[In the following essay, Moddelmog offers a psychoanalytical reading of Porter's “He.”]

“He” has received varied critical attention in the fifty-five years since its publication, so varied in fact that the interpretations of its critics make one wonder whether they have read the same story. “He” is ostensibly about the Whipple family, but because Porter develops in detail only the relationship between Mrs. Whipple and her retarded son, the story becomes essentially a study of the psychology of that relationship. Critically, the key question seems to be how Porter wants the reader to react to Mrs. Whipple. Are we to view her finally with compassion, condemnation, or ambivalence?

Winfred Emmons, for example, says of the story's conclusion: “Everybody has done his best, but He was a problem that nobody could solve. The reader may hope that Mrs. Whipple's bright outlook will somehow return; it has seemed to be her natural state and would doubtless be more pleasant to her than the defeated pragmatism of her husband. And it is possible that their luck might change for the better some day. Sometimes luck works that way, and Mrs. Whipple's desire for order and a better life might find a way to help luck along.”¹ But whereas Emmons applauds Mrs. Whipple's optimism, William Nance claims that Mr. Whipple's main function in the story is “to furnish a welcome contrast to his wife by acting as the laconic voice of plain truth.” And whereas Emmons hopes that Mrs. Whipple's life will improve now that He has been placed in the county home, Nance takes a more ambivalent attitude toward the mother. He maintains that the reader is left “suspended between condemnation and sympathy for this weak woman in her hard fate.”² In contrast to Emmons and Nance, George Hendrick states that “He” ends with compassion for both the mother and the child, but that it is “a completely pessimistic story.”³

What gives rise to this diversity of opinion? M. M. Liberman suggests that “He” is a “gem of enormous thematic magnitude” and “a masterpiece of compression” in the tradition of Joyce's Dubliners.⁴ Unfortunately, economical stories of this sort (where not a word is wasted and much is implied) are often misread, for the simple language and seemingly straightforward narration may relax the reader into overlooking subtleties and ironies meant to darken the story's tone and complicate its tragedy. Furthermore, the subject matter of “He”—coping with the psychological and physical demands of raising a retarded child—is one that causes many readers to sympathize with Mrs. Whipple instead of judging her according to the story's evidence. My objectives in this [essay] are, first, to indicate how the story should be read and, then, to establish the view that Porter expects the reader to take toward Mrs. Whipple.

“He” is a tour de force in using point of view to unveil the hypocrisy of a character.⁵ We learn Mrs. Whipple's sentiments in two ways: directly, through quotation, and indirectly, through the restatement of her words by a third-person narrator. The narrator paraphrases accurately, but, in the story's opening paragraphs, qualifies Mrs. Whipple's noble and loving assertions by reminding us that she makes them only when the neighbors are (or might be) listening and by “loading” his descriptions with tags such as “would say,” “kept saying,” “forever saying so,” and “keep on saying it.”⁶ Thus, we learn immediately that the narrator is ironic. In reality, Mrs. Whipple is vain and self-deluding and often unaware of, or incapable of admitting, her true motives. In order to understand Mrs. Whipple, we must remember that throughout the story her assertions are exaggerated contradictions of her actual feelings.

Porter's focus is on Mrs. Whipple's relationship with her retarded son, and in the opening scenes we discover the conditional nature of that relationship. The narrator mentions that her claims of a monumental love for Him are made only in front of the neighbors. Mrs. Whipple's priorities are further clarified when she explains to her husband the reason for this great love: “It's natural for a mother … it's more natural for a mother to be that way. People don't expect so much of fathers, some way” (p. 49).⁷ In the repetition of the idea of her love as being “natural” and in her concern for what people expect, we note the unnaturalness of her “love.” Although she would not admit the fact, even to herself, Mrs. Whipple's relationship with Him is dictated by what others would think, not by motherly love or tenderness.

That is, Mrs. Whipple's public relationship with Him is governed by her anticipation of the neighbors' reactions. For when Mrs. Whipple is alone with Him and does not expect the neighbors to visit, eavesdrop, or spy, her true attitude toward Him becomes apparent, at least to the reader. John E. Hardy claims that the preacher's assurance that He enjoys God's special protection (“The innocent walk with God”) has been valuable to Mrs. Whipple as “an excuse for her own neglect and exploitation of Him.”⁸ However, Mrs. Whipple's treatment of her son in private suggests her intentions go further than neglect and exploitation. When Mrs. Whipple tells her neighbors, “I wouldn't have anything happen to Him for all the world, but it just looks like I can't keep Him out of mischief” (p. 50), we search for the reality behind that seemingly loving, but defensive, assertion. We quickly realize that, unconsciously or subconsciously, she desires His death, provided she cannot be blamed for it.

The evidence is copious. She allows Him to climb peach trees until a neighbor, concerned for His safety, warns her that she shouldn't let Him do that (p. 50). She permits Him to handle the bees in their apiary, for He doesn't mind their stings, until, once again, she becomes fearful of what the neighbors might say (p. 51). She boxes Him on the ears because He got His clothes dirty, unaware of how hard she has hit Him until she notices Him fighting back tears and rubbing His head. Then she gets scared and has to sit down because her knees are trembling (pp. 52–53). She gives her daughter Emly the extra blanket off His bed (p. 50) and provides warm clothes for both her other children, claiming that they cannot afford the same for Him (p. 54). Yet He is the one taken sick in February. The Whipples fret for two days, His condition growing no better, before they finally send for the doctor, who tells them He must be kept warm. Mrs. Whipple is ashamed, for, not being able to stand dirt, she has washed His blanket and they must wait until it dries to put it back on His bed. So the Whipples give Him the blanket off their bed and put His cot by the fire, but again Mrs. Whipple is motivated by her fear of gossip: “They can't say we didn't do everything for Him … even to sleeping cold ourselves on His account” (p. 55).

Mrs. Whipple's death wish for Him manifests itself less clearly, but not less significantly, in His encounters with the pig and with the bull. When her older son Adna refuses to take a baby pig away from its mother because “That sow'd rip my insides out all over the pen” (p. 52), Mrs. Whipple pushes Him into the pen, claiming He's not afraid. The mother pig is “a great fighter, worse than a Jersey cow” (p. 52). He comes running back, suckling pig in His arms, the sow “raging at His heels” (p. 52).

Encouraging Him to court danger is not the only way that Mrs. Whipple displays her death wish for Him on this occasion. Hendrick notes that in this scene the description of the pink pig is almost the same as descriptions of Him.⁹ Indeed, throughout the story the physical description of Him is reminiscent of a pig: for example, “Rolls of fat covered Him like an overcoat” (p. 50) and “He blubbered and rolled” (p. 56). After He catches the piglet, Mrs. Whipple takes it from Him and, with her face stiff, slices its throat in a stroke. He runs at the sight of the pig's blood, but Mrs. Whipple assures herself that He'll forget and eat plenty just the same. She cannot, however, stop thinking about Him:

“It's a shame, a shame,” she kept saying under her breath, “and Adna with so much brains!”

She kept on feeling badly about all sorts of things. In the first place it was the man's work to butcher; the sight of the pig scraped pink and naked made her sick. He was too fat and soft and pitiful-looking. It was simply a shame the way things had to happen.

(p. 52)

Mrs. Whipple's stream-of-conscious self-pity underlines how closely she too connects her son to the pig. Reviewing her feelings about the pig, scraped pink and naked, triggers the thought of Him. The link between the butchered pig and Him is thus too obvious to overlook: both make her sick. We may deduce that when she cut the pig's throat she was also thinking of Him, and that this confused lamentation is partly an effort to propitiate her conscience, to prevent it from accusing her of the wish to murder. We recall the similar action of another Porter character with a death wish, Maria Concepcion, who soon after she discovers her husband's infidelity, selects a chicken for the archeologist Givens and “silently, swiftly drew her knife across its throat, twisting the head off with the casual firmness she might use with the top of a beet” (p. 7). Givens is unnerved by Maria's cold-bloodedness, but her resoluteness here is an explicit foreshadowing of her later bloody revenge.

The incident with the bull reinforces the impression that Mrs. Whipple harbors an unconscious death wish for Him. The Whipples borrow a bull for breeding purposes from a neighbor, and once again Mrs. Whipple excuses Adna and sends Him to perform a dangerous job—bringing the bull back to the Whipples' farm. After He has been gone for some time, however, she begins to worry and goes out to the lane to wait for Him. When she finally sees Him, coming slowly and leading the bull behind Him, she panics:

Mrs. Whipple was scared sick of bulls; she had heard awful stories about how they followed on quietly enough, and then suddenly pitched on with a bellow and pawed and gored a body to pieces. Any second now that black monster would come down on Him, my God, He'd never have sense enough to run.

She mustn't make a sound nor a move; she mustn't get the bull started.

(p. 55)

Significantly, right after she cautions herself to be still, Mrs. Whipple sees the bull move his head at a fly and “Her voice burst out of her in a shriek, and she screamed at Him to come on, for God's sake” (p. 55). Fear causes Mrs. Whipple to endanger His life. However, her fear is not for her son's safety; rather, she is afraid that an accident would ensure the neighbors' scorn because she had let Him undertake a dangerous task. Running toward the house, she prays, “Lord, don't let anything happen to Him. Lord, you know people will say we oughtn't to have sent Him. You know they'll say we didn't take care of Him. Oh, get Him home, safe home, safe home, and I'll look out for Him better! Amen” (Porter's emphasis, p. 56).

Psychoanalysts tell us that death wishes are not uncommon to parents, especially to the mother, of a retarded child. Maud Mannoni, a French psychoanalyst who has studied the mother-retarded child relationship, emphasizes the intensity and frequency of the mother's death wish: “The mother-child love relationship will always, in such cases, have an after-taste of death about it, of death denied, of death disguised usually as sublime love, sometimes as pathological indifference, and occasionally as conscious rejection; but the idea of murder is there, even if the mother is not always conscious of it.”¹⁰ Simon Olshansky observes that parents of a simple-minded child have little to look forward to, which leads them to search for a permanent escape: “they will always be burdened by the child's unrelenting demands and unabated dependency. The woes, the trials, the moments of despair will continue until either their own deaths or the child's death. Concern about what will happen to his child after he is dead may be a realistic concern for a parent, or it may be associated with death wishes, either for himself or for his child. Release from his chronic sorrow may be obtainable only through death.”¹¹ Thus, besides selfish reasons for wishing for a child's death, Olshansky's investigation uncovers humanitarian motives.

If we ignore the ironic narrator who dictates viewpoint in Porter's story and attribute, Mrs. Whipple's death wishes to her worry over her son's future, we might argue for humanitarian motives and conclude as Harry J. Mooney does:

In “He,” we have the story of a mother whose whole life lies in her feeble-minded son, and whose final tragedy comes to her when she is forced to put him in the county home. Mrs. Whipple is not to be blamed for the fact that her son is a mental defective, but she is altogether committed to Him … both because she loves him and because he is absolutely dependent upon her. … But the real significance of Mrs. Whipple's life lies in her effort to make a life for her son, little though she can help; otherwise his going off to the county home would be a solution to a pressing problem rather than a grim tragedy in a mother's life.¹²

Mooney's sympathetic interpretation of Mrs. Whipple cannot be accepted—first, because we should not overlook (as Mooney has) the ironic third-person narrator, and second, because Mrs. Whipple is not the typical mother of a retarded child. Mooney's belief that Mrs. Whipple loves her son is far from accurate. Indeed, as I have indicated, Mrs. Whipple's attitude toward her son is dictated entirely by her selfish concern for appearances. Furthermore, I would argue that His going to the county home is a solution to Mrs. Whipple's pressing problem, and, if so, the story's ending requires a very different response from the reader than the one Mooney proposes. The crux of our understanding of the story lies in determining Mrs. Whipple's motives for sending Him to the county home and in analyzing her feelings in the final scene.

When the doctor advises the Whipples to put Him in an institution, Mrs. Whipple promptly refuses. Her reasons, however, are far from loving ones: she does not want the neighbors saying she sent her sick child off among strangers, and she refuses to depend on charity. But Mr. Whipple maintains that He will be better cared for at the county home and assures his wife that they are not accepting charity when their taxes support the place. Once Mrs. Whipple finds excuses with which to fend off neighbors' gossip, His fate is settled. Almost cheerfully, she states that they'll bring Him home when He's better, although, as Mr. Whipple reminds her, the doctor has diagnosed His condition as untreatable. “Doctors don't know everything,” Mrs. Whipple retorts (p. 57), but immediately we see that Mrs. Whipple's optimism is intended to delude herself and others as to her true motives.

Clearly, she does not desire His return. When she begins to make plans for their family, she remarks, “… we'll all work together and get on our feet again, and the children will feel they've got a place to come to” (p. 57). In other words, without Him, family life will be normal, and the farm will become profitable. In her exultation she envisions summertime, “with the garden going fine, and new white roller shades up all over the house, and Adna and Emly home, so full of life, all of them happy together. Oh, it could happen, things would ease up on them” (pp. 57–58). Although He has been a real help around the farm, even doing Adna's chores when he left to take a job, Mrs. Whipple associates Him with their hardship. The stigma of having a retarded child is more than the vain Mrs. Whipple can bear. Having at last found a way to get rid of Him, other than by His “accidental” death, she plans to do so.

The final scene of mother and child in the neighbor's wagon is the most difficult to assess because Mrs. Whipple finally seems to feel some compunction over her previous cruel treatment of Him. If we can determine that that guilt is a small sign of love or the indication of a change of heart, Mrs. Whipple would gain in complexity and become the tragic figure that Mooney claims she is: We note first that Mrs. Whipple is accompanying Him to the county home because of her concern not for Him but about the neighbors: “The hospital would have sent an ambulance, but Mrs. Whipple couldn't stand to see Him going away looking so sick as all that” (p. 58). Second, she continues her story about her plans for Him when, to the neighbor driving the carryall, she asserts: “Besides, it ain't as if He was going to stay forever. … This is only for a little while” (p. 58).

Mrs. Whipple apparently expects an uneventful ride, a quick trip to the county home. But as she sits holding her son in her arms, she is amazed to see big tears rolling out of the corners of His eyes. She instantly believes He is accusing her of something: “Maybe He remembered that time she boxed His ears, maybe He had been scared that day with the bull, maybe He had slept cold and couldn't tell her about it; maybe He knew they were sending Him away for good and all because they were too poor to keep Him. Whatever it was, Mrs. Whipple couldn't bear to think of it … there was nothing she could do to make up to Him for His life” (p. 58). Mrs. Whipple has not admitted her death wishes, but she has a complete inventory of them running through her mind. And she has given herself away, contradicting in this more lucid, private moment her previous claim that His institutionalization is only temporary (although even privately she rationalizes that decision with the economic excuse). But, primarily, she refuses to think about Him or to try to understand His feelings. As Hardy notes: “She is herself so incapable of genuine charity, of love, that she cannot recognize even the possibility that His weeping is an expression of love for her—an appeal, simply, that He not be turned out of the family, rather than a reproach for what He has suffered there.”¹³

The final scene, then, not only reaffirms Mrs. Whipple's callousness, but also confirms His sensitive nature, which previously Porter has only hinted at. We recall, for instance, that He gasped and ran at the sight of blood when Mrs. Whipple sliced the suckling pig's throat. Mrs. Whipple dismissed His reaction, claiming that He would “forget and eat plenty, just the same” (p. 52). However, during the Sunday meal, He would not enter the dining room where the prepared pig was being carved. Mrs. Whipple attributed His refusal to timidity, but knowing her habit of rationalization, we might more plausibly argue that His reluctance arises from His memory of the butchering of the pig. At one point in the story Mrs. Whipple chastises her husband for calling Him senseless. Pretending to understand Him, she maintains, “He sees a lot that goes on, He listens to things all the time” (p. 51). Ironically, Mrs. Whipple is right. For although the Whipples are careful not to discuss their plans for His institutionalization in front of Him, He seems to know He is being sent away. His dumbness becomes that much more painful to the reader, for He cannot protest or prevent His fate.

As in Greek tragedy where blindness is an indication of “sight,” in Porter's story dumbness becomes a sign of awareness. His understanding coupled with His dependency—and contrasted to Mrs. Whipple's deception and selfishness—makes Mrs. Whipple's victimization of Him even more appalling. As Mrs. Whipple observes, He does anything she tells Him to do (p. 51). Yet she cannot accept Him for what He is, nor can she love Him. Her final thought is “what a mortal pity He was ever born” (p. 58), a feeling the neighbors voiced behind her back and the death wish she can finally admit—now that He will no longer cause her misery. As far as she is concerned, He is dead.

Having identified Mrs. Whipple's motives throughout the story and having understood the total lack of love she feels for her son, we can hardly feel compassion for her, as many critics do, at the story's end. In fact, Emmons' hope that Mrs. Whipple's “desire for order and a better life might find a way to help luck along” now seems terribly ironic; Mooney's conclusion that “the real significance of Mrs. Whipple's life lies in her effort to make a life for her son” is simply a misreading. Even Hardy's suggestion that Mrs. Whipple's incapacity is “the common incapacity of mankind, the curse of our intelligent being”¹⁴ cannot be accepted; for Porter, with her use of the ironic third-person narrator, does not let us condone that incapacity or the woman who manifests it and tries to pretend otherwise. Mrs. Whipple's hatred of Him, derived from the loss of comfort and prestige that she believes her retarded son has caused her, is despicable, no matter how universal her feeling of injustice might be.

In charting the psychology of the relationship between a mother and her retarded son, Porter actually anticipated by twenty years any extensive efforts of psychoanalysts to examine the same territory.¹⁵ However, “He” should not be viewed as a literary precursor to a scientific enterprise. Porter's purpose is not to depict the psychological and emotional problems that the ordinary mother of a retarded child might face. Instead she is concerned, as she is in many other stories, with self-deception, vanity, and hypocrisy. In “He” Porter shows us not a weak but well-meaning mother of a retarded child, but rather one whose pride and hypocrisy make her a moral monster. To be swayed by Mrs. Whipple's self-serving rationalizations is to miss the point of the story.

Notes

1. Katherine Anne Porter: The Regional Stories, Southwest Writers Series, No. 6 (Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn, 1967), p. 28.

2. Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 21.

3. Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Twayne, 1965), pp. 84, 86.

4. Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1971), pp. 87–89.

5. Several critics have recognized the irony of the narrative viewpoint, notably Liberman, Nance, and Hendrick. However, none of these critics has pursued to its fullest extent the implications of this irony, often because they assume that the irony is dropped in the story's final scene.

6. I am indebted to Paul Deasy's “Reality and Escape,” Four Quarters, 12 (1963), 30, for alerting me to these phrases. Although he uses them to a different purpose, finding them together in his essay suggested to me another way in which the third-person narrator establishes irony.

7. “He” was first published in New Masses (1927). All references to the story and the single reference to “Maria Concepcion” are from The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: New American Library, 1970) and are cited parenthetically in the text.

8. Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), p. 36.

9. Hendrick, pp. 84–85.

10. The Retarded Child and the Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973), p. 4.

11. “Chronic Sorrow: A Response to Having a Mentally Defective Child,” in Perspectives in Mental Retardation, ed. Thomas E. Jordan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), p. 27.

12. The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), p. 47.

13. Hardy, p. 38.

14. Hardy, p. 38.

15. In May 1954, Leonard Rosen told members of the American Association on Mental Deficiency that “To date there has been only one systematic study of parents of retarded children. That study was concerned with the acceptance of the retarded child by his parents.” A lecture reprinted as “Selected Aspects in the Development of the Mother's Understanding of Her Mentally Retarded Child,” American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 59 (1955), 522.