SOURCE: "The 'Booby Trap' of Love: Artist and Sadist in Katherine Anne Porter's Mexico Fiction," in The Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 16, No. 4, Spring, 1990, pp. 617-34.

"Her eagerness to be beautiful in their eyes, to draw them to her, made her ache. Her nerve ends boiled and bubbled. But she kept her face calm as she watched them, serpent-feminine enough to know that her attitude of calm pleased them." Inscrutable without and turbulent within, Alma, the silent, erotic center of Katherine Anne Porter's unfinished story, "The Evening," resembles several of the female characters in Porter's 1920s Mexico fiction. "The Evening" belongs with four other early narratives, all originating in Porter's relationship with the Mexican artist community: "Flowering Judas" (published in 1930), "Virgin Violeta" (1924), "The Martyr" (1923), and its unpublished counterpart, "The Lovely Legend" (manuscript dated 1925). These biographically related texts focus on the relationship of male spectator and female spectacle, often through an artist and his model/muse, and expose the sadomasochism that Porter saw fueling the transformation of women into symbolic and erotic objects. Read together and then set in the context of essays and unpublished journals, they reveal that during the 1920s Porter was intently exploring the issues of power underlying the tradition of romantic love.

In Porter's early Mexico fiction, interactions between the sexes are presented as sexualized struggles of dominance and submission. The male characters share the same sadistic goals: to subject the women to their will, consume them as sexual objects, or use and then discard them in the service of some creative act. Yet, although threatening, even monstrous, these men are powerful and thus, the texts suggest, dangerously attractive. Confronted with the physical and emotional threat implicit in the presence of the male artists, the passive women respond in a complex manner. They do not imagine a different, active existence; rather, their desires are either for safety, escape from or protection against the controlling male gaze, or, more frequently, pleasure, the pleasure which Porter suggests accompanies self-objectification and which can be gained by further attracting masculine admiration.

Except for "The Evening," these stories adopt either the woman's point of view, exploring the mingling of desire and terror aroused by a powerful man's attention, or the man's point of view, exposing his combined obsession with and exploitation of the woman. All share an atmosphere of erotic tension and employ images of gluttony, suffocation, and entrapment.

Perhaps Porter never finished "The Evening" because she was unable to settle on a point of view for the text. Some passages ("Her eagerness to be beautiful …") follow Alma's thoughts as her nerves "boil and bubble" in her violent desire to arouse violent desire. She longs to fulfill her romantic fantasy: "To dance with one man while another stared in another direction with murder in his heart … that was the way she described it to herself." Other passages move into the minds of the men surrounding her, and in these Porter reveals how men, either artists or parasitical aesthetes, use women as the passive medium out of which they shape their aesthetic. Their argument—that all beauty requires the presence of some ugliness—is punctuated by unspoken feelings of desire or hostility for Alma. They think of the silent woman as an object exchanged among men and employ the dualistic imagery that characterizes the imaginations of all the men in Porter's artist stories. According to Gordito, for example: "She would not go back to Ciro or to Roberto—no she would not go back, she would go on to Vicente … little whore, adorable angel." Because the manuscript of "The Evening" shifts about in point of view and is incomplete, it is not possible to state with any assurance Porter's final goals. But the text underscores her explorations of the sexual/sadistic bonds between passive women and controlling men, a theme which arose out of her experiences in 1920s Mexico. In fact, among Alma's admirers, little Lino, who scrawls "obscene caricatures," is easily identified as Miguel Covarrubias, the young caricaturist who, with other members of Mexico's artist community, helped Porter organize an exhibition of Mexico folk art in 1922.

"Flowering Judas" stands at the center of Porter's Mexico fiction, and at its center is the eternal present, where Braggioni watches Laura with the patience of a predator. Told from the woman's point of view, this story explores the combination of attraction to and fear of her own objectification which keeps Laura frozen and silent throughout the narrative. Although "nobody touches" Laura, she appears surrounded by men who watch and desire her, and she defends herself against the sexual threat implicit in their gaze by erecting barriers. Like Alma, she maintains an "attitude of calm" and conceals her sexuality: her lips are "always firmly closed"; her "great round breasts" are covered "with thick dark cloth." Yet despite these measures, Laura's most ordinary actions take on the quality of performance under the eroticizing gaze: "No dancer walks more beautifully than Laura walks, and she inspires some amusing and unexpected ardors" as she passes silently through the streets.

Laura's defenses mask desire as much as resistance. She is "full of romantic error" and enjoys being a spectacle. When a young man begins daily to follow her, "she is pleasantly disturbed by the abstract, unhurried watchfulness of his black eyes which will in time turn easily towards another object." She finds the kind of masochistic pleasure under the male gaze that E. Ann Kaplan identifies in her discussion of the erotic in film: "Assigned to the place of object (lack), she is the recipient of male desire, passively appearing rather than acting. Her sexual pleasure in this position can thus be constructed only around her own objectification." Through her long, tense confrontation with Braggioni, Laura holds herself still, frozen like an erotic image for his contemplation.

Laura's pleasure in her own objectification—like Alma's in "The Evening"—is combined with an "insatiable thirst" for "excitement." Her marginal participation in the Revolution rises from this attraction to the erotic: what is dangerous is also sensual. Thus, she lives tantalizingly close to impending violence, whether it be the revolution's chaos or Braggioni's physical assault. Hers is a "liminal state" between yielding and flight, an exciting, sustained tension. Seated across from Laura, Braggioni is the mirror in which she views what she fears and desires. His physical appearance suggests the combination of sensuality and violence which secretly attracts her. Gluttonous, oily, with yellow eyes like a cat, he exudes an erotic threat. Like Laura's masking clothing, Braggioni's costume forms a central symbol of his sexuality:

Over his lavender collar, crushed upon a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop: over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled cruelly around his gasping middle: over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness, his mauve silk hose stretched taut, his ankles bound with the stout leather thongs of his shoes.

Braggioni's silk and leather clothing suggests the implements of bondage in sadomasochistic sexual fantasies. His gasping body is "buckled cruelly" inside his heavy belt; his feet are bound. Braggioni represents the erotic dangers and pleasures of love for Laura, as yielding to desire requires subjection of the self.

Cruel and vain, Braggioni pins Laura beneath his gaze and assaults her with his song. He plays the guitar as though it were her body, expressing through it the sexual violence implicit in his costume: "under the rip of his thumbnail, the strings of the instrument complain like exposed nerves." Braggioni as singer resembles the other artist figures in Porter's fiction; not only is woman his subject and his inspiration, but the goal of his art is her submission. Thus his song, which transforms Laura into a figure in a romantic legend, legitimizes his hunger: it represents an effort to control her by controlling the language which defines her. "'O girl with the dark eyes,' he sings and reconsiders. 'But yours are not dark. I can change all that. O girl with the green eyes, you have stolen my heart away!'" Braggioni remakes the song as he would like to remake Laura; his words are a mask over his predatory gaze, the "cat's eyes" which, as he sings, mark "the opposite ends of a smoothly drawn path between the swollen curve of her breasts."

Knowledge of Porter's source for Braggioni's song further reinforces the fact that Porter views the gluttonous revolutionary as an artist and Laura as his passive medium. Thomas Walsh has identified the song as "A la Orilla de un Palmar," a ballad in which a male speaker recalls meeting a beautiful woman and singing her lament: "I am a little orphan, alas. I have no father and no mother, nor even a friend who comes, alas, to console me." As Walsh rightly points out, "the song is obvious male fantasy with the promise of sexual conquest lurking just below its sentimental surface." In Braggioni's ballad, sung to the tune of his sadistic guitar, the male artist speaks the woman's desire; she is his creation, part of his fantasy of seduction and control.

Laura's half-willing attraction to the combination of sensuality and danger in Braggioni becomes most apparent as she oils and loads his pistols. Although until this point she has resisted him entirely, keeping an "open book on her knees," as "her knees cling together" under her heavy skirt, she takes his ammunition belt when he asks and "spreads it laden across her knees" and "sits with the shells slipping through the cleaning cloth dipped in oil." The guns and the oil, the two elements of Braggioni's erotic appeal—violence and sensuality—occupy her completely. And when he asks her why she has no lover, "a long, slow faintness rises and subsides in her," suggesting that her conscious defenses briefly yield to unconscious desire. The wave passes, but in that moment Braggioni's sensual but dangerous hold has tightened. Again the guitar represents Laura's passive body: "Braggioni curves his swollen fingers around the throat of the guitar and softly smothers the music out of it." The moment is both climax and murder, a soft smothering. While Braggioni "strokes the pistol lying in [Laura's] hands," his hypnotic voice describes the violent explosions that will accompany the revolution.

"Flowering Judas" has biographical ties to Porter's other 1920s fiction which explores sadomasochism and romantic fantasy. Braggioni's blonde curls and his youth as an impassioned poet suggest that his character is based partially on one of her admirers, the Nicaraguan poet Salómon de la Selva, with whom she was involved in 1922. Publicly, Porter claimed that she combined "four or five objectionable characters into … one" when she created Braggioni, and privately she was even more explicit about Carlos, the poet with the predatory eyes in "Virgin Violeta." In unpublished notes on her Collected Stories, Porter wrote that Carlos was "Based on looks, character, and malicious ways of Salómon de la Selva." De la Selva's poetry participates in and perhaps influenced the atmosphere of her 1920s fiction. His collection Tropical Town and Other Poems, published in 1918, explores themes of religious and sexual devotion, often mingling the Christian and the erotic with suggestions of violence. In these poems, sacred ecstasy, a dying in passionate communion with God, is connected with sexual ecstasy, a losing of the self in another. Some of de la Selva's poems recall the experiences of such mystics as Saint Teresa; others use language suggesting the rituals and implements of sacrifice; still others are explicitly sexual, the sexuality emphatically stained with sadomasochism. One man's caresses are burning flames in the night; another lover is "afevered for the torture" of his beloved's touch; dawn brings death to passion; in several poems, the beloved herself is dead.

Porter's papers also link de la Selva with two other acquaintances in 1920s Mexico: Diego Rivera and his model and wife, Guadalupe Marin. According to Porter's notes, the 1924 story "The Martyr" was directed at "Diego Rivera and his wild-woman Lupe Marin." Among her unpublished papers is a description of an evening with Rivera, Marin, and de la Selva from which she drew material for "Virgin Violeta":

The night at Los Monotes … Lupe the Savage. Diego. Salómon de la Selva. Our pilgrimage to the Nino Perdido … The old convent in the old street, the cobblestones and broken glass, the rattle of the tinny orchestra from the pulquerria around the corner. A danzon. We dance, and afterward he makes a poem … something about the nuns in that convent who looked out on dancers in other days … and tonight their ghosts with ghostly partners, come and dance again—the nuns are dancing with small bare feet, over broken glass in a cobbled street … for me, he said.

De la Selva's nuns dancing barefoot on broken glass—a characteristic image of erotic sacrifice—reappear in these 1920s stories, in both "Virgin Violeta" and the unpublished "The Lovely Legend." In the latter, Amado, de la Selva's fictional counterpart, weeps briefly over a woman's masochistic devotion. "'She did, she did,' he sobbed. 'She danced for me on broken glass with her white feet bleeding. I knelt and kissed the wounds through the cold iron grill of the gate.'" The image deserves attention, for it clearly fascinated Porter. Like Laura, the nuns wear clothing which both covers their sexuality and ostensibly announces its repression or denial. External identity is erased; they are blanks awaiting the inscription of male desire, either the fantasy accompanying the erotic gaze or, in the case of the nuns, the patriarchal Word.

Like Laura too, the nuns are silent. The poet both interprets their actions and claims them for his own pleasure. Yet their blankness is a mask worn over a potential sensuality which, when released, finds expression in masochistic display. Dancing on glass, the nuns simultaneously reveal their sexuality—the blood suggesting defloration or menstruation—and receive punishment for it. Their expression of desire is simultaneously self-sacrifice. The nuns enact this erotic ritual for the male observer—"for me," the poet says. The dancing nuns are de la Selva's supreme romantic fantasy, a spectacle of adoration, submission, and sexual sacrifice.

In "Virgin Violeta," the image of dancing nuns becomes central to Porter's exploration of a young girl's seduction by a male poet's text. Violeta's awakening sexuality leads her from romantic fantasies of masochistic devotion, fed by Carlos's poems, to a terrifying experience of her actual entrapment and victimization within these fantasies. As in "Flowering Judas," in "Virgin Violeta" the point of view belongs to the silent woman. Thus, the story shares the same erotic tension of withholding and desire and has the same slow movement, a sense of unendurable time spent in a liminal state between boredom and arousal. From the beginning, romantic love is entwined with religious ecstasy, violence, and abasement in the text. Carlos's poetry speaks of the "torment of love," and the picture above Violeta's head shows St. Ignatius before an aloof Virgin Mary, "grovel[ling] in a wooden posture of ecstasy."

Entering puberty, Violeta becomes infatuated with her cousin, Carlos. He fascinates and attracts her both as a man and as a poet; she longs for his approving looks and studies his poetry seeking the images of his desire. The power of Carlos's text contends with that of the Church for Violeta, giving her another version of what it means to be good. She conceals his poems in her missal, memorizing them during religious service. Throughout the long, slow evening, Violeta dreams of a masochistic sacrifice, combining ecstasy with self-abasement. She is enthralled by Carlos's description of "the ghosts of nuns … treading with bared feet on broken glass as a penance for their loves" and shakes all over when she reads the poem, imagining that it had been written for her: "'The nuns are dancing with bared feet / On broken glass in the cobbled street.'… She was even one of the nuns, the youngest and best-beloved, ghostly silent, dancing forever and ever under the moonlight to the shivering tune of old violins."

Placing herself within Carlos's text, Violeta imagines herself as the "best-beloved" object of Carlos's desire. Like Laura, she finds looking and being looked at absorbing and stimulating. She feels intensely exposed to Carlos's critical gaze as she sits at her mother's knee. And watching the poet watch her sister, Blanca, she becomes increasingly aroused. As spectator, Violeta identifies herself with Blanca, the focus and actual passive recipient of Carlos's desire. This excited identification resembles the potential pleasure that E. Ann Kaplan assigns to the female spectator of an erotic film: "[l]ocating herself in fantasy in the erotic, the woman places herself as either passive recipient of male desire, or at one remove, as watching a woman who is passive recipient of male desire and sexual actions." In Porter's text, Violeta's identification with her sister is so complete that she participates in her physical experiences. When Blanca's shawl slips from her shoulder, "A tight shudder of drawn threads played along Violeta's skin, and grew quite intolerable when Carlos reached out to take the fringe in his long fingers."

Violeta alternates watching with fantasy. She imagines a "beautiful and unexpected" future in which she becomes "miraculously lovely," all-desirable. In common with Alma in "The Evening," she longs to be a performer in a clichéd romantic scene, with an audience of excited, admiring men. She imagines that "she would dance with fascinating young men … would appear on the balcony above, wearing a blue dress, and everyone would ask who that enchanting girl could be." The center of the fantasy is, of course, Carlos; he is the most important of the admiring observers. In Violeta's mind, her sudden desirability is proof that she has devoted herself to his text. Looking at her displayed on the balcony, "Carlos … would understand at last that she had read and loved his poems always." For Violeta, memorizing the poet's text is one with becoming the text. Transformed into the perfect object of desire, she becomes a poem. Just as Braggioni's guitar stands for Laura's body in "Flowering Judas," so Violeta becomes Carlos's poem in her imagination, the perfect actualization of his romantic texts.

Finally unable to restrain her desire, Violeta intimates to Carlos her knowledge of his poems. The confession immediately brings what she both desires and fears: her transformation into an erotic object. When she rises to retrieve his book, the poet follows her down the dark hall, the predatory "pad-pad of his rubber heels close behind her." Finally, he traps her in the moonlight and kisses her. Although Violeta receives only a kiss, the impact of Carlos's act is equal to a rape; she is, as her name suggests, a virgin violated.

Carlos's unexpected kiss constitutes a terrifying violation for several reasons. Violeta dreams of Carlos's love and turns to him expecting "to sink into a look warm and gentle." What she confronts instead is the blank gaze of the predator: "His eyes were bright and shallow, almost like the eyes of Pepe, the macaw." Rather than offering a communion between equals, Carlos seeks to possess and devour. Like Braggioni's predatory gaze, which belies the superficially compassionate content of his song, Carlos's eyes expose the sadistic desire underlying his poetry. "Staring at her, fearfully close," their blank rapacity alarms Violeta, and she struggles to escape, feeling as if she is "about to smother."

No matter how she turns, however, the young girl confronts another image of herself as she is perceived by the poet. She cannot escape his text: it surrounds her like a mirror, and she possesses no other language except that which defines and thus controls her. Although Violeta feels violated by the poet's act, she continues to watch herself as if through his eyes, and in the next moments her sense of self is repeatedly transformed as she struggles to accept the changing images that Carlos provides. The poet first calls Violeta an innocent child, chiding her for overreacting to "a little brotherly kiss." When he tells her that she "smell[s] like a nice baby, freshly washed with white soap," his voice "tremble[s] in a strange way," revealing that her innocence excites him. Violeta, longing for adulthood, cannot fully understand Carlos's fantasy, the pleasure he takes in imagining her innocence as a blank, whitewashed and inviting inscription. Although she accepts his image, she does so with shame and horror. "She saw herself before him, almost as if his face were a mirror. Her mouth was too large; her face was simply a moon; her hair was ugly … 'Oh I'm so sorry!' she whispered." In her own mind, Violeta feels transformed into a round-faced infant by the poet's controlling language and look. To be undesirable, she feels, is to be without value, to not exist, and she suddenly longs "to run away," to kill herself.

However, Carlos's next words again transform Violeta: "What did you expect when you came out here alone with me?" he asks, suggesting that she invited the kiss. Suddenly she is seducer rather than child—she has provoked her own violation. "He turned and started away. She was shamefully, incredibly in the wrong. She had behaved like an immodest girl." Buffeted between the twin poles of male fantasy, Violeta becomes in moments both the virgin and the prostitute, the temptress and the victim: like Alma in "The Evening," she is simultaneously "little whore" and "adorable angel." "It was all bitterly real and unbelievable," she thinks, "like a nightmare that went on and on and no one heard you calling to be waked up."

Laura and Violeta form a still center in their stories, surrounded by men who perform the actions and do most of the speaking. Willing objects of fantasy, they alternately yield to and struggle against the defining language and erotic gaze of the more powerful male characters. In their identification with vehicles of the imagination—musical instruments, poetry—Laura and Violeta resemble artist's models whose nude bodies provide image and inspiration. In this context, in two other stories dating from the 1920s, "The Martyr" and "The Lovely Legend," Porter more explicitly explored the sado-masochism which she saw underlying the tradition of romantic love. Of the two, she published only "The Martyr," a text that uses ironic reversal to make its point: the artist is his model's victim. Both "The Martyr" and "The Lovely Legend" are told from the male artist's point of view. Both expose, with underlying irony and anger, each artist's exploitation and objectification of the passive woman in the making of his art.

In creating Ruben, the artist in "The Martyr," Porter drew on her acquaintance with Diego Rivera. Isabel, Ruben's model, resembles Lupe Marin, Rivera's wife and model, known for her violent temper, and the painting in the story corresponds to Rivera's mural "Creation," which he painted in 1922 at the Preparatoria School. However, Porter draws Ruben, her artist, with the exaggerated strokes of a cartoon. The martyr of the story, he can speak only of his passionate adoration of Isabel. When she leaves him for another artist, he gorges himself to death, between bites mourning the moments when "she used to kick my shins black and blue." Ruben's steady, destructive feeding not only reveals his self-destructive tendencies but also suggests his powerful desire to repossess Isabel. Thus, Porter repeatedly links his eating to his loss: while he laments Isabel's absence, he fills himself with substitutes: "Crisp sweet cakes," "sweet wine," and "soft Toluca cheese, spiced with mangos." "[E]ating cheese and gazing with wet eyes at the nineteenth figure of Isabel" on his easel, Ruben longs again to devour his model with his eyes but now must satisfy his hunger for her in other ways.

Ruben's "consuming" desire for Isabel is apparent even before she runs away, in his obsession with her as his model. She would often "stand all day … while Ruben made sketches of her." His mural is to contain twenty figures of Isabel, twenty reinterpretations of her significance. In the flesh, the single focus of the artist's gaze, Isabel becomes the sole subject of his language after her departure. Here she appears in characteristic dual terms—innocent child and evil temptress. "[My] poor little angel Isabel is a murderess," Ruben mourns. She is a killer in the diminutive: "Ah Isabelita, my executioner!" Ironic and exaggerated, "The Martyr" parodies the male artist's obsession with the meaning of woman. Yet even as parody, Ruben's gluttony suggests the artist's desire to control and consume his model through language and image. (At the same time the story alludes to Rivera's own voracious appetite for both food and sex.) His frequent relations with his models—perhaps including Porter—are public knowledge. Isabel's response can be inferred from her flight, as can her boredom and sense of entrapment before she escapes with her lover. Yet in describing the new relationship, Porter reveals that Isabel is as addicted to her objectification as is Laura in "Flowering Judas": Isabel has left Ruben for a man who will create a "mural with fifty figures [of her] in it, instead of only twenty."

The mocking tone of "The Martyr" disappears in "The Lovely Legend," replaced by a clear sense of underlying rage. Here Porter portrays two artists, friends, both using the same woman as image and inspiration in their art. The painter Rafael's relationship to this model is both overtly exploitive and sadistic; in contrast, the poet Amado is foolishly infatuated with his own fantasies of the woman. Rafael, occasionally referred to as Ruben, is clearly based on Diego Rivera; Amado, a poet and lover, takes his character from Salómon de la Selva. The story opens with the two men discussing women as erotic objects. Amado is describing at length the color and odor of women he has desired or made love to; Rafael seems bored, mentioning finally his need for a particular type of woman to serve as a model:

I need a model for the Maya fresco, said Rafael. I want a lean tall woman who does not simper or paint her finger nails. She must have long hard hands and feet, and a nose with a hooked bridge. Her hair must be black.

According to Amado, Rosita, a dying tubercular prostitute living at Calle de la Palma, meets Rafael's need exactly. Like Isabel in "The Martyr," or like Lupe herself, according to Porter's notes, Rosita is aloof and bold, gaunt but physically powerful and often violent. Rafael takes her home as his model and paints her during the increasingly infrequent lulls between her violent rages and physical attacks.

Because of Rosita's profession and her increasing violence, the reader is unable to share the complacency with which the male characters view her objectification. In fact, her original role as prostitute suggests the truth about her second role as model. In both roles she is powerless, an object that may be possessed and then discarded. Whether standing before the two men in the artist's studio or at Calle de la Palma, in the men's minds she has value only insofar as she stimulates both their erotic fantasies and their art: the two seem inextricably linked. Her violent attacks on Rafael suggest that Rosita resists her completely passive status. Although she does not speak, by throwing pots at the painter's head she clearly upsets the terms of their relation and attempts, unsuccessfully, to assert her presence as more than a passive medium.

Rafael, however, remains entirely indifferent towards his model, unlike Ruben in "The Martyr." He does not recognize her violence or rage in any way. Her protest is merely an annoyance, and he makes no effort either to understand or to resolve it. For him, Rosita is an object, not a person, a more or less useful means for expressing his creative powers. As he tells Amado, "this empty creature, useless as a human being, has for me the value of a work of art." On the other hand, Amado, the poet, is deeply affected by Rafael's images of Rosita, "recreated in splendor, her likeness raised to the stature of a goddess." Stimulated by his fellow artist's work, he begins to construct increasingly obsessive romantic fantasies about the model until, unable to overcome his infatuation, he flees to Nicaragua, rewrites all of his poetry, and dreams of Rosita's "magnified portraits." During the poet's absence, Rafael tires of the model's violence, perhaps because he unconsciously recognizes it as an effort at self-expression. As he later tells Amado, Rosita had acquired an increasingly irritating tendency to regard "those gorgeous bones as her own property." Her usefulness over, he returns her to the brothel at Calle de la Palma. When an unsubdued Amado returns, Rafael tells him Rosita is dead. The poet mourns Rosita passionately and composes a lengthy ballad of her life, transforming her into "The Lovely Legend." But then, upon learning that she has been returned to her former profession, he visits Calle de la Palma only to experience an inexplicable yet complete collapse of his fantasy. She ceases to be a significant object for him, and he feels, suddenly, "as if she were really dead."

In Rafael's last speech to Amado, Rosita's status as an object to be appropriated and discarded becomes entirely evident. According to Rafael, Rosita herself had no identity; she existed and had value only through the forms given her by the artist's desire. When that desire disappeared, she became a thing of no value. "Why mourn?" Rafael asks his friend:

You have your poem, I have my fresco: they are the ends, what else is in the least important? Rosita? pah, dead or alive, how does she figure in this now? [….] I tell you, you loved some fancy you had of her, nothing more. She is not a woman to love, she is a bitch and ugly to her core, any beauty she possesses you added to her yourself. I clothed my idea with her outlines, and I love that: but I never confused the two things.

As prostitute, bitch, and ugly woman, Rosita is nothing—she has no significance except as a passive physical vehicle for the artist's vision. In Rafael's speech, Porter exposes the sadistic appropriation of Rosita by poet and painter alike. Rosita herself has no voice in the story—the men articulate her significance and insignificance. Her only recourse is inarticulate rage. Ironically, what is produced through or by means of this silent woman are more texts: a poem, a fresco, a "Lovely Legend." These transform a dying prostitute, like an orphan wandering on a shore, or a nun dancing on glass, into a romantic victim.

When "The Lovely Legend" is grouped with Porter's other published and unpublished stories from 1920s Mexico, it becomes apparent that in her early fiction she repeatedly explored the sadomasochism which she saw underlying relationships in which women are transformed into symbolic and erotic objects. All of her male characters are artists: poets, painters, singers. Their poems, paintings, and songs originate in a relationship to a woman that is both violent and sensual. And their art is implicated in that violence; although alternately seductive poetry and obsessive fantasy, it is always predatory, seeking to define, objectify and ultimately control its female subject. In those narratives written from the woman's point of view, the combination of attraction and danger surrounding the male artist creates such ambivalence that the female character is frozen between desire and terror, yielding and flight. On the other hand, narratives written from the man's point of view expose an attitude toward the woman that is either so fatuous or so coldly exploitative that the female characters respond with violence.

Although the connections among these several narratives become clear when they are examined as a group, what remains unclear are Porter's possible motives for exposing and exploring the sadomasochistic potential in these relationships. Her 1921 essay, "The Mexican Trinity," provides one clue. Here she condemns contemporary Mexican literature for ignoring the revolution and adhering to the old themes of "romance and the stars, and roses and the shadowy eyes of ladies, touching no sorrow of the human heart other than the pain of unrequited love." Romantic love is neither modern nor revolutionary, Porter implies; it is distinctly unliberating. The Mexico stories develop a more complex and even more condemnatory statement on art that portrays romantic love. By focusing on the relationship of male artist and female subject, these stories expose the origins of the tradition, showing the varying postures of seduction, infatuation, and sacrifice which are celebrated as love rises out of oppressive, violent relationships and which are, in actuality, postures of domination and submission. The poems, paintings, and songs in these stories either originate in the exploitation of a woman or express a lover's desire to possess the beloved: a desire which finds correspondence in her unacknowledged wish to be possessed. "Possessing," as Porter points out in her essay, "Marriage Is Belonging," is too often "the basis of many contracts" between men and women.

A book review from 1925 provides another important clue to Porter's concerns in her Mexico fiction. In the review, she touches on a related subject: art is made predominantly by men, and in it women have a predominantly passive role as muse or model. This, Porter argues, is a wrong that must be remedied. "Why did woman allow herself to be used as a symbol by man?" she asks in the review. Why is woman an actress, "a plastic medium for the expression of someone else's idea"? "If this difference is biological," she continues, "then it may be said that nature is the implacable enemy of woman and it is the duty of intelligence to combat this destructive law."

These statements, bolstered by the feminism of other 1920s reviews, support the reading that Porter's early fiction attacks the conventions of a male-dominated literary tradition in which women perennially served as passive subject rather than active creator, and in which one goal of art—whether it be Braggioni's song, Carlos's passionate poems of sacrifice and adoration, or Amado's "Lovely Legend"—is their submission to men's creative and erotic fantasies. Thus, the fiction condemns the male artists who perpetuate and benefit from the tradition of romantic love.

Yet this answer is also incomplete. For the women in Porter's Mexico stories do not blindly comply with the demands of their male companions. Laura is well aware of the violence under Braggioni's oily song, and both Isabel and Rosita throw pots at the painters' heads. What these stories (told from the woman's point of view) make absolutely clear, in fact, is that women are seduced by the romantic love tradition and often find their own objectification exciting. Porter's terms in the review—"nature" and "intelligence"—illuminate Laura's position between yielding and flight. Her mind tells her that she should flee, but her body stays firmly in place. In a brief, undated journal entry, Porter laments her own upbringing in the tradition of romantic love and the shock she encountered—perhaps like Laura's terrible disillusionment—when she entered "real life" in the twenties:

LOVE. My earliest notions of love were founded, alas, for me in the world I was about to encounter, not on Freud, but on Harry King's poem to his dead wife, on Heloise's letters to Abelard on Wuthering Heights … and on my father's perpetual mourning for my mother, who died young and fair and never faded as mortal women do. This is no preparation for what we are pleased to call real life as I was to learn.

In "The Making of Flowering Judas," Thomas Walsh suggests that Laura's defensive pose reflects her author's fears: "Porter identified with … Laura's 'notorious virginity,' expressing her own fear of violation in a world in which men were used to having their way with women." Yet as much as Laura expresses Porter's fear, she also expresses her desire. As a public reviewer, Porter condemned artistic conventions of sexual objectification, but privately she acknowledged her own romantic desires. Like Laura, she was poised between two worlds, one of "romantic error," which she found impossible to relinquish, another of modern disillusionment, in which she could see that the tradition of romantic love perpetuated oppression in every relation of men and women, from that of artist and subject—the scheme in which the fantasies first find expression—to that of lovers, as the fantasies are acted out. As a scrap written in the third person among her papers states: "She suffered a great deal from love, or rather, the impossibility of finding an adequate substitute for illusion."

Caught up in the Mexican art community, Porter must have felt great contradictions between her attraction to and emotional involvement with the men she knew and her simultaneous recognition that both their art and their culture exploited women sexually. Romantic herself, she records with pleasure, "Salómon repeating his poems, lightly melancholy, full of a false nostalgia, oddly enchanting." Yet elsewhere her notes explicitly condemn the poet's romantic code: "I detested his attitude toward love and women." She comments wryly, "If Salómon met the Virgin Mary, he would introduce himself as the Holy Ghost." "Symbols"—"little whore, adorable angel"—or models and muses—"plastic medium[s] for the expression of someone else's ideas"—the women in Porter's Mexico fiction are objectified and exploited. Yet to grind paints and perhaps model for Diego Rivera and to dance with Salómon de la Selva and have that dance transformed into a poem were undoubtedly experiences which Porter was unwilling to relinquish.

Throughout her life, Porter's fiction as well as her letters, journals, and essays, records an unresolved struggle between desire for romantic love and desire for freedom: it seemed impossible for her to achieve these two together. This struggle was probably extremely acute during the 1920s. Porter turned thirty in 1920, and her unpublished personal notes from the next ten years record forcefully her recurring frustration with emotional relationships. "Not one of them wished me to live as I must live, given my nature and my vocation," she once wrote in her notes. "They wished to put my whole life to uses for which it simply was not intended." Conditioned by her upbringing and culture and, moreover, impelled by her own desires for love, she often complied willingly with her companion's expectations. The results were painful: she saw herself, like a model or muse, transformed by the other's fantasy of her: "under the strain of trying to live in the vise in which they could fit me," her notes record, "I took on, you might say, the shape of their own distorted desires." Lovers consumed or destroyed her, Porter's journals from the twenties suggest, leaving her "withered" and "mangled." As for Laura in "Flowering Judas," the alternative to seemingly inevitable subjection is flight. In a journal entry dated Monday, February 27, 1928, Porter describes her struggle between these two unsatisfactory alternatives and vows to end a period of self-imposed isolation and "face the world." "I found much there to frighten and discompose me," she writes, "but only because my sexual impulses led me into situations that I could not control or battle with…. Certainly my doubts of human beings and their motives is [sic] founded in a fear of their power over me."

The mingled violence, hatred, and desire which infuse sexual relations in Porter's 1920s fiction become a consistent characteristic of her vision, apparent in much of her work through Ship of Fools. Finally, all romantic relationships are seen as stifling and destructive. From Miranda's sudden recognition, "I hate loving and being loved, I hate it," to Jenny Brown's impassioned attack: "I think it is a booby trap … I hate it and I always did," spoken "with a violence that made her shake all over," rejections of love chime repeatedly in Porter's writing. This early group of Mexico stories about artists and desire reveal that in the 1920s Porter was exploring the materials out of which this "booby trap" is created and maintained, perhaps in an effort to control her own victimization by love. The stories not only expose the violence underlying the symbolic, erotic objectification of women, but they also, with intense honesty, explore the ways in which women have been attracted to or participated in their own objectification.