonds; though she had run away to marriage, she knows that she will run away from marriage, too. She will repudiate love, she says to herself; but what she does not know, "in her hopefulness, her ignorance,"… is that it is too late. She cannot escape "loving and being loved," nor the grip of family and its legends, and she will never know the truth about herself.

Many ghosts out of the Southern past haunt Miranda, as they haunt her author-self as a mature woman. Katherine Anne Porter invests in the grandmother many qualities which constitute a womanly ideal; she stresses the grandmother's courage, her willingness to work, her commitment to her "natural" duty to protect and instruct the young, and her faith in nature's abundance—in short, her "natural" humanity and acceptance of life. But at the same time Porter realizes that this ideal had been purchased at a terrible price, and only by a painful resistance of men and a male-dominated world. It had maintained itself in the teeth of antagonistic forces so formidable as to make such self-sufficiency and courage impossible to imitate, difficult at times even to love. To carry out what she had to do, the grandmother had to become as strong, as absolute and inflexible as the men whose tyranny she had escaped.

Miranda will follow none of these women from her family past, except to follow them in rebellion. All three women had struggled in various ways to escape the restrictions of the role of Southern womanhood, and by the end of these stories we see Miranda, too, committed to flight, to withdrawal from experience and evasion of human ties—prominent patterns in Porter's fiction. But Miranda will never know the "truth about herself" because she cannot reconcile her need to express her own identity with any acceptable model of mature womanhood; she has never known one. As we may conclude from Pale Horse, Pale Rider—the last Miranda story—and from the bulk of her later work, Katherine Anne Porter's own experience was that of the failure of love and the death of the heart. Her stories of the South help to explain why. (pp. 59-60)