SOURCE: “‘Mingled Sweetness and Corruption’: Katherine Anne Porter's ‘The Fig Tree’ and ‘The Grave,’” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, May 5, 1988, pp. 111–25.

[In the following essay, Titus discusses the relationship between aspects of Porter's life—particularly the death of her mother—and her short stories “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree.”]

Earth, my tender, soberly smiling mother, oh fruitful nourisher, oh demonic fury, oh drinker of blood, insatiable devourer of rotting flesh!

[Notes: Mexico 1921, copied Basel 1932]

From 1930 to 1940 was Katherine Anne Porter's most productive decade. Her best work from this time, Old Mortality and the short pieces that make up The Old Order, originated in efforts to write Many Redeemers, a novel rooted in a family history that was half fiction, half fact. Porter drew on several sources as she imagined her novel.¹ She conducted genealogical research, aptly described by her biographer Joan Givner as “typical of her method of manipulating facts” (29). She corresponded with relatives, gathering versions of the family past. And she probed her own memories. Memory was vivid, fascinating, yet often painful for Porter, and she clothed it in fantasy before presenting it to the public. A characteristic statement among her papers suggests memory's double edge:

The past can be a viper concealed in the dear hoarded heap of rubbish where you thrust your unguarded hand; or the opening of a grave where you breathe in again the old sickness of which you have already once died, and now must die again; or a curtain drawn idly without thought to find a green spring landscape there, just where you left it, buttercups, the sound of running water, morning light, newborn calves, and all. …

(“Notes on a Decade”)²

The imagery with which Porter describes the past suggests its duality; it carries both beauty and terror, yielding either suddenly and inexplicably. The association of pastoral landscape and grave reappears in two stories from The Old Order: “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree.” Read in the context of unpublished fragments of autobiography as well as other notes, drafts, and poems, which surround her work on Many Redeemers,³ these stories are revealed as explorations of the sexual terror and guilt originating in her most painful childhood experience: her mother's death after childbirth when Porter was almost two years old.

Porter wrote most directly about her childhood in “Pull Dick—Pull Devil,” an unpublished, incomplete, autobiographical essay. It begins with the central fact of her mother's death: “My mother died of her fifth child, when I was a year and a half old.” The loss was kept very present throughout her childhood, she records, for her father never remarried and perpetually mourned his wife, making “a cult of her memory,” which he shared with his children. He brought out pictures of their mother and told them romantic stories about her: “we saw and touched her gloves, her curls of hair, her strange and charming dresses: he showed us bits of jewelry we should have when we grew up.” In Old Mortality Porter recalls these rites: the story flows back and forth from fiction to actual memory. Although it is the Grandmother who “twice a year compelled in her blood” brings out the “locks of hair … yellowed long gloves and misshapen satin slippers” (175), the father also participates, reading young Miranda and Maria romantic poetry: “‘Her tantalized spirit now blandly reposes, Forgetting or never regretting its roses’. … Their father read that to them” (178). Porter echoed these lines in the close of her own poem, “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery,” which she buried in her mother's grave in 1936: “This shape of her love / Whose living dust reposes / Beside her dust / Sweet as the dust of roses” (Essays 489).

Repeatedly expressing to his children a wish that they had never been born, Harrison Boone Porter seems to have consistently transferred to them the blame for his wife's death, avoiding his own responsibility for her debilitating pregnancy, the fifth in seven years. According to Porter, her father frequently expressed the feeling that he had been “betrayed” by his marriage, for he was “wifeless when he had wanted a wife, and a father when he did not want children” (“Pull Dick—Pull Devil”). His children, replacing the lost and perpetually mourned wife, were simply a burden. Among Porter's notes is a brief entry on her mother's death, mentioning the guilt transferred from father to children: “She was very young,” Porter writes, looking at a photograph, “and she died of exhaustion at the birth of her fifth child, her fifth in the space of less than seven years. Quite literally she died under torture, and the guilt of this death was never lifted from any of us, husband and father, and the children through him” (Notes, undated).

Blaming his wife's death on his children, Porter's father repeatedly linked childbirth and death, a link that also profoundly influenced Porter's thinking. According to her notes, his first words to his daughters when they married were, “Don't have children.” Her mother “died too young and too hard a death,” she wrote in “Pull Dick—Pull Devil,” “and somehow this was told to me in a way that makes a sore spot in me to this day.” When her older sister Gay had her first child, the first birth of their generation, Porter feared that Gay would soon die. Seeing her sister quietly resting after labor, she imagined her “wounded and remote with the kind of far awayness of people who know they must die and so have nothing to say to life” (“A Vision of Heaven”). But Porter may have also possessed concrete, early memories that connect childbirth with suffering and death. Givner, who visited the family home where the mother died, describes it as “a simple two-room L-shaped log structure” (37). The children would have been unable to avoid overhearing if not witnessing the birth scene. Although her mother died two months later, of what appears to be a respiratory ailment, Porter's words—“My mother died of her fifth child”—indicate that the powerful impression of the delivery overshadowed everything.

While excavating and recording childhood memories in the early 1930s, and confronting once again these early painful events, Porter began to long to visit Texas. “I'm getting simply and childishly homesick,” she wrote Janice Ford on 16 May 1935; “I want to see my family and that country once more.” In 1936 she made the trip, which included a special excursion to visit both the old family home in Indian Creek, abandoned after the mother's death, and the nearby graveyard where she was buried. The two locations—the small farm and the grave—are sources for imagery Porter wove through much of her fiction, letters, and journals, appearing, for example, in her depiction of memory as the open grave and “green spring landscape … new-born calves.”

In the fifteen years since Porter had last visited Texas, her memory had perfected the landscape of her childhood home. The Indian Creek farm, with its roses and pecan and fig groves, had become an Eden and a source of perpetual longing. No other dream recurs in her papers with such frequency as the dream of a home that reproduces this first place, secure and bountiful: an “acre where I could grow apricots and peaches and almonds and figs” (Letter to Gay Porter Holloway, 8 Apr. 1963). The dream lies behind her restless travels and perpetual dissatisfaction with people and places. Nothing she found could be as fulfilling and complete as the landscape of memory. Homeless and restless, Porter often expressed privately her feelings of alienation, as if she were cut off from others, condemned to her own private hell. As she acknowledged to a friend in 1941, “My life has been a long history of my attempts to take root in a place, to have a place to go back to, at least. … This has been so often thwarted and disappointed, it has become almost like a fantasy, a mere day dream, and I have resolved quite often to put it away, and think of it no more, and I have tried to persuade myself that such an apparently simple, natural, human situation was not for me” (Letter to Glenway Wescott, 23 Jan. 1941).

Porter's prose often lingers over descriptions of homes remembered or imagined. “Home … is a continuous, deep, sunny revery,” she wrote in “Here is My Home,” an essay for Perfect Home Magazine. It is a world of absolute peace and contentment, filled with fragrance and soft, breast-like fruit: “this house is in the country; and in a climate that grows figs and peaches, camellias and gardenias.” It is timeless and completely fulfilling: “Everything I ever loved is there, and all my friends come and go at ease. … All the books and the music and the flowers and good food have gone there; and there it is, astonishingly perfected and radiant.” This perfect home is recalled in the Grandmother's fruitful plantation in The Old Order, as well as in Porter's public, half-fictionalized memories of childhood in “Notes on Noon Wine” and several interviews, particularly one with The Paris Review in 1963. In all of her descriptions, home is characterized by its fertility; the landscape is full of fruit-laden trees, flowers, and newborn animals. Its warmth and fecundity, and the pleasure she experienced recalling it connect it with her earliest nurturing relation. In this orally gratifying and secure place she could live “a long day dream of perfect beauty, silence”: the lost childhood home suggests the lost mother, both taken from Porter's life at the same time (“Here is My Home,” clipping, Nov. 1954).

In Texas, Porter found the actual Indian Creek house shabby and rather forlorn; the orchard had been cut down, everything seemed diminished. At the cemetery, she was at first terrified to approach her mother's grave—“shaking with fear of my own feelings”—yet the sight of the “quiet dark blue marble stone” calmed her. Her notes describe a sudden sense of peace, a homecoming: “I sat down beside her and began instantly to dig a place to plant the rosebush I had brought. I felt strangely at home, rested, eased, full of the most profound almost painful joy.” Porter's notes and her letters to friends about this experience contain a poem, which she claims she wrote at the gravesite and then “tucked … into the earth” (Notes, undated). She later revised and published it under the title “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery,” adding four closing lines, linking her roses with her mother's dust.

This time of year, this year of all years, brought
The homeless one home again;
To the fallen house and the drowsing dust
There to sit at the door,
Welcomed, homeless no more.
Her dust remembers its dust
And calls again
Back to the fallen house this restless dust
This shape of her pain.
This shape of her love
Whose living dust reposes
Beside her dust,
Sweet as the dust of roses.

(Essays 489)

Here the return home clearly represents a return to the dead mother. In “repose” by this “fallen house,” Porter feels eased, “welcomed,” no longer alone.

Porter's initial terror approaching the grave suggests that her expectations of the visit were complex; encounters with memory participated in its dangerous double nature. Her claim that she wrote “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery” while at her mother's grave is not completely precise. Although she may have composed this final version there, she had been working on the poem in Paris in 1932, at the time she was writing the “Miranda” stories. An earlier version from this time more clearly expresses the power of her memories of her mother. It opens: “But this time of year brings me back, / As though she cried / From her deep grave upon me” (Notes, Paris, 1932). The memories are active and call or pull her back to the grave. More striking is the use of “upon,” as though Porter carries her mother's deep grave upon her own shoulders; she is oppressed by her; the cry from the grave continually pulls her back into the anguish of memory.

This earlier version of the poem lacks the last four lines that greatly soften what was initially a more bitter, painful statement. Perhaps Porter added them to the poem at her mother's grave and so felt the whole was completed there. The additional lines especially soften the phrase “the shape of her pain,” by restating it in the next line as “the shape of her love.” The phrase, with its implications of guilt, is central. One other significantly different, undated version of the poem sheds even more light on the phrase that here, too, appears at the poem's close.

Time has heaped a bitter dust
Over her name:
Ashes are sagging on the hearth
She breathed to flame.
Her path from fire to cradle
Measured the earth
She served the stern necessities
Of death and birth.
I take all roads and each road
Is strange to me
I claim no kin with any wave
Of any sea.
Nowhere do I stop and say
“This much is done:”
Still I fly before the winds
And the staring sun
But this time of year her voice
On the wind's track
Follows me from her deep grave
And hails me back
Her dust remembers its dust and calls again
Back to her side this prodigal shape of her pain.

(“Time Has Heaped a Bitter Dust”)

The poem makes more clear that the mother died after childbirth, died serving the “stern necessities / Of death and birth.” Even clearer here, too, is that the speaker, or wanderer, believes herself to be the cause of the mother's death. Although Porter's mother died when she was two, shortly after giving birth to Porter's younger sister, Porter could never free herself from the belief that she, and not her sister, was the “shape of her [mother's] pain.” Thus rather than associating her mother or her mother's grave with home and house, this poem associates her death with Porter's own feelings of exile and alienation that originate in a profound sense of guilt. Cast out and kinless, she flies from her original home, trying to escape the place of destruction, the place that she destroyed. But she is unable to free herself from guilt; it returns with the seasons, calling her back again each year to the place of death.⁴

In her poem, Porter perceives herself as both the “shape of her [mother's] love” and the “shape of her pain,” as both the nurtured and adored and the devouring and destructive child who must perpetually remember and reacknowledge her terrifying, guilty role. As visitor to the grave, she compares herself to the prodigal son returning home, suggesting all the contradictions inherent in this relation. The prodigal son is welcomed home with the words, “This son of mine was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and is found.” Paradoxically, Porter transforms home into the grave; as the prodigal child she returns to the place of death: there her lost self can be “found.” Home and the grave, fulfillment and absence, nurturing and death are bound together in these poems as they were bound in Porter's own memories. When she returned to her childhood in the 1930s, she explored these interconnections, and the knot of associations woven about her mother's death lies at the heart of several stories from The Old Order, particularly “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree.”

The world of The Old Order is a mythic one, ruled by the stern Grandmother who, with the other antediluvian “giants”—Uncle Jimbilly, Old Nannie, and Great Aunt Eliza—represent the last survivors of a former idealized way of life. Although facing extinction after the Grandmother's death, this world still follows ancient seasonal rituals, that include a perpetual successful recreation of homecoming. The Grandmother's cyclical journeys from townhouse to summerhouse to farm fulfill what eluded Porter: the recreation of the order, security, and fruitful garden of childhood in each new home. Persephone's seasonal descent to Hades informs the opening of “The Fig Tree.” The farm where the Grandmother returns to bring order each year is referred to as Halifax by the family, and at the story's opening Old Uncle Jimbilly, “yelling like a foghorn,” is turning the “steeds” around “so they would be pointing towards Halifax” (355). It is time for the perennial descent into Hell. Persephone's journey illuminates Porter's own search for a home. Without the aid of a mother, she cannot escape the hell of isolation and homelessness. In contrast, Persephone may return to her mother each year, who welcomes her by renewing the garden.

For the Grandmother, unlike Porter herself, each journey is a journey toward home, for she instills order, security, and fruitfulness wherever she travels. Creating home everywhere, the Grandmother is always coming home: she arrives at the farm in summer “with an indefinable sense of homecoming” (322); yet after setting the place to rights, she heads back to town, arriving there “with the same air of homecoming she had worn on her arrival in the country.” Here, too, she immediately “set[s] to work restoring … order” (325). Central to the Grandmother's homemaking is her ability to “bring forth fruit”: to bear and feed children. The ruler of numerous offspring, she continues to find fulfillment in old age watching the seeds she has planted reproduce as well. In “The Source,” “when the Indian cling peach-tree against the wall of the town house begins to bloom,” the Grandmother thinks of the five orchards she has planted, and stands “quite still for a moment looking at the single tree representing all her beloved trees still blooming, flourishing, and preparing to bring forth fruit in their separate places” (322).

The soft peaches promised by the Grandmother's trees suggest both her own and Nannie's fruitful breasts and the physical luxury the two women found nursing their children. Yet their fecund and orderly world is passing in The Old Order, replaced by Miranda's homelessness and sexual terror. “The Grave,” a story about Miranda, ends far in the future, in the new order (or disorder). The memory that closes the story recalls the time just after the old order's passing, the time when innocence yielded to experience. Like so many of Porter's own memories, this one is sudden, vivid, and painful. The past is not at all past:

Without warning, plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of that far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind's eye. She was so reasonlessly horrified she halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back of them.

(367)

Like the voice of the dead mother, memory can speak from “its burial place” at any moment, making vividly, even violently present the horror hidden in the past.

Miranda's involuntary memory is evoked by the “smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers … like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery.” But the smell does not actually bring back the happy moment in the empty cemetery when she and her brother “found treasure in the opened graves” (367). Although the text is not explicit, Miranda's horror clearly reveals that she is remembering the day's emotional climax: the sight of the blood-covered baby rabbits her brother had exposed in the womb of the rabbit he had just killed. The memory marks a direct contact point between Porter's life and her art, a point where she transmuted emotional trauma into fiction. Submerged beneath the Mexico scene, providing the link that binds the hot market place to the eviscerated rabbit, lies an event that explains the anguish associated with Miranda's memory: an abortion Porter had in Mexico sometime in the early twenties. Mentioned in an autobiographical fragment and confirmed by Mary Doherty, one of her closest companions in the 1920s, the abortion repeats the pattern of fertility transformed to death that informs not just “The Grave” but Porter's own early childhood.⁵

Throughout, “The Grave” reinforces the inevitable movement from nurturing and fulfillment to violence and loss. The “time” of the story provides an example. Miranda and her brother have recently lost their grandmother; “the motherless family” is now doubly abandoned, “with the Grandmother no longer there to hold it together” (365). The grandmother's death, though, means more than the loss of a second mother: it means also the loss of land and a house; the three are bound together in Porter's imagination. The published version of “The Grave” records only the loss of the land: “After the grandmother's death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale.” Little more is told about this loss except that, significantly, the cemetery was also a garden: “a pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass” (362). Yet even these small clues reveal the cemetery as a place of sweetness and corruption, containing the two sides of memory, the nurturing and destruction that surround the relation of mother and child. In a page once intended for inclusion in the final story, it becomes increasingly clear that the lost land contained not only the cemetery, but also the fruitful garden and the family home. The page, among Porter's papers, and headed: “To be added to The Grave,” describes the children responding to the loss of the land after their grandmother's death (rpt. Givner 69). Here it is clear that, with the land, a peach orchard and the grandmother's first house were also lost. After the grandmother's death, when the children return to their former garden to gather fruit, they are humiliated trespassers:

Something more than her physical presence had disappeared from the children's lives with the death of their grandmother. They puzzled over the loss of land, over the sale of the finest orchard where grandmother had planted her favorite peaches. Even the empty cemetery was no longer theirs. They felt like trespassers. … [T]he summer after grandmother's death, they remembered her Indian cling peach trees in the orchard that was now sold. The three of them went boldly, walked into the orchard and filled their baskets with the fruit as they had done the summer before. The woman who owned the orchard saw them from her vegetable garden nearby. She and her husband had been renters, sharecroppers but in twenty years' time they had saved enough money to buy the first old house the grandmother had built, and her first beautiful orchard.

Each image of loss corresponds to another: the peach trees, the family home, and the fertile land are all lost with the grandmother's “physical presence,” and that loss recalls the earlier, more central loss of the mother's nurturing body.

The loss of the two nurturing women forms the context for other moments in “The Grave” when fertility yields to death rather than fulfillment. The first accompanies the young Miranda's movement into puberty. The ring Miranda finds in the grave carries all the complex interweavings of sexuality, marriage, and death that shaped Porter's own experience. “Carved with intricate flowers and leaves” (363), the gold band links the fruitful garden with marriage: yet the children find the ring in a grave. Marriage and adult sexuality may be the source of life, but they are also closely bound with death, as childbearing brings both life and death to a woman. Miranda at first thinks only of the superficial implications of her own sexuality. Playing with the ring on her finger, she longs to shed her rough clothing, to dress and act like a “proper” young lady; she wants immediately “to go back to the farmhouse, take a good cold bath, dust herself with plenty of Maria's violet talcum powder … put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees” (365). But when her brother eviscerates the rabbit, she realizes that womanhood wears the double face of sweetness and corruption.

Looking down at the tiny rabbits in the open womb, that are both beautiful and blood-covered, Miranda gains sudden, clearer understanding “of the secret, formless intuitions in her own mind and body, which had been clearing up, taking form, so gradually and so steadily she had not realized that she was learning what she had to know” (366–67). As the horror of the adult Miranda in the hot, foreign marketplace indicates, this is not a simple lesson in the facts of human sexuality; it is a symbolic realization of her bondage to child-bearing and death.⁶ Split open, the body of the rabbit corresponds to Miranda's own new split, severing her from her former childhood innocence. Moving toward adult sexuality, she moves inexorably toward death. The torn-open womb, a brutal image linking pregnancy with physical destruction, reflects Porter's own abortion and her terror of pregnancy, her fear that she, like her mother, would “die under torture.” “Quietly and terribly agitated … looking down at the bloody heap,” Porter's character, Miranda, rejects the vision, burying it deep in her memory “for nearly twenty years” (367).

The second loss, the abortion twenty years later, is only faintly suggested in “The Grave.” Yet Porter's childlessness, whether due to a physical cause—as Givner suggests—or to an insurmountable fear of childbirth, enhanced her feelings of homelessness and guilt.⁷ Porter's notes on her family for Many Redeemers emphasize the necessity of childbearing for the family's preservation. She mentions several times the failure of the women in the generation after the Grandmother either to bear children or survive childbirth. Evidently Porter feared that with her generation the family faced complete extinction. Grandmother's eleven children, her successful homemaking, and her fruit trees are all evidence of her ability to preserve and continue the family. But the next generation carries a blight. Porter explicitly explored her association of a fertile womb with a fruit-bearing tree through the image of the fig tree. In her notes, the fig tree is associated with fertility, mother and grandmother as childbearers, or simply the family, fruitfully reproducing the same blood through generations. Her notes contain a powerful response to a passage she attributes to the King James Bible: “when the fig tree does not bear it must be cut down and cast into the fire”: “I was thinking of my own family, and at the words a deep shudder went all through me, as if all the dust of the dead quivered and communicated with my flesh … terror, too. I do not want us to die and be altogether dust. … [T]he roots mustn't be destroyed, there must be a replanting” (Many Redeemers). For Porter, recognition of the desire for a home and children, the planting and perpetuation of her family line, gives rise to feelings of terror, responsibility and guilt. She not only lost what fulfilled and nurtured her as a child—her mother's body, her grandmother's home—but she cannot reproduce either woman's fertility. In place of their fruit-filled orchards, she possessed the empty grave.

The mingled smells of flowers and decay, and the sight of sugar “baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs” (367) that bring back the sudden, vivid memories of “The Grave,” find correspondences in “The Fig Tree,” where a younger Miranda ritualistically buries baby animals in flower-draped graves, mingling sweetness and corruption. Having just lost her mother, Miranda is preoccupied with both nurturing and death. Shortly after the story opens, she runs off alone, musing on her recent loss.

Sometimes [her father] called Grandmother “Mamma,” but she wasn't Mama either, she was really Grandmother. Mama was dead. Dead meant gone away forever. Dying was something that happened all the time, to people and everything else. Somebody died and there was a long string of carriages going at a slow walk over the rocky ridge of the hill towards the river while the bell tolled and tolled, and that person was never seen again by anybody. Kittens and chickens and specially little turkeys died much oftener, and sometimes calves, but hardly ever cows or horses.

(354)

Miranda's thoughts move from her grandmother, who has replaced her mother, yet is not “Mama,” to burial rites, and from these to the baby animals she frequently finds dead at the summer house and on her grandmother's farm. To the child, death seems everywhere, “something that happened all the time to people and everything else.” In an effort to gain some control over her insecure, death-filled world, she has developed a ritual of burial corresponding to the adult rituals, the carriages and tolling bells, that fascinate her. She must rigidly repeat her ritual each time a small animal dies: “she always buried it in a little grave with flowers on top and a smooth stone at the head. Even grasshoppers. Everything dead had to be treated this way. ‘This way and no other!’” (354). Through her rule-bound burial rites, Miranda repeats her mother's burial, and as the story progresses we see that the correct performance of the rites has become her way of coping with the terror and loss connected with her mother's death.

Thinking about death and burial, Miranda's steps lead naturally to the fig grove of the town house, a symbolic landscape in the story, representing the nurturing mother for the child. It is dark and comforting there, and Miranda's favorite tree reaches down to her height, feeding her without effort on her part: “the deep branches bowed down level with her chin, and she could gather figs without having to climb” (354–55). The description of the fig grove at the farm makes the connection even clearer; the trees with their soft round fruit, smell milky, like a mother's breast: “They took the dewy path through the fig grove, much like the one in town, with the early dew bringing out the sweet smell of the milky leaves. They passed a fig tree with low hanging branches, and Miranda reached up by habit and touched it with her fingers for luck” (361).

However the fig grove, like the mother, now dead, no longer bears life; it has been replaced by the grave. Thus under the shelter of her favorite tree Miranda finds “one little chicken who did not move.” This death threatens to transform the nurturing grove into a place of terror. Miranda urgently begins an especially elaborate burial, but pressed for time because of the family's imminent departure to the farm, she cannot complete it. The hasty ritual proves inadequate; just as Miranda is called to the carriage she hears “a very sad little crying sound. It said Weep, weep, weep, three times like that slowly, and it seemed to come from the mound of dirt” (356). As the family leaves for the farm Miranda, distraught, imagines the trapped chick crying in the grave: “She had to go back and let him out. He'd never get out by himself, all tangled up in the tissue paper and that shoebox. He'd never get out without her.”

Implicit in Miranda's distress for the chick is the guilty fear that she was somehow responsible for her mother's death. Somehow she acted wrongly, did not perform a required ritual adequately, and so brought on her loss. This guilt seems inescapable, for the cry is even more clear in the milky scented fig grove at the farm. Just as Miranda touches a low-hanging tree for luck, “From the earth beneath her feet came a terrible, faint troubled sound. “‘Weep, weep, weep weep …’ murmured a little crying voice from the smothering earth, the grave” (361). Nurturing has again been transformed to death; the once comforting trees are full of murmurs from the improperly made, suffocating grave.

Unlike “The Grave,” however, “The Fig Tree” not only reflects Porter's exploration of the sexual terror and guilt connected with memory, but it also represents an effort through fiction to resolve the long-term effects of her mother's death. If she cannot silence, she can at least change her response to the cry from the grave that haunts her. The effort is made with the aid of Great Aunt Eliza, whose clear vision and rational, scientific mind, represented by her microscopes and telescopes, can provide Miranda with a new perspective, one directing her away from her obsessive concern with childbearing and nurturing. Eliza's scientific pursuits first replace the little girl's fascination with baby animals: “Miranda almost forgot her usual interests, such as kittens and other little animals on the place … anything at all so it was a baby and would let her pet and feed it, for Great-Aunt Eliza's ways kept Miranda following her about” (360). And then, at the end of the story, the child is released from her terror by her Great Aunt's reasoned explanation. The crying sound becomes a natural phenomenon—tree frogs—not a voice from the grave. With this knowledge, the child enters a more properly ordered, less terrifying world: “Miranda took a deep trembling breath and heard them. They were in the trees. They walked on again, Miranda holding Great-Aunt Eliza's hand” (361).

In “The Fig Tree,” Porter struggled to protect the nurturing landscape of the fig grove from transformation into a place of terror and death. Through the strength of the rational mind, the story suggests, she can at least momentarily achieve a sense of peace. But inevitably memory turns its other face and the nurturer becomes the empty grave. As in the headnote to this essay, the “tender soberly smiling mother,” changes swiftly and inevitably into the “insatiable devourer of rotting flesh.” For Porter, thoughts of love and nurturing, memories of childhood peace and security—all sweetness—slipped into corruption. Again and again, “The Fig Tree” becomes “The Grave.”

Notes

1. Porter described her sources in a 1934 speech before the American Women's Club in Paris. There she discussed “Legend and Memory … the title of the first section of a long novel I am now working on, and I called it that because it is from these two sources that I am attempting to recreate a history of my family” (Essays 433).

2. All unpublished materials cited are in the Katherine Anne Porter Collection, University of Maryland Library at College Park. I am grateful to Isabel Bayley, Porter's literary executor, for permission to quote from the papers, and to the University of Maryland Library special collections staff for their kind assistance. Unpublished notes, essays, and letters are cited parenthetically within the body of this essay. The poem “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery” is excerpted herein from the book The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter, by Katherine Anne Porter, Copyright ^©1970 by Katherine Anne Porter, reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence.

3. Givner states that Porter wrote “The Fig Tree” in Bermuda in 1929 (212); Porter's manuscript, however, has a note in her hand: “First written in Paris, 1934.”

4. Givner describes several times Porter's recurring depression and illness, linking them to early childhood tragedy (for example, 43).

5. Porter mentions the abortion in notes for Thieves Market, a novel she worked on during the 1920s: “Towards the end, after the imprisonment, etc. abortion, etc. Jerome's sickness. Laura and Braggioni must be worked all through this” (Notes, undated). Jerome was her fictional name for Joseph Retinger with whom she was involved in the twenties. Laura—as Porter repeatedly acknowledged—was Mary Doherty, her close companion. According to Thomas Walsh, Mary Doherty mentioned to him that Porter did have an abortion in the early twenties (Conversation with Thomas Walsh, Sept. 1986).

6. DeMouy also notes the double message of the rabbit, that “Giving life means risking death” (140). However, neither she nor Brooks adequately emphasizes the threat of physical violence implicit in the image.

7. Givner discusses Porter's childlessness and argues that Porter was unable to conceive (see, for example, 92, 174–76).

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth. “On ‘The Grave.’” Yale Review 55 (1966): 275–79.

DeMouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983.

Givner, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Delacorte, 1970.

———. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: New American Library, 1970.

Thompson, Barbara. “The Art of Fiction XXIX—Katherine Anne Porter: An Interview.” Paris Review 29 (1963): 87–114.