SOURCE: "The Love Ethos of Porter, Welty, and McCullers," in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning, University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 235-43.

[In the following excerpt, Kieft explores Porter's attitudes toward love and romantic relationships as shaped by her personal experiences and reflected in her writing.]

Since love is a central theme in much fiction, especially that of women writers, it is not surprising to find the theme dominant in the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. What is surprising, given their time and place in the most conservative part of the country, the South (Texas, Mississippi, Georgia) in the first half of the twentieth century, is the extent to which each writer, though she could not totally escape conventional codes and attitudes toward love, essentially subverted them in her life as a fiction writer. Their contrasting lives and fictional projections of love reveal how as artists they individually fulfilled their destinies and escaped from the common female destiny, the stories society might have written for them, and they for their characters, as lovers, wives, and mothers.

In my essay, I analyze and relate these two sets of stories, the biographical and fictional "love lives" of the three writers. I am aware of the hazards of my undertaking: chiefly its magnitude and the impossibility of sorting out facts from fiction. For in what other area of a woman's life is reality more infused with fantasy, is language more "loaded" and ungovernable, are assumptions, actions, values more charged and elusive in their meanings?

I face these difficulties squarely and attempt to deal with them in two ways. First, I use the term mythos because it implies a pattern of attitudes and experiences that are both individual and yet shared with others in smaller or larger groups. For each of the three writers, there is, in addition to a unique personal history, a set of "conventional" (religious, archetypal, literary) sources of the mythos that the writer either wholly or partially accepts or rejects. Each has her own relationship to "the truth," each a different way of conducting her life and using it in her fiction, a different mix of the realistic with the fantastic. Each writer's "mythos of love" is the intricately woven pattern of several components: (1) her early experiences within the family setting; (2) her "love history" as a woman; and (3) her imaginative assimilation of both traditional and modern attitudes toward love acquired through formal education, reading, observation. Each component is to some extent cloaked in its own language and reference system, the community's encoding of attitudes and assumptions. Since I cannot treat all elements consistently or at equal length, I shall stress what seem the most important formative influences on each writer.

Second, I have limited my study to the fiction itself and material essentially biographical rather than critical. Fortunately, for two of the writers we have long, definitive, authorized biographies written by sympathetic women: Joan Givner's of Porter and Virginia Spencer Carr's of McCullers. In Welty's case, we have a slender autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, itself a work of art, though not, I think, another of her works of fiction, for I believe it to be as honest as it is beautiful, moving, and amusing, however selective in its personal revelations. These biographical sources being different from each other in kind and approach, I make no claims for their comparative objectivity, or that of my own conclusions. Since the territory I hope to survey is thickly wooded, I intend to be wary, flexible, and suggestive rather than definitive or doctrinaire.

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Porter's mythos of love seems the most perilous of the three to describe because, though convoluted, it is easiest to reduce to a formula: the Freudian one of the wholly determining effects of early childhood on all of a writer's work. In an extraordinary feat of fact-gathering and reconstruction, Givner has told Porter's life story and revealed her life-long habit of interweaving fact, fantasy, and fiction. Porter invented for herself a Southern aristocratic past and early family history. She assumed and played out the dual roles of Southern belle modernized and liberated, and legendary femme fatale. Her beauty, love of finery in clothing and decor and exoticism in food and drink, her four marriages and countless love affairs, her self-infatuated conversations, her restless traveling and adventures, her uncanny timing in being in the right place at the right time to involve herself with important historical persons and events—all this is the stuff of a legend she self-consciously created, a legend more usually associated with Hollywood stars than one devoted to a craft that invites what Welty once referred to as "the intimacy of strangers."

Givner's "uneasy sense," expressed in the prologue to her biography, "that the revelations about [Porter's] life constituted some cruel kind of exposure," seems justified, for it is an often vain, selfish, capricious, exploitive, irresponsible, deceitful character that emerges. Yet Givner salvages respect and admiration for Porter, whose actual life she found "more heroic than anything [Porter] invented," for it is the story of a sensitive child named Callie whose mother died when she was two years old; who was raised in miserable poverty and overcrowding in a large household by a strict Methodist grandmother; who was neglected, erratically treated and unloved by a weak and self-indulgent father; whose amorous adventures were the compulsive attempts of a love-starved woman to find what she could not possibly attain. Givner's commissioned biography seems the fruit of Porter's decision to "come clean," make a truthful final confession, not only to a priest but to the world. Yet whatever her relation to the truth, in her personal legend making, Porter was exhibiting a characteristically Southern trait.

The encoded rhetoric that lies behind Porter's ethos of love has both a popular and a traditional source, each of which I think she had unconsciously assimilated, insofar as the rhetoric fed some impossible idealism about romantic love that she seems never to have lost. The popular source is best illustrated by excerpts from letters Porter's father, Harrison, wrote shortly after the death of his wife, Alice, samples of the kind of sentimental graveyard rhetoric satirized by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. The first letter, to his oldest daughter, was sent with a picture:

Gay: This is your mother. She is buried near Brownwood. It is a holy place for us all. There I saw the star of all my earthly hopes go down in an endless darkness and there is no light in my heart even at noonday. In this strange twilight I try to trace the narrow road I must walk to reach this city of the dead and lie down in the long night beside my love. But this star is not extinguished altogether for it shed the rays of its purity and love over the waste landscape of my life, gave meaning to Nothingness and left memories that not time nor death itself can take away.

To a close friend of Alice he wrote: "I loved her better than my own life, aye, better than I did my God…. If there is, after this turmoil, a halcyon period, a golden place somewhere 'en vista' of the golden dawn, I know my spirit will seek hers there, though but a season. Hell thenceforth with the companionship of the Dragon of the Apocalypse will not torment me worse than the pangs that now rend me."

From this graveyard rhetoric it is a short leap to that of the poem Uncle Gabriel writes to memorialize his beloved Amy in "Old Mortality" ("A singing angel, she forgets / The griefs of old mortality"). Noteworthy about Harrison Porter's rhetoric, in addition to its self-indulgence, is its "literary" pretension and the mixing of religious language with that of human love. Harrison plays out his drama as mourner on a cosmic stage against a backdrop of time and eternity, heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. And Porter played out her drama on the same cosmic stage.

The other encoded rhetoric is that of the ancient noble literary tradition of Courtly Love, the Age of Chivalry. The love ethos is often adulterous, thriving most when unconsummated, product of fevered imaginations, high codes of morality and tests of bravery, celebrated by poets of stature from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth-century Romantics. Actually, this noble tradition reached the South, and doubtless Porter, more by way of Sir Walter Scott than Dante, Shakespeare, and Keats. Porter had little formal education and was not an inveterate reader as a child. Her fictional portrayal of what had become of the Western world's and the South's version of love is negative: she shows love traduced and betrayed, relentlessly exposed and rejected, yet also as inescapable and hopelessly victimizing. The romantic and antiromantic are constantly at war in Porter's fiction; her pages are strewn with the combatants wounded, dying, and dead of that mortal struggle.

It is instructive to look closely at the battle in its formative stages, to Miranda's, that is, Porter's generation as it appears in "Old Mortality." Miranda and her sister Maria, eight and twelve years old, are deeply impressed by the story of Aunt Amy, who, though now only a "ghost in a frame," had once been "beautiful, much loved, unhappy, and had died young." Though somewhat skeptical about the romantic legends told by their elders, the little girls enjoy "patching together … fragments of tales that were like bits of poetry, and music … with the theatre." The romance of their Uncle Gabriel's "long, unrewarded love for [Amy], her early death," was a story linked for them with books they thought of as "unworldly … but true, such as the Vita Nuova, the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the Wedding Song of Spenser; and poems by Edgar Allan Poe." Thus an ancient and noble lineage of love poetry is provided for Porter's fictional counterpart, Miranda, though there is little to indicate that these greatest of love poets were early a seriously formative part of Porter's actual reading and thinking. Yet as central to her fictive world, they provided her with the norm for the lofty and unattainable ("unworldly") ideal of love she saw everywhere traduced.

Amy is presented as willful, capricious, a type of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. She dresses and behaves scandalously, has many beaus while resisting the courtship of Miranda's profligate Uncle Gabriel, has a duel fought over her and compensates for life's dullness by running off, half-sick, on a three-day lark to the border with her brothers. She perversely accepts Gabriel when he loses his family inheritance, marries him in a gray wedding gown, and dies within ten days, not only of chronic illness, but, it is hinted, an overdose of medication. Miranda is impressed by this history, and although she already knows how far reality is from the romantic legends enshrined in the family memory, she persists in her addiction to the romantic gesture, as in her rebellion against conventional morality. Her alternately strict and indulgent rearing makes satirical comedy of the emphasis on character training taught by the nuns in the convent school in which Miranda and her sister are "inured." Their father reinforces the superficiality of the Catholic moral codes by stressing his daughters' need to be good chiefly in order to win the reward of being swept off to the races on certain "blessed Saturdays."

Miranda elopes from out of the convent at sixteen and flees from the marriage within two years. Desperately in love, Porter herself married at sixteen in a double wedding with her sister, a civil ceremony conducted by a Methodist minister. Though the marriage lasted nine years, the longest of her marriages, the relationship was a disaster. Porter later referred to her husband, John Koontz, as a "monster"—a term she applied to all her husbands and lovers. Givner speculates that Porter's "inability to find any pleasure in sex … aggravated furthermore by her discovery that she was not able to bear a child" was the cause for her romantic disillusionment. In the final section of "Old Mortality" Porter has Miranda think, after her divorce, "I hate loving and being loved. I hate it," and then suffer "a shock of comfort from the sudden collapse of an old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions."

Yet Miranda rejects also her ugly, chinless, peppermint-breathed feminist cousin Eva in Eva's reductive assessment of Amy's romantic history as "just sex!" What else but desire for romantic love—with its rich fantasy, brief and ambiguous pleasure, and almost inevitable disillusionment and pain—could have induced Porter's fictional characters to act as they did? "Old Mortality" ends with Miranda's thinking, "I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself…. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopelessness, her ignorance." The final word shows how little Porter believed that Miranda, or anyone, could find the truth for herself, unshackle herself from the past or even settle for the bleak reductions of the present. Porter found her truth only in the realm of what she created, the means and end of her integrity and her personal salvation, her fictional art. And in her choice of the free, bohemian existence and refusal of the traditional roles of strong, supportive wife and mother, she became a prototype of the modern woman artist.

The Miranda stories tell a bitter story about love—with one exception, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." But that story presents romantic love as mythical, Edenic. Miranda's soldier-lover is named Adam—obviously prelapsarian; he is described as being round, firm, and beautiful as an unbitten apple; he is even compared to the sacrificial lamb. The pale horse and rider of the Apocalypse, death, carries him off sinless, and before his and Miranda's love is consummated. There is no grand passion: only the sweet elusiveness of an ideal lost love. The encoded language is religious—hymns, prayers, the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation, Eden to the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse (death) to a viewed and missed Paradise beyond; the love language is innocent—that of simple Western ballads.

The finality of death is the seal on a perfect love that might be viewed as Porter's imaginative reenactment of the love of her mother and father. In later life Porter idealized the young man on whom she modeled Adam—apparently a young English soldier who lived in the same rooming house, looked after her before a hospital bed could be found, kissed her once, and died of influenza while she was ill. She made of this casual acquaintance the man she might have trusted and been happy with all her days. "This lifelong devotion," says Givner, "should properly be seen as the love of a writer for a favorite character, the love of an artist for the created object. There is, therefore, an ironic truth in her assertion that he was the one man she could have loved."

Miranda, the survivor, denied her bright vision of death, is seen in the end as a silver-gray ghost, though a very smartly dressed one, with her beautiful smooth gray gloves. Salvation through style: that too was Porter's modus vivendi as she took up her life after her rub with death. In stories based more purely on her own experience, Porter achieves a group of painfully authentic, psychologically acute portraits of the failures of modern love. Givner describes how the patterns of confusion, tension, and dissolution developed from a "fatal ambivalence" in Porter's nature. She craved an adoring, protective kind of masculine love she never got from her weak father, or for a great length of time from any of her husbands and lovers, since it would have been one requiring a docile and obedient wife or mistress to complete on the receiving side. Yet she also had the desire to be a strong, dominant and independent woman like her grandmother. Her apparent distaste for the sexual relationship and her apparent inability to bear children further threatened her fragile sense of her femininity and desirability.

In story after story, Porter presents stormy quarrels between lovers and the unconvincing calms or reconciliations that follow them; she shows destructive fury striking out blindly. To the heroine of "Theft," survivor of many painful love affairs, the loss of a beautiful, golden cloth purse reflects "the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark, inexplicable death of love" in a landslide of remembered losses." In the end she thinks, "I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing." In these stories love is elusive and illusionary yet eternally revived as though in answer to some demon of obsession.

This misanthropy and cynicism about love reaches a series of frenzied peaks in Ship of Fools. The feeling between David darling and Jenny angel passes quickly and irrationally from loving passion to fierce hatred, the flux of emotion touched off by the slightest impression, such as the couple's reactions to Jenny's appearance in a fresh white dress. When David sees her as lovely, and tells her so, the narrator says, "She believed it with all her heart, and saw him transfigured as he always was in these mysterious visitations of love between them—reasonless, causeless, having its own times and seasons, vanishing at a breath and yet always bringing with it the illusion that it would last forever." Yet, after seeing Jenny drunk in another man's embrace, David comes to think that "the girl he thought he knew had disappeared so entirely he had almost to believe he made her up out of the odds and ends of stuff from his own ragbag of adolescent dreams and imaginings…. There never was, there couldn't possibly be, any such living girl as he had dreamed Jenny was."

Dr. Schumann, the ship's physician, loves La Condessa but does not comfort her by giving any sign of his love until very shortly before she leaves the ship in political custody. The irony is that he is illicitly feeding the Condessa's drug addiction and thus killing her. A Mrs. Treadwell, divorced and bitter, remembers her "despairs, her long weeping, her miserable grief over the failure of love." She unleashes such mindless fury against aggressive male sexuality that she makes pulp of the face of a young man with the sharp pointed heel of her evening slipper when he comes to the cabin in lustful pursuit of her young cabin-mate. All three of the "heroines" of Ship of Fools, as Givner points out, are avatars of Porter at some state of her life in a typical love relationship.

Whereas this psychologically acute fiction is painful, often self-lacerating in its personal revelation, in other stories Porter makes the imaginative leap into persons unlike herself, relating their experiences with empathy and compassion as well as fidelity to the particulars of their time and place. In "Flowering Judas" she shows the plight of a modern young woman who has lost the Catholic faith of her childhood and can replace it neither with the Socialist faith of the Mexican Revolution nor the personal faith and purpose of romantic or maternal love. In "Noon Wine" she portrays a weak poverty-stricken woman, Mrs. Thompson, testifying against her conscience, in support of her morally weak husband. She is defeated by fate and social codes in a society as dominated by male supremacy as is Sicily or Mexico.

In other of Porter's stories, however, women are far from weak and defeated in relation to their men. Maria Concepcion accomplishes her own revenge on her sexual rival by killing her and taking the girl's child as her own. "Granny Weatherall" nourishes a life-long grievance against the man who jilted her and risks hell rather than surrender that hatred, even on her deathbed. These women are strong enough to take risks that may cost them their lives, for time and eternity. In their fight against male hegemony, they might appear to be champions of female independence until one looks closely at what each of these women desires. It is the love of her man, the fulfillment of the promise or vow he made and broke; it is position in the community, marriage, the child by him she expects. These are women who embrace traditional feminine roles with a vengeance. Porter knows much of woman's consciousness and dilemmas in love but nothing of their cure, and she does not fictionalize her own personal "cure" of self-realization through her art.

What fascinates in Porter's personal and fictional love experiences, finally, is the tension between extreme idealism and scepticism, traditional romance and realistic modern attitudes. A clear-eyed appraisal of herself told her how foolish and brief were her many affairs, how much based on fictions spun out of the imagination. And yet she had a faith that there was also, in the love object, an actual love and beauty that answered her need and capacity for discovering and offering her own; and that, when this idealization was mutual in a relationship, it was wonderfully transforming. When she fell in love, her partner was "instantly transfigured with a light of such blinding brilliance all natural attributes disappear[ed]" and an "archangel" appeared, "beautiful, flawless in temperament, witty, intelligent, charming, of … infinite grace, sympathy, and courage." This is the golden god of romantic love. It was inevitable that such great expectations should again and again suffer disillusionment. She called it "'probably the silliest kind of love there is, but I am glad I had it. I'm glad there were times when I saw human beings at their best, for I don't think by any means I lent them all their radiance.'"

Porter was a fierce and often intolerant woman, requiring impeccable manners but failing in trust and fidelity. Legendary in all things, she was above all that in her primary dedication to her art. Admired and hated with equal fervor, she has been accused of many character flaws but never of being a less than committed and formidably gifted fiction writer.