SOURCE: “Death's Other Kingdom: Dantesque and Theological Symbolism in ‘Flowering Judas,’” in Flowering Judas, edited by Virginia Spencer Carr, Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 99–120.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in PMLA in 1969, Gottfried examines Porter's use of religious imagery and language in “Flowering Judas.”]

I

I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't invent symbolism. You don't say, “I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,” but, of course, it does.

—Katherine Anne Porter¹

The attempt to portray hell and its leading personages by relating them parodically to heaven using inversions of varying degrees of complexity is traditional. Scholastic theologians like St. Thomas regularly related the various virtues and kinds of blessedness to their opposites, and both Dante and Milton, the two greatest poetic infernologists, made systematic use of parody and ironic parallelism. Katherine Anne Porter is clearly working in this ironic mode in “Flowering Judas,” a story dealing with latter-day lost souls. Her nun-like heroine is a lapsed devotee of the religion of revolution. She refers to the religion of the machine and uses a parodic saviour and symbolic perversions of the sacrament of communion and the purification ceremony of foot-washing. Precautions must be observed, however. Porter is neither a theologian nor a theological poet like Dante. In most of her other works there is comparatively little explicit use of the religious and eschatological diction and imagery so prevalent in “Flowering Judas.” Even taking the word in the most extended sense, one would be unlikely to call her a “religious” writer in the sense that T. S. Eliot or Francois Mauriac were religious writers.

The principal difference that sets her apart from the “religious” writers is not the fact that in most of her work she has not used the elaborate system of religious allusions prominent in “Flowering Judas.” Rather, it is that her portrayal of hell (not only in “Flowering Judas”) is without reference to any corresponding “heaven” or system of ultimate values other than those of Catholicism and Marxism, both discredited. In this respect she is a typical modern secular writer for whom meaning and value are created, not given; she enacts the characteristic doom of the modern Promethean artist struggling to carve out of the chaos of experience some order or meaning which can come into existence, if at all, only after the struggle. In her 1940 “Introduction” she calls the stories in Flowering Judas and Other Stories “fragments of a much larger plan,” a plan which never fully materialized. “They are,” she goes on, “what I was then able to achieve in the way of order and form and statement in a period of grotesque dislocations in a whole society where the world was heaving in the sickness of a millennial change.” For herself, she says, “most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort … to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.” Admitting that the voice of the individual artist in such times may seem inconsequential, she nevertheless concludes with a triumphant statement of faith in art itself:

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shape and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

Although Porter is referring specifically to the period of the two world wars, she is speaking of art in a way that might have met with ready understanding and approval any time these three hundred years or more, and assuredly for the last century and a half, and she speaks of it in much the same religious tone used by T. S. Eliot to urge the necessity of keeping alive another sort of faith during what he believed to be our spiritual Dark Ages. But faith in the vitality and reality of art itself (“the only reality”) is not at all the same as faith in the existence of an order or spirit informing that other “reality” of which art has commonly been held to be a reflection. In Porter's writing, such an order is implicit only by absence or negation. Yet, in her story of the failure of a young woman involved in the materialistic revolutionary movement in Mexico of the 1920s, Porter's early training and background offered her a rich store of religious imagery and language, behind which lie centuries of systematic theological thought, to give order and form to one of her sketches of the “failure of the life of man in the Western world.”

II

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot:
I would thou wert cold or hot.
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor
hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

—Rev.3.15–16

In “Flowering Judas,” as in a number of her other stories, Porter is concerned with the problem (or sin) of non-involvement and the waste for which it is responsible. Among the many other writers who dealt with the theme of the half-alive spiritual state during the period between wars, perhaps the most influential was T. S. Eliot. It is therefore not surprising that we find Porter in “Flowering Judas” drawing, as did so many of her contemporaries, upon Eliot's poetry. Her story echoes Eliot's “Gerontion” in its title and in the use of the tree's blossoms as a substitute for the Host in a travesty of Christian communion. The landscape of the heroine's dream at the end of the story, in which the infernal communion takes place, is reminiscent of both The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” Thematically the story has affinities with these poems, but “The Hollow Men” seems especially close in theme and imagery to the problems of Laura, Porter's heroine. Like the life-in-death of the hollow men, Laura's life is characterized by “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” Each of Eliot's negations is carried out in the imagery of Laura's story.

Behind both Eliot's hollow men (and much of his other poetry of this period) and Porter's Laura, who so much resembles them, lies the Inferno of Dante, especially the third canto, wherein is depicted the fate of the souls who were neither good nor evil, who had never truly lived—those “sorrowful souls” whose eternity is spent in aimless wandering in the vestibule of hell, as they had lived “without blame and without praise” (35–36). Central among these lost souls, and representative of their plight, is that of one (perhaps Pontius Pilate) “who, through cowardice, made the great denial.” Negation or refusal or moral choice is the keynote of the spiritual existence of these creatures, as it was for Pilate, as it is for the hollow men, and as it has become for Laura. Feeling that “she has been betrayed irreparably by the disunion between her way of living and her feeling of what life should be,” Laura has sought a point of fixity in commitment to the revolutionary cause, but her commitment is wholly outward: “she wears the uniform of an idea.” Like the saint or mystic, “she is not at home in the world” and tries to persuade herself that her stoical denial of all external events “is a sign that she is gradually perfecting herself” in a spiritual discipline cultivated against some nameless, impending disaster. But her stoicism is a parody of the spiritual discipline of the saint or mystic, for her unworldliness is utterly dissociated from joy. Totally negative, it does not stem from feelings of kinship with anything beyond herself, but from “the very cells of her flesh [which] reject knowledge and kinship in one monotonous word. No. No. No.”

Laura, to be sure, is not entirely “without praise.” We are told that “all praise her gray eyes, and the soft, round under lip which promises gayety, yet is always grave.” Nevertheless, “nobody touches her,” and her greatest fame is for the “puzzle of her notorious virginity,” a virginity whose quality is purely negative. But the thematic patterns of negation in the story are more complex than this, and far more complexly interwoven with Dantesque imagery. The ultimate refusal is that of life itself, and we are given an example in the suicide of Eugenio that seems the logical culmination of his meaningless, dope-sodden, imprisoned existence. His death was not a protest nor an act of pride, but it was in keeping with the general motif of acedia that dominates the story—he committed suicide “because he was bored.”

Laura, the uninvolved, did nothing about it. “He refused to allow me to call the prison doctor,” she says, though in his stupor he could not have prevented her from doing so. In Laura's dream at the end of the story, Eugenio appears to her, calls her murderer, and hands her “the warm and bleeding flowers” that he stripped from the Judas tree. As he holds them to her lips she becomes aware that he is the tree, “that his hand was fleshless, a cluster of small white petrified branches,” and that she is eating his body and blood. While the image of bleeding and talking plants is familiar to readers of Virgil and Dante, the association with suicide is Dante's alone (Inferno, xiii). By misusing their freedom of bodily movement, the suicides have robbed themselves of their own form forever. They are pent up in trees and bushes and can find expression only in the agony of bleeding when some chance passerby such as Dante, or malicious creatures such as the Harpies, break leaves or branches from them. While they bleed they can speak. Porter blended the image from Dante with an image of infernal communion from Eliot's “Gerontion”

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers …

thus achieving a richly symbolic unifying statement that connects all the negations of life and love in Laura's story with the ultimate negation of life itself by self-destruction.

According to Dante, love is the spring of all spiritual (and, indeed, physical) motion. In Purgatory he has Virgil explain that neither the creator nor any creature is devoid of love (xvii. 91–92). But the whole of Dante's Purgatory is designed to show that our sins stem from three sorts of perversion of love: love of wrong objects, excessive love of proper but secondary objects, and deficiency of love (xvii. 96). The last vice is the way of the slothful, whose lack of diligence in pursuit of the good is the sin of acedia. Appropriately, it is on the cornice of the slothful in Purgatory that Virgil pauses to explain the doctrine of love and its relation to sin. In the Inferno, which is not organized according to the seven deadly sins, the slothful are given no distinct habitation, but may have some relationship to the cattivi of the Antinferno, the souls who were kin to those angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but were for themselves (iii. 38–39).

In “Flowering Judas,” it is Laura's deficiency of love that Braggioni, her revolutionary leader, finds most difficult to understand. Braggioni himself is an evil soul who becomes positive at least by virtue of action, and he cannot see why Laura “works so hard for the revolutionary idea unless she loves some man who is in it. ‘Are you not in love with someone?’ ‘No,’ says Laura. ‘And no one is in love with you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then it is your own fault.’”

But to understand Laura more fully, we must direct our attention to Braggioni himself, who seems at so many points to be her opposite. Whereas she is prim in her blue serge dress and round white collar “not purposely nun-like” (it is “one of twenty precisely alike, folded in blue tissue paper in the upper drawer of her clothes chest”), he is resplendent in his expensive and gaudy dress. Whereas she is ascetic and notoriously chaste, he is a sensualist. He is frankly opportunistic, while “she has encased herself in a set of principles.” She cannot love at all, but he loves himself with great “tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity.” Yet in spite of these contrasts and more, Braggioni insists to Laura that “we are more alike than you realize in some things.” Although she inwardly rejects the kinship, she admits to herself: “It may be true that I am as corrupt, in another way, as Braggioni, … as callous, as incomplete.” If there is, indeed, such a similarity, where can it lie?

III

Amari habent iram permanentem propter permanentiam
tristitiae, quam inter viscera tenent clausam …
[The sullen have a permanent anger because of a perma-
nent sorrow which they hold closed up in their bowels.]

—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, Q. 158, Art. 5

It is at once evident in “Flowering Judas” that Braggioni, though prideful and vainglorious, is preeminently a man of wrath, both by profession and inclination, and that his wrath is of the permanent sort stemming from a deep inner wound. St. Thomas, in describing the wrathful, follows Aristotle by distinguishing among three kinds: the quick-tempered (acuti), the vindictive (difficiles), and the sullen (amari). Dante consigns the souls of the sullen to the fifth circle of the Inferno (Canto vii) where they are permanently buried beneath the black slime of the sorrowful (tristo) Styx. Dante calls them “the sorrowful” (tristi), and he seems to echo Aquinas when he has them describe themselves as bearing within themselves their sluggish or slothful fume (accidioso fummo, vii. 123). Because they darkened the glad light of the sun and the sweet air with their sullenness, they now sadden themselves in the black muck (vii. 124). Completely submerged, they cannot communicate directly, but for the sake of his disciple, Virgil interprets the bubbles they make, commenting afterwards that this is the song they gurgle inwardly, in their throats (vii. 125). St. Thomas observes that all anger (ira) is compounded of the contrary passions of hope (of vengeance) and sorrow (on account of some pain that has been suffered) (I–II, Q. 46, Art. 1). As for the sullen specifically, he attributes the permanence of their anger to a permanent sorrow (tristitia) that they nurse inside themselves.

If we examine Braggioni, beginning with his description in the first paragraph of “Flowering Judas,” certain details stand out. In the opening sentence we see him in an uncomfortable heap, singing in a “furry, mournful voice.” Lately Laura has found him waiting for her every night with his “surly, waiting expression … snarling a tune under his breath.” Unaware in his vanity of his “miserable performance” as a singer, he refuses Laura's offer of the brown beverage chocolate, for it “thickens the voice.” A few pages further on, he is described as singing another song “with tremendous emphasis, weighing his words,” in sharp and perhaps ironic contrast to his normal style that is like the muddy gurgling of Dante's tristi who cannot speak whole words (vii. 126) because of their situation. His song is a melancholy ditty in which the singer complains of his utter loneliness with no one to console him. He finds a clear singing voice, it seems, only to indulge his meaningless and self-pitying sorrow.

It is not long before his self-pity and melancholy find speech, as he tells Laura, in language suggesting both the Psalmist (Psalms lxix.2, 21) and Christ: “It is true everything turns to dust in the hand, to gall on the tongue.” In his abiding tristitia, this secular savior recalls by travesty Isaiah's “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Like the Biblical man of sorrows, Braggioni assuredly “hath no form nor comeliness.” Isaiah's servant of the Lord “was wounded for our transgressions,” and Braggioni sees himself as “wounded by life” (Isaiah liii.2–5). In spite of his unrestrained self-indulgence, nothing satisfies him. “I am disappointed in everything as it comes. Everything,” he sighs. At this point he affirms his kinship with Laura: “You, poor thing, you will be disappointed too. You are born for it. We are more alike than you realize in some things. Wait and see.”

Braggioni's grotesque melancholy is at last appeased when he returns to his long-suffering wife. She calls him her “angel” and washes his feet in a parody of Christian ritual. In his softened and sentimental mood, “he is sorry for everything and bursts into tears. ‘Ah, yes, I am hungry, I am tired, let us eat something together,’ he says between sobs.” He enjoys the luxury of sobbing with his wife, who is represented as a mater dolorosa, endlessly weeping. She begs her idol to forgive her, “and this time he is refreshed by the solemn, endless rain of her tears.”

Laura's stern self-control may seem at the opposite pole from the maudlin emotionalism of Braggioni, but she appears to share with him an abiding sorrow. She denies life, hiding her vital body with its “long, invaluably beautiful legs” and its “great round breasts … like a nursing mother's” in ascetic, nun-like garb, just as she has encased her soul in “the uniform of an idea.” Braggioni is a minister of death, consecrated to an apocalypse of “gaping trenches, of crashing walls and broken bodies.” He reserves his love for pistols and cannon and his faith for dynamite. He is an embodiment of St. Paul's warning against excessive sorrow, for “the sorrow of the world worked death” (II Cor., vii.10). Laura recognizes this as she hands him his gunbelt, saying: “Put that on, and go kill somebody in Morelia, and you will be happier.” Braggioni, the wrathful, with his infinite love and charity for himself, is a worker of death, but Laura oils and loads his pistols. She lacks love even for herself. She is allied to death through her passiveness and through the self-delusion in which she monstrously confuses “love with revolution, night with day, life with death.” She may abstractly love the “tender round hands” of the pupils in the school where she teaches, but they “remain strangers to her.”

Braggioni is guilty of every sin, but Laura is virtuous only by negation, not by attachment to any good: “Denying everything, she may walk anywhere in safety, she looks at everything without amazement.” Her “bold talismanic word” No serves her in place of the Lord's prayer, for it “does not suffer her to be led into evil.” Her deficiency of love renders her the victim of that spiritual sloth of acedia that Thomas Aquinas calls sorrow in the face of spiritual good (II–II, Q. 35, Art. 2). If we accept the association of acedia with Dante's cattivi, we see, also, that the poet denies even a total death to the souls who die confirmed in this sin. The souls of the uninvolved in Dante are rejected by both Heaven and Hell, where the damned might have some glory over them, just as Laura lives in Mexico but is not accepted by it (“I am tempted to forgive you for being a gringa,” says Braggioni).

Laura, who is so frightened of life, is equally frightened of death. Although she “may walk anywhere in safety,” she is possessed by what may not be a wholly irrational fear “that violence, mutilation, a shocking death, wait for her.” She translates this “warning in her blood” into homely terms by taking excessive precautions when crossing streets, so as not to be killed by an automobile. She has devoted herself to a cause which promised men that they might have life more abundantly only to find herself an agent of the forces of death, a cause that seemed to offer an earthly fulfillment of charity only to discover that it is riddled with intrigue, jealousy, and selfishness. Braggioni's “gluttonous bulk,” so different from the “vessel of abstract virtues” she had imagined the ideal revolutionist to be, becomes the “symbol of her many disillusions.” The life more abundant has become a “feeding trough” for him and other envious “hungry world-saviours.” But in spite of her disillusion, Laura is paralyzed. She “feels herself bogged in a nightmare.” Incapable of loving either man or God, she has no positive good to which she can turn and so remains motionless, the unwilling but unrejecting agent of death. Charity is travestied in her routine, abstract attachment to the class of children she teaches and in her distribution of narcotics to the prisoners in the “infernal hole” of their prison, the narcotics that Eugenio employs to kill himself. It is not irrelevant that St. Thomas calls acedia a vice directly opposed to the theological virtue of charity (II–II, Q. 35, Art. 2).

It is clear on both psychological and theological grounds that there must be some connection between those whom Dante calls the tristi or sullen and the spiritually indifferent (anime triste) of the vestibule of the Inferno. Yet the former are granted at least the dignity of damnation while the latter go mournfully sighing forever in circles, in an eternal state of alienation. The similarity is that both possess a permanent sorrow leading to a rejection of spiritual goods, but the difference seems to be between those who have made a moral choice, though an evil one, and those who have vitiated their humanity by abstaining from moral choice itself. Acedia, that is, may be described as a state of soul or a disposition that can lead to disengagement, cowardice, negation, or indifference on the one hand, or, on the other, may manifest itself in sullenness, that species of anger whose victims are punished with the other wrathful.

If Laura's activities are a travesty of charity, so too are Braggioni's. Hungry men constantly wait for him outside his office or accost him on the street. “He is always sympathetic,” we are told. “He gives them handfuls of small coins,” and beyond this, promises. He uses them ruthlessly, and he despises them. “They are stupid, they are lazy, they are treacherous, they would cut my throat for nothing,” he tells Laura. When she informs him of the death of Eugenio, Braggioni says callously, “He is a fool, and his death is his own business,” and again, “He is a fool and we are well rid of him.” By her passiveness and self-delusion, Laura is a passive accomplice in his crimes. St. Thomas observes that sloth, though a special vice in relation to the Divine good, may also be a circumstance of all vices in relation to the specific goods of which they are the opposites (II–II, Q. 35, Art. 2, Reply to Objections). Laura admits to herself that she may be as incomplete as Braggioni, but their conditions of incompleteness are different; they have their own distinct kinds of damnation.

Perhaps all the major spiritual differences between them can be traced to one cause—that Laura, the idealist, feels deep attachment only to abstract principles, but none to any living thing, whereas Braggioni has no principles save that of expediency, but is possessed of a deep and passionate love. That this love is directed toward himself accounts for the fact that, far from the Pauline “vessel of abstract virtues,” he is in fact a vessel of all the deadly sins (cf. II Tim.ii.21). The main details in his first appearance confirm him as one of the wrathful. He is devoted to destruction, telling Laura with some disappointment that he had once “dreamed of destroying this city, in case it offered resistance to General Ortiz, but it fell into his hands like an overripe pear.” As a professional revolutionary, he is a “stirrer-up of strife” like the figure of Ira in Piers Plowman and might belong in the ninth bolgia of the eighth circle of Dante's Inferno with the “sowers of discord.” Even his softer activities are portrayed in combative terms. His amours are vengeful. “A thousand women have paid for that,” he says, referring to his early humiliation by a girl, and when he wishes to put an end to his music for the evening he “curves his swollen fingers around the throat of the guitar and softly smothers the music out of it.” Indeed, Braggioni possesses the characteristics of all the kinds of the wrathful. He has an abiding, sullen melancholy within like St. Thomas's amari. Like the acuti, he is quick to anger, “sensitive to slights.” And finally, like the difficiles (also known as the graves), he is vindictive: he is “cruel to everyone” and it is “dangerous to offend him.”

In addition to wrath, Braggioni is guilty of pride and envy, the three sins in Dante's scheme of the Purgatory that are caused by love of the wrong objects. Of these, pride or excessive love of self, the sin of Lucifer, is primary. Braggioni is vain and sensitive because of the “vast cureless wound of his self-esteem.” Like Milton's Satan, he is an effective leader because he “loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity that his followers … warm themselves in the reflected glow” and convince themselves of his nobility. His likeness to Lucifer the arch-rebel is further borne out not only by the repeated references to his being a revolutionist, but also by inversion through the many parodic details showing him as a secular Christ.

He is of vaguely foreign extraction, his father and his name having come from another country. He is a “world-saviour” whose “skin has been punctured in honorable warfare,” but “he will never die of it.” He is a “professional lover of humanity … wounded by life.” In the first paragraph of the story when Laura returns to her home, her maid says with “a glance toward the upper room, ‘He waits.’” He tells his followers that “they are closer to him than his own brothers, without them he can do nothing.” (cf. John, v. 19 & 30, viii.28, & xv.5). He urges them to be “on the watch” (for spies) and holds forth promises of a bright future—“until tomorrow, comrade!” He is obsessed by his apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the existing world, expressed in the vivid language of eschatology. He joyously imagines everything “hurled skyward and distributed, cast down again clean as rain, without separate identity … no one shall be left alive except the elect spirits destined to procreate a new world cleansed of cruelty and injustice, ruled by benevolent anarchy.” Finally, there is the reunion with his wife, the ceremony of her washing his feet, and their communion of weeping.

Equally Satanic is the motivation of envy, and again the author has taken pains to establish the deep-rootedness of this vice in Braggioni. Although a revolutionist dedicated to that abolition of class distinctions, he boasts of his Jockey Club perfume “imported from New York” and he is proud of his “expensive garments” tricked out with diamonds and silver ornaments. These, like his conquests of women, and like the very fat that encases him, are the satisfactions of an envy traceable to his impoverished youth when “he was so scrawny all his bones showed under his thin cotton clothing … and he could never find enough to eat anywhere, anywhere!” All in all, Braggioni is well endowed with the attributes of the sins of malice (Dante's malizia comprising all the sins of violence and fraud in the Inferno): “He has the malice, the cleverness, the wickedness, the sharpness of wit, the hardness of heart, stipulated for loving the world profitably.”

But Porter has not neglected to suggest all the possibilities of wickedness in her description of Braggioni, for he is equally devoted to the “natural” sins categorized in the Inferno as those of incontinence and in the Purgatory as those of excessive attachment to secondary goods—namely, gluttony, avarice, and lust. His gluttony is seen in his “suety smile,” his “gluttonous bulk,” his oily, balloon cheeks, his “paunch between his spread knees,” and his fat legs over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes swelling “with ominous ripeness.” His lustfulness is evident from his designs on Laura, his boasting of his thousand conquests, and his remark that “one woman is really as good as another for me in the dark. I prefer them all.” Although he is apparently not avaricious in the common sense of stinginess, he gives his poor fellows only “small coins from his own pockets” while indulging himself in every luxury; theologically, his excessive preoccupation with material goods and his desire for more of them than is necessary are the marks of avarice. “He is not rich, not in money,” he tells Laura, “but in power, and this power brings with it the blameless ownership of things, and the right to indulge his love of small luxuries,” such as his expensive clothes, his hired automobile, his soft bed, and his imported perfume.

Finally, there is the intermediate sin of sloth. Neither Braggioni nor Laura is guilty of that common slothfulness in the active life know as laziness (pigritia), for both are energetic workers in the cause. But in keeping with the general scheme of Braggioni's being perceived as a vessel of all the abstract vices, we are told of his enjoying “plenty of sleep in a soft bed beside a wife who dares not disturb him” and of his sitting “pampering his bones in easy billows of fat.”

For Braggioni the sinner, there is some consolation because while everything disappoints him in the end, he at least enjoys the pleasures of his vices, revels in his power over others, and enjoys the possessions of the goods of this world. At the end of the story he is left with his wife enjoying a communion which, if it is a travesty of Christian communion, is at any rate consummated as they blend their tears, in contrast to the aborted communion in the immediately ensuing scene of Laura's dream. In the language applied by T. S. Eliot to Baudelaire, Braggioni is man enough to be damned (Selected Essays, 380), perhaps corresponding to the “lost violent souls” of Eliot's poem “The Hollow Men.”

For Laura, on the other hand, there is no consolation. She is un-evil, but also un-good. Her children love her, but she cannot love them back. She is loved and desired by men, but can feel nothing for them. Her specific failures as a woman pre-figure her general failure as a human being. When she tries to pray, her lips, like those of Eliot's hollow men, can only “form prayers to broken stone.” She continues to work for a revolutionary cause in which she no longer believes because she lacks the energy of spirit to break away. She is neat and fastidious, intelligent, intermittently perceptive, and hopelessly lost, frightened of both life and death. In spite of the likeness between her and Braggioni, which he insists upon and which she partly acknowledges, the final sense of contrast is underscored by the ironic juxtaposition of the highly colored picture of Braggioni to the overall grayness with which Laura is portrayed.

IV

Through me lies the way to the dolorous city …
Abandon all hope, you who enter.

(Inferno iii. 1–9)

Not only the characters but the atmosphere of the story is saturated with the representation of the feeling most characteristic of damnation: despair. The abandonment of hope enjoined upon the damned in the legend carved upon the gate of Dante's hell may be taken as more of a description of the state of damnation than as an imperative. As St. Isidore put it in a passage cited by Aquinas, “To despair is to fall into hell” (II–II, Q. 20, Art. 3, & cf. Q. 20, Art. 4). Dante himself, as the pilgrim spirit in his poem, although he is under special divine protection, is nevertheless forbidden to gaze upon Medusa (generally understood to represent despair), the sight of whom turns men to stone. There is no special place set aside for the hopeless in hell, since an eternity of waiting without hope is precisely what hell is, a hell shared by all the damned regardless of their special sins or punishments. Even the virtuous pagans in Limbo, who suffer no special pains, are condemned to exist for eternity, as they had lived in this world, outside the pale of hope.

The fetid atmosphere of despair, of waiting without hope, permeates the whole story of “Flowering Judas.” The political prisoners “of her own political faith” whom Laura visits in their cells complain that “time doesn't pass in this infernal hole.” These outcast souls frequently “lose all patience and all faith” and curse their friends on the outside for not coming to their rescue, but these friends are generally little better off. They “dare not set foot in the prison for fear of disappearing into the cells kept empty for them,” like the place in Dante's hell reserved for Pope Boniface VIII. Laura's errands of mercy to the prison are linked with her errands to “men hiding … in back streets in mildewed houses, where they sit in tumbled beds and talk bitterly.” Like the damned, all are waiting, fearing, cursing, in the dark, their hopes constantly dimmed by anger and fear.

To the extent that the outcasts have any hope or faith, it is in Braggioni, whose favor “is their disputed territory.” But this false saviour cynically submits them to at least purgatorial punishment. “Let them sweat a little,” he says. “The next time they will be more careful.” If one of them is in real danger, Laura will enter his hovel in the darkness with money and the message—and it seems impossible to overlook the sardonic pun on Vera Cruz (True Cross)—“Go to Vera Cruz and wait.”

Laura herself both dreams and lives out a nightmare of paralysis. She too waits in dread without hope among people who “cannot understand why she is in Mexico.” Like a person in a nightmare, she feels the urgent need to escape but cannot. When Braggioni, the flesh in which her revolutionary ideals have been incarnated, leaves the room, she thinks she is free—“I must run while there is time.” But she does not go. With the outcasts whom she visits (as with many of the damned souls in Dante), Laura shares an intense preoccupation with time, perhaps representing all that is arbitrary in human relationships. Her body, as she prepares for sleep, does not respond to the natural rhythm. Instead, like the prisoners, she must remind herself that it is time to sleep. “Numbers tick in her brain like little clocks, soundless doors close of themselves around her” as she enters, in sleep, her own private nightmare hell.

To the many examples of theological and eschatological diction already cited many more could be added, such as Laura's private rejection of machine-made lace as a “heresy” against the religion of “her special group” who believe that “the machine is sacred, and will be the salvation of the workers.” Words like “faith,” “charity,” “love,” “patience,” and “forgive” are liberally distributed through the text. The word “hope,” however, does not appear, perhaps replaced by Laura's “uneasy premonitions,” “disillusions,” and “sense of danger.”

There are also more apparent allusions to Dante than those already mentioned. Laura, for example, knowing “what Braggioni would offer her” and determined to resist, “sits in her deep chair with an open book on her knees,” a picture reminiscent through ironic reversal of Francesca da Rimini whose book, instead of protecting her, has betrayed her into lust. Most striking is the pit that Laura fears to visit in her dream when Eugenio, calling her “Murderer,” commands her to “follow me.” “I will show you a new country,” he says, with an invitation similar to that of Charon addressing the souls of the damned. The landscape through which Eugenio takes her in successive downward steps is reminiscent of the steps of hell, as she passes “the rocky ledge of a cliff and then to the jagged wave of a sea that was not water but a desert of crumbling stone.” Rejecting with a cry of “No!” the recognition of evil that Eugenio attempts to force upon her, she “awoke trembling, and was afraid to sleep again,” another reversal of the situation in the Inferno wherein Dante, trusting his guide, falls “like one overcome by sleep.”

Even the colors of the story (and it is, in a quite literal sense, a very colorful story) seem to form theological patterns. The main color impression of the story derives from the title itself. No one who has ever seen the judas tree (redbud) in bloom can forget the peculiar intensity of its scarlet-to-purple flowers from which, by association with the red hair of the arch-betrayer, the tree takes its name. There is such a tree in Laura's garden, and it appears twice in the story, but never in full daylight (the Inferno too is a place of darkness). On the first occasion it is seen by moonlight; no stars, symbols of divine light in Dante, are mentioned. Its “scarlet blossoms” are dyed “full purple” by the darkness. Purple, the imperial color, is the prevailing color associated with Braggioni and his “lavender collar,” “purple necktie,” and “mauve silk hose.” Thus, his link to the judas tree as the betrayer of his followers and of Laura's illusions is reinforced by the color conversion of scarlet, the theological color of charity or love, to purple, the color of empire.

The second appearance of the tree is in Laura's dream, where it serves first as one of the steps of her downward journey, then as the supplier of the “warm bleeding flowers” which Eugenio feeds her, and finally it becomes Eugenio himself. The blossoms are now their true color of blood, but it is the blood of betrayal rather than of forgiveness in this parody of the last supper: “Murderer! said Eugenio, and Cannibal! This is my body and my blood.”

Other colors in the story bring out still further theological parallels. All the colors of Laura's garden by moonlight are distortions of the colors of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, just as the virtues themselves appear in the story only in perverted forms. The bright white radiance of faith (sun and stars in Dante) becomes a dim replica of itself as “the moonlight spread a wash of gauzy silver over the clear spaces of the garden.” The normally predominant color of a garden, green, the color of hope and also of life and carnality, is obscured by the darkness and shadows into cobalt blue, in keeping with the general absence of hope in the story. (The color green is mentioned once in the story, when Braggioni, in his song, inexplicably changes Laura's eyes from their true gray to green.) Braggioni's own “tawny yellow cat's eyes,” “glossy yellow shoes,” and “kinky yellow hair” suggest the leopard in Dante's Inferno, variously interpreted as representing lust, all the sins of incontinence, or fraud, any of which could apply to Braggioni. Finally, it is significant that when the enamored boy for whom Laura can feel nothing is singing under her window, “the names of the colors repeated themselves automatically in her mind, while she watched not the boy, but his shadow.”

One last theological symbol, and perhaps the most confusing one, is the figure (he is far too shadowy to be called a character) of Eugenio. In a widely read interpretation, Ray B. West sees him as another Christ-symbol, but he accepts Eugenio at face value, basing his argument upon the meaning of the name “Eugenio”—well born—and upon his allegedly Christ-like behavior in surrendering himself up to death by means of the narcotics brought by Laura, the Juda. This, however, is an unlikely interpretation. There is nothing further in the story to indicate how Eugenio might in any way be a means of salvation, whether secular or theological. He is far too slender a figure in the story to carry such a weight, and when we add the few details about him that are given, such an interpretation becomes even more unlikely.

Eugenio's death was not a martyrdom for a cause, but a suicide brought on by boredom and despair. In Laura's dream he offers himself as the way to death, not to life: “Where are you taking me? she said … To death, … said Eugenio.” When he gives her the flowers, Laura sees “that his hand was fleshless, a cluster of small white petrified branches.” Instead of the Light shining in the darkness, Laura perceives that “his eye sockets were without light.”

Finally, Eugenio's metamorphosis into the tree, an image of damnation taken from Dante's forest of the suicides (Inferno xiii), suggests that he is to be taken parodically as much as Braggioni himself. His betrayal of life through suicide is but a more violent version of Laura's negation of life through spiritual sloth. This would seem to be the true meaning of the infernal communion between them in Laura's dream, when Eugenio says “in a voice of pity, take and eat: … This is my body and my blood.” Although he uses the language of Jesus, his point is to confirm her a member of the damned. Eugenio cannot be taken seriously as a Christ figure, other than parodically, since he is primarily associated with despair, death, damnation, and not at all (except through reversal) with salvation.

V

As he our darkness, cannot we his Light
Imitate when we please?

—Paradise Lost ii. 269–270

The modest conclusion to which we may come, then, is not that Porter has a positive religious message to transmit, but that, as a chronicler of the desiccation of the soul of Western humankind in our time, she found in traditional Catholic religious thought and in Dante's poetry a valid source of language and images for dealing, intensely but obliquely, with various states of spiritual vacuity and decay. It is not necessary to assume, of course, that Porter immersed herself in medieval theology, or even in Dante, in preparation for writing “Flowering Judas.” Her own account of the story's long, slow gestation and rapid, sudden composition contradicts such an idea. It is sufficient to note that Porter's early convent training and her acquaintance with the works of Eliot and Dante put her in a position where, possibly without full consciousness, she could draw upon deep reserves of psychological and ethical thought, imagery, and symbolism latent in the language and teachings of the Church and of the two poets.

Without direct evidence, no accumulation of detailed parallels can prove the thesis decisively, but it is striking how naturally all the details in the story reinforce the pattern described here, while the most careful search fails to yield one detail that contradicts it. Porter's extensive use of religious words and images in an explicitly “political” story need occasion no surprise if we consider the degree to which politics had become, in the earlier twentieth century, a substitute for religion while our religions were widely perceived as having failed to provide adequate solutions to the world's social and political problems. We are all familiar today with the equation of political creed and religion, and with the equations that derive from it—political leader with saviour, political devotee with member of a religious order, political deviation with heresy, and political disillusion with apostasy. These equations or metaphors have been exploited by the propagandists of such apocalyptic political movements as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, and often by their opponents as well.

By exposing these religio-political metaphors to the light of political reality, Porter in “Flowering Judas” was able to reveal the danger latent in them. Personally, she was on record as being “opposed to every form of authoritarian, totalitarian government or religion.” As for political expediency, she expressed herself unequivocally: “If you are promised something new and blissful at the mere price of present violence under a new master, first examine these terms carefully … If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide too” (The Days Before, 128, 129).

“Flowering Judas” is a story about a young woman living in Mexico and working for the revolution during the 1920s. Disillusioned after her earlier commitment to a totalitarian political creed, she cannot bring herself to take any decisive action and tries to repress her internal conflict from consciousness. The story is, thus, one of self-delusion, as its author has said. It is also a story about acedia or spiritual life-in-death, as evidenced by its affinities to the poetry of T. S. Eliot's middle period (The Waste Land, “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men”). Laura “had religion” in childhood as a Roman Catholic and later as a devoted revolutionary. She lost her ability to believe in either faith and was consequently cut off from every possible heaven except one of private commitment and belief that she might construct, but she was unable or unwilling to undertake such a labor of construction.

Yet it would be unfair to put the entire responsibility for her plight upon Laura. Within the frame of reference of what her world could offer her, she seems to have done her best. “Now and again” she tried to derive some spiritual sustenance from the faith of her childhood by slipping (at the risk of scandal) into “some crumbling little church” and kneeling “on the chilly stone,” but she could no more overlook the failure of her church to meet the social injustice of the society in which she found herself than she could overlook the vanity and cruelty of the revolutionary leaders. The “altar with its tinsel flowers and ragged brocades” and the “battered doll-shape of some male saint whose white, lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his ankles” force themselves upon her unwilling attention. The tinsel flowers suggest a divorce from reality in contrast to the “fresh garden flowers” left on her desk each day by the adoring children in her classroom, representing immaculate love, to the “warm bleeding flowers” of her dream, representing a perversion of spiritual love, and even to the flower that she heedlessly tossed to her anonymous young suitor and that he continues to wear, “withering in his hat,” representing a failure of human love.

Her religion of politics, on the other hand, offers her no closer tie with reality. The “developed sense of reality” of her comrades seems to her no more than cynicism, and Mrs. Braggioni's sense of reality, which was “beyond criticism,” consists merely of her recognition and acceptance of her own enslavement. Just as the eternal basis of hell is an inversion of the unchanging bliss of heaven, so is a nightmare a horrific transformation of reality. Laura's nightmare existence is symbolized by her vision of herself sitting with Braggioni “with a bitter anxiety, as if tomorrow may not come, but time may be caught immovably in this hour, and with herself transfixed, Braggioni singing on forever and Eugenio's body not yet discovered by the guard.”

And yet time does move, or at any rate it conveys the illusion of movement. The seasons pass and return in endless rhythm. But for those who are fearful of death or of life the movement itself is frightful. The time of the story is April, with May rapidly approaching (the “depraved May” of Eliot's “Gerontion”), and both the Catholics and the Socialists are making their plans for the celebration of life's renewal. For the unliving and the undead, however, April may be the “cruellest month,” and the renewal of life is an agony to be shunned like death. Braggioni, apostle of death, is excited by the prospect of the approaching May-day, for he will come alive in his element of violence. He tells Laura “about the May-day disturbances coming on in Morelia, for the Catholics hold a festival in honor of the Blessed Virgin, and the Socialists celebrate their martyrs on that day. ‘There will be two independent processions, starting from either end of town, and they will march until they meet, and the rest depends …’” Laura, on the other hand, reacts with fright and revulsion. As she looks down the barrel of the pistol she has been cleaning for Braggioni, “a long, slow faintness rises and subsides in her.”

Two processions moving ineluctably toward mutual catastrophe—this is the metaphor for Laura's world. One procession seems to be grounded in a no longer viable past, putting its faith in unrealities, while the other, boasting a developed sense of reality, seems in fact to offer only death or tyranny. They divide the world of the story between them, and while each offers to the artist a vocabulary of words and images useful to set off the failures of the other, neither, in this context, seems to exist in relation to any other reality.

Here we see, behind the story of one young woman's failure, a world “heaving in the sickness of millennial change.” If she were an artist, Laura might not be cut off from all life and joy if she could really love the children she teaches or could cultivate the finer shades of interpersonal relationships, the doctrine offered in many of the English novels of the earlier twentieth century. Perhaps love would offer some hope of personal redemption in the midst of chaos, as Matthew Arnold half-heartedly suggested more than a century ago in “Dover Beach.” It does occur to Laura that love is indeed what survives, as she thinks of the youth who follows her, observing the convention of love “with all propriety, as though it were founded on a law of nature, which in the end it might very well prove to be.” But even if possible, would such a personal salvation be enough when all around her, in the Mexico which is her Inferno, Laura sees only confusion, the confusion of “love with revolution, night with day, life with death,” and beyond this nothing. Such questions are at least implicit in Laura's story, and they must be considered before she can be judged or condemned.

Because of the absence of any viable faith in “Flowering Judas,” it is a portrayal of a hell without a heaven. It is perhaps in this sense that the story is a fragment, as the Inferno would be a fragment without the rest of the Divine Comedy, or the first two books of Paradise Lost would be a fragment without the portrayal of the two paradises of heaven and earth. This absence in no way detracts, however, from the power of the story, for its symbiosis of religious and political imagery offers a profound and moving experience of the failure of two of the great faiths of our epoch. Porter's complex, parodic symbolism of life and death, salvation and damnation, good and evil, contributes inestimably to the depth of insight offered by the story into the failure of the individual which reflects and is reflected in the “majestic and terrible failure of man in the Western world.”

Note

1. Recent Southern Fiction: A Panel Discussion, Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia. Quoted in “News and Ideas,” College English 22 (1961): 521.