[In the following essay, Titus considers Porter's depiction of the female artist in “Holiday.”]

According to Katherine Anne Porter's friend, Robert Penn Warren, the “alienation of the artist” occurs as a “basic theme,” “implicit, over and over” in her fiction and “finds something close to explicit statement” in her story, “Holiday” (Warren 11). Warren's suggestion, made almost fifteen years ago, points toward a central concern of this beautiful, neglected story.¹ In “Holiday” Katherine Anne Porter depicts the alienation of the woman artist in a culture that advocates motherhood, not authorhood, as a woman's natural and ideal achievement. The story was a painful one for Porter to write, not just because its subject was extremely important to her, but also because it was rooted in two deeply troubling personal experiences, both crucial to her thoughts on gender and vocation. She began “Holiday” in 1923, but was unable to complete the story until 1960.

Raised by her grandmother, Katherine Anne Porter grew up exposed to profoundly contradictory views of a woman's proper role. The ambivalence and anxiety about gender role and vocation apparent in her fiction reflects the shifting cultural positions on women that surrounded her as she moved from childhood in 1890's rural west Texas to young womanhood in 1920's Greenwich Village. Porter's grandmother lived in and accepted the domestic sphere of nineteenth century women,² but Porter grew up witnessing first the achievements of the New Woman, who often chose a career and social activism over courtship and marriage,³ and then the gradual discrediting of those achievements and ultimate transformation of the New Woman from self-made heroine to old maid and “invert.”⁴ The women of Porter's own generation, particularly artists and professionals, experienced powerful social pressures not to make choices which could potentially separate them from the heterosexual path of marriage and childbearing. Frequently this pressure came in the form of accusations of sexual deviance.⁵ For a heterosexual and ultimately heterosexist woman like Katherine Anne Porter, suggestions that her career ambitions unsexed her were deeply disturbing.⁶ Although she rebelled against her upbringing, seeking far more expansive and varied opportunities for creative expression as well as intellectual, cultural and sexual freedom, her rebellion was characterized, in the words of her biographer Joan Givner, by “a complicated ambivalence” (Givner 67).

Porter never entirely relinquished a belief that domesticity, marriage, and most of all, childbearing denote female success; as Givner comments, it is remarkable “how closely linked her idea of femininity was with fertility” (Givner 92). Like many women of her generation, Porter viewed motherhood and authorhood as mutually exclusive. In her mind, becoming an artist required an unnatural rejection or repression of her sexuality; it meant becoming, in Porter's own words, “monstrous.” Among her unpublished papers are notes on Saint Rose that clearly express her struggles with conflicts of gender and vocation. Writing of women saints and women artists she concludes:

The body of woman is the repository of life, and when she destroys herself it is important. It is important because it is not natural, and woman is natural or she is a failure. … Therefore women saints, like women artists are monstrosities. … You might say that if they are saints or artists they are not women.⁷

Implicit in these notes is the assumption that a woman is defined by her biological capabilities; her body “is the repository of life,” and if she denies this she “destroys herself.” Overall, the influences of her family background and cultural milieu fed an “anxiety of authorship” in Porter, and her works bear the marks of struggle, often simultaneously “identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed” on women (Gilbert and Gubar 51, 79).

In “Holiday” Katherine Anne Porter turned her attention fully toward questions of gender and vocation. The story sets an anonymous narrator down on a black-land Texas farm in very early spring. Although characterization is cryptic, everything suggests that this narrator is an artist, most likely an aspiring writer. “Holiday” traces her observations of a culture that binds women to the natural order through marriage and parturition. The story consistently exposes and resists patriarchal authority; however, on other issues it is more ambivalent. As the natural world unfolds into spring, the narrator must come to terms with painful feelings of alienation and sterility. In particular, she must face her fear that, in choosing another path, she may have “destroyed” herself, become like her narrative double, Ottilie, the handicapped Mueller daughter. What is remarkable about “Holiday” are the times when the story expresses joyous acceptance of the maimed, alienated self. In a sequence of epiphanic moments, the narrator realizes that although her life choice may separate her from traditional womanhood, she yet remains a part of nature, one more marvelous creation. At the story's close, Porter's narrator goes on a second holiday, taking a brief but free and festive journey away from the alienation and anxiety of being a woman and an artist in a patriarchal culture.

Porter began “Holiday” in 1923, but was unable to complete the story until 1960.⁸ According to her introduction to her 1965 Collected Stories, “The story haunted me for years and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the thing went off track” (v). Typescript evidence reveals that the “certain spot” that stumped Porter was her opening. She struggled with setting up a context for the narrative, in particular describing the “troubles” that brought her narrator to the Mueller farm. Her decision in 1960 was to sidestep the entire problem, and she does this by choosing silence. The published story begins with a cryptic allusion to “troubles” and then a refusal to tell: “It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them” (407). The voice here originates in the Katherine Anne Porter of 1960, approximately thirty-seven years after she first started “Holiday.” At the age of seventy she could truthfully say of her troubles when she was 23 and 24 (her age when some of the story's source events occurred) or 33 and 34 (her age when she wrote the story): “It can no longer matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them” (407). That Porter did have troubles at both times in her life, and both times have bearing on “Holiday” is very clear from biographical evidence. Both moments, a decade apart, probably underlie the narrative's opening silence, and both illuminate Porter's final text.

The first biographical source for “Holiday” is an event Porter rarely mentioned and seems to have hoped would disappear from the record: her nine-year-long early marriage, begun at age 16, to John Koontz, a young Texan from a wealthy Swiss family (which she consistently identified as German) (Givner 88). John Koontz proved an unhappy choice for Porter, and the marriage was full of disagreements. Looking at photographs from these nine years and reading the biographical record of 1906 to 1915, one discovers a young woman full of romantic notions, engaging, flirtatious, eager to dress well and show herself off to advantage. She also longed to begin a family and romanticized her relationship to her sister Gay's first child, Mary Alice, dreaming that she would become the child's “Tante,” and pretending “to herself that she and not Gay was the child's mother” (Givner 96). Unhappily, the marriage met few of her expectations. John Koontz seems to have been a steady but conservative husband, and his family on the whole disapproved of Porter's flirtatious personality and spendthrift pleasures. Furthermore there were no children. The marriage to Koontz likely provided some of the setting and family characterization of “Holiday,” from the Koontz ranch, which Porter enjoyed visiting, to the death of the family patriarch, Henry Koontz, after exposure in a winter storm while tending his cattle (Givner 88–95).

According to Joan Givner, the opening of “Holiday” reflects Porter's final response to her marriage—flight. Givner draws language from that opening to describe Porter's personal decision: “Once she faced the fact that her marriage was ‘trouble that did not belong to her’ she hardened her resolve to run from it ‘like a deer’” (Givner 98). Certainly all of Porter's “tradition, background, and training”—to continue quoting from “Holiday”⁹—had taught her otherwise; her flight from John Koontz when she was in her early twenties was a dramatic and devastating flight away from the expectations surrounding the life of a young woman from her family background. Porter's decision not only shocked the Koontz's but also incited her father's intense disapproval, which did not diminish for years to come (Givner 99). However, for Porter's vocational aspirations escape was crucial, the first step toward an independent, creative career.

“Holiday” also rises out of another biographical moment, one of the more mysterious in Porter's life. Her letters indicate that she wrote most of the story during 1924, while she was involved with Francisco Aguilera, a romantic Chilean studying for a Ph.D. at Yale. According to Porter many years later, Aguilera was the source for naming her fictional alter-ego, Miranda.¹⁰ The relationship was brief; by the end of the summer Porter and Aguilera were no longer involved; however, Porter's letters to Genevieve Taggard that fall state that she is pregnant. Joan Givner thinks that this pregnancy never actually occurred; in fact Givner speculates that Porter could not bear children (Givner 92). None of Porter's friends from the time ever noticed any physical changes, and none of Porter's extant letters, except those to Taggard, mention the pregnancy. What is intriguing is the convergence of three incidents in the letters to Taggard: the pregnancy, the appearance of Miranda, and the creation of “Holiday.” To excerpt from the letters:¹¹

October 31, 1924: “I am completing two stories, both far too long in germinating.”

November 14, 1924: “I have finished my story ‘Holiday’ in a bath of bloody sweat, and am resting … dear darlin,' had you heard, out of the air, maybe, that I am going to have a baby about the middle of January? Now I've passed the danger period of losing it I can't keep silent any longer. Write and tell me how mad I am.

November 28, 1924: “jedsie, darling—you're not to trouble about me. I'm doing well enough, I have been a madwoman, and I know it, but I can't possibly come out of my trance to establish any mood of regret. So far as the child is concerned, it is all more than well—but everything else in my personal life has been a blank failure—in all, I mean, that touches my love.

But, I will see you afterward. I will bring Miranda. (Her name and sex have been definitely chosen for seven months at least) and we will talk about everything for days.”

Thursday, undated: “On December second my child was born prematurely and dead, and though I have never been in danger, still it is better in every way to be quiet. … My baby was a boy. It was dead for half a day before it was born. There seems to be nothing to say about it.”

Certainly there is much here that we can never know; the letters are cryptic, and they form the only known record of these events in Porter's life. Yet after acknowledging that supposition can only partially unravel this mystery, speculation is invited, tracing the few threads that seem to form a pattern.

The letters first break silence and then reinvoke it. There is “nothing to say”; “it is better in every way to be quiet.” They twice confess madness: “tell me how mad I am”; “I have been a madwoman and I know it.” They suggest that Porter was in a heightened mental state—a “trance.” She views the child, whom she knows will be female and named Miranda, as “more than well,” a mark of success in a “personal life [that] has been a blank failure.” All the positive birth imagery in the letters, however, belongs to her writing, not her pregnancy. Two stories are “germinating” and “Holiday” comes to birth, “in a bath of bloody sweat,” a labor so great that afterwards Porter is “resting.” The arrival of “Holiday” coincides with the end of the “danger period” of losing the baby, each is at least a viable rough draft.

Overall, the letters as much as describe the potential birth of the fictional alter-ego, Miranda, as they do an actual pregnancy. Conflating child-birth and creative literary production, they suggest that Porter was seeking a way to resolve the conflicts between gender and vocation that she found so painful and so fundamental. Rather than producing a child, and so fulfilling biological potential, she will produce Miranda, an equally marvelous being. She will be no less a mother because she is an artist, for the creative labors are akin, the outcomes equal.

That Porter's labor to resolve her conflicts of gender and vocation feels both deeply personal and dangerous is apparent in both the repeated invocations of silence and repeated fears that she has become a madwoman. And in the end all her hoped for achievements come to nothing. “Holiday” lay unfinished for thirty-six years; the child, a boy, was stillborn. Dead and male, the child is a bitter conclusion to Porter's hopes. The brave new world, the many wonders, which would accompany Miranda, whether she be a viable alter-ego for Porter's fiction, or an actual child, are lost—she can be neither mother, nor author. As she writes Taggard, “it is better in every way to be quiet. … There seems to be nothing to say.”

In “Holiday,” the story that emerged in “a bath of bloody sweat” but then lay incomplete for over thirty years, Porter also pursued a healing vision, seeking an image of the woman writer as a part of fertile nature, neither unnatural, nor monstrous. Like Porter fleeing her first marriage, the narrator of “Holiday” is a refugee from love. Her disillusionment, underlying the story's opening silence, emerges when she first sees the warm light of the farm house kitchen and finds her “feelings changed again toward warmth and tenderness, or perhaps just an apprehension that I could feel so, maybe, again” (411). The hesitancies of her phrasing suggest the extent of her learned caution. That she was once steeped in love's romantic promises is evident in her confession that all the German she knows is “five small deadly sentimental songs of Heine's learned by heart” (413). German represents the patriarchal language in “Holiday”; it was also the language of the Koontz's. In “Holiday” the narrator's knowledge of German is limited to sentimental cliches; wise now, she is aware that such knowledge, taken to heart, is “deadly.” Most likely through her youthful marriage to John Koontz, Porter first confronted the disjunction between romantic language and actual experience.

To live at the Mueller farm is to live in the heart of a patriarchal order, as Porter makes entirely evident. The narrator's friend Louise identifies the Mueller's as “a household in real patriarchal style—the kind of thing you'd hate to live with” (408). Old Testament figures, the Muellers seem larger than life, solid, physical, bound to the natural cycles of the earth and body. Obedient to these cycles, the family women follow lives devoted to marriage, childbirth, the care of men and of children. The story is unabashed about the narrator's entrance into this ultimate patriarchal order, ruled by “Old father, God almighty himself, with whiskers and all” (408). Choosing to stay with such a family, this alienated, solitary woman chooses to set herself against a culture where gender relations are traditional in structure and unquestioned. In such an environment, her own choices and struggles stand out clearly for self-examination, and in the course of “Holiday” she explores her feelings about women's roles under patriarchy and her relationship to them, at times seriously opening up these roles to question at other times describing them with longing or reverence. On the surface, the fecundity of the farm world suggests that the family's patriarchal order is not just natural, but even blessed. Yet throughout, “Holiday” troubles this smooth surface, providing glimpses of the limitations for women of life under patriarchal rule.

“Holiday” satirizes its ruling patriarch, Father Mueller. A highly successful capitalist who reads Das Kapital reverently, Father Mueller continually buys more land, extending his authority outward from the family holdings, and then uses his economic power to control local politics. At home he maintains a similar economic control over his children, keeping them and their offspring within the family house, refusing to understand why marriage should “take a son or daughter from him” (416). In this way, too, Father Mueller builds his wealth. The labors of his offspring, their spouses and their children, contribute to his profits, for it is assumed natural in a patriarchal, capitalist organization like this family that all the labor of family members should be unpaid. Why then would Father Mueller want to let any children leave his house? “He always could provide work and a place in the household for his daughters' husbands” (416). Resting in the parlor evenings, reading Das Kapital, travelling to town to make purchases, or seated in “his patriarch's place at the head of the table” (415), Father Mueller heads up a hierarchical organization in which all other men and women are ranged, each in their place, beneath him, obedient to his word.

Besides Father Mueller, the men in “Holiday” receive little attention; they are not the interest of the narrative.¹² Throughout, “Holiday” is laden with imagery of maternity: women marry, give birth, care for human and animal offspring, milk cows and feed men in a landscape moving from winter to spring, where the fields lie “ploughed and ready for the seed” (410). As DeMouy rightly points out, “Maternity is the mark of this tale, made in so many places it astounds. Imagery, symbolism, setting, time, character, even gesture communicate maternity in ‘Holiday’” (167).

The Mueller women's lives, devoted to the domestic and nurturant labors, represents women's lives within patriarchal tradition. The narrator, overly self-conscious about her own choices, is drawn to them, finding “the almost mystical inertia” of the Mueller's minds relaxing, for it releases her from her own intense mental activity. Their “muscular life” provides a “repose” for her intellectual one (418). Yet it is not a life she would choose. In the course of the narrative, she notes how repetitive and unreflecting this family's day may be and recognizes that they lack the intellectual and aesthetic awareness that is so central to her own consciousness. Even the play of the Mueller children repeats the laborious demands of constant nurturing. In silence they move their toys through a day's tasks: “They fed them, put them to bed; they got them up and fed them again” (418). For variation, the children “would harness themselves to their carts” (418), an image that confirms what the text everywhere else suggests, that the Mueller's life is little different from animal life. It is physical, instinctive. The women in particular exist in a state of mental sleep, or half-waking. For example, Gretchen, the family's favorite daughter, “wore the contented air of a lazy, healthy young animal, seeming always about to yawn” (416). Raising their children, the women “were as devoted and caretaking as a cat with her kittens” (419).

In the portrayal of Mother Mueller, the matriarch, “Holiday” suggests most powerfully the negative side of traditional womanhood. If Father Mueller as capitalist and patriarch controls the labor of his family, Mother Mueller works to sustain the gender roles which order and perpetuate the family structure. Called “the old mother,” by the narrator, she emerges from the descriptive language surrounding her as a powerful, dark, somewhat fearsome woman, whose voice is a raucous shout. Her colors, amidst the pale blues and greens which characterize the family and the landscape, are elemental blacks and browns. With her “seamed dry face … brown as seasoned bark” and her teeth “blackened,” she looms behind her husband “like a dark boulder” (142, 415), suggesting the forces of nature which underpin and sustain the patriarchal order. The old mother's power is most evident in the milking scenes that dominate her characterization. That she is fully bound to this labor is suggested by the description of her daily passage to the barn wearing a “wooden yoke, with the milking pails covered and closed with iron hasps” (414). Her unmarried daughter Hatsy does not yet carry the full maternal burden—the “milk yoke” (430); thus she is described as running beside her mother, lightfooted, swinging two tin pails (414). When later Hatsy's new husband tries to carry the full pails of milk, the old mother stops him, shouting “No! … not you. The milk is not business for a man” (430). Milk is women's business, and money is men's in this story.

Both Father and Mother Mueller work to maintain these distinctions around which gender has historically been structured. When she dies and at her deathbed he momentarily loses his faith in money, the family is thrown into disorder, unbound from its necessary verities. As Father Mueller cries out over Mother Mueller's body, “hundert thousand dollars … tell me, tell, what goot does it do?” the children break into a “tumult utterly beyond control” (431). However the mother's death only briefly shatters the family order. Because that order is structured around natural cycles, the entire farm confirms its continuance: “they would hurry back from the burial to milk the cows” (433).

When the narrator of “Holiday” arrives she feels she has no part in the natural cycles that structure the Mueller world. She is a winter figure who comes to this fecund patriarchal order seeking healing and renewal. She rides to the farm on the felicitously named spring wagon, whose mysterious harnesses suggest her own interest in finding a way to attach herself to the positive, forward movement of the season. Yet she is in every way separate from the Mueller family, particularly in the intellectual vocation most evident in her fascination with language. Although she longs for freedom from hearing and speaking, the narrator is obsessed with interpretation of signs of all sorts. When we first meet her, seated on her trunk at the station, she is thinking about writing, mentally composing a letter to her friend Louise, and “beginning to enjoy” (409) the task just as it is interrupted by the Mueller boy.¹³ Louise is clearly a discriminating reader, and the narrator is much concerned with her audience. She is also mindful of the differences between fact and fantasy, as well as the requisite talents for a literary career. She has decided that “unless [Louise] was to be a novelist, there was no excuse for her having so much imagination” (409). One might note as well that for this narrator a career as novelist can certainly be a woman's goal. The contents of Louise's beloved attic further confirm this awareness.

As she rides toward the farm, the narrator continues to ponder language and composition. She admires the formal qualities of “a river shaped and contained by its banks, or a field stripped down to its true meaning” (410). The harness of the spring wagon, “a real mystery,” takes up much of her thinking, as she attempts to find meaningful order in its structure: “It met and clung in all sorts of unexpected places; it parted company in what appeared to be strategic seats of jointure … Other seemingly unimportant parts were bound together irrevocably with wire” (410). Later in the narrative, after she finds herself bound to Ottilie, the Mueller's handicapped daughter, with “a filament lighter than cobweb” (426), the narrator will demonstrate her own ability to handle the mysterious connections of the harness, when she takes Ottilie out for a second holiday journey in the spring wagon. With her curiosity about language, the narrator also puzzles over the name “spring wagon,” unable to see why it should belong to this “exhausted specimen.” It is a testimony to the intricacy of this story's symbolic layering that the wagon's progress, “with a drunken, hilarious swagger” (410), also describes Ottilie's movements: “Her head wagged. … Her shaking hand seemed to flap … in a roguish humor” (426). Both the wagon and Ottilie are “exhausted specimens,” and both are also, as we shall see, the unexpected vehicles of the narrator's rejuvenation.

The narrator's interest in language and meaning exists simultaneously with a longing to escape from language, to descend into a preverbal internal world from which she can be reborn. As she settles into her attic room, and hears the murmur of German beneath her, she finds pleasure in listening to the “muted unknown language which was silence with music in it” (413). Once relieved of the possibility of communication, she imagines she can travel toward her essential self:

I loved that silence which means freedom from the constant pressure of other minds and other opinions and other feelings, that freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to my own center, to find out again, for it is always a rediscovery, what kind of creature it is that rules me finally.

(413)

The narrator's journey from her troubles is also a journey toward freedom, and that freedom entails not only discovering her own authority, what “rules [her] finally,” but also her own “opinions” and “feelings.” She must escape her own life and learned expectations, and she must free herself from the expectations inscribed in language itself. Anne Goodwyn Jones has commented on the movement away from language in “Holiday,” suggesting that “it is precisely the experience of moments of prelinguistic experience, of unintelligible sound, that [allows] the narrator to begin to work through her own suffering.” From her descent into a state free of language's structures and ingrained, controlling meanings, the narrator can emerge essentially linguistically newborn. She can “re-enter the symbolic so that eventually she can tell us this story.”¹⁴

It is important to keep in mind here that the language the narrator cannot understand, German, is the language of patriarchy in the story. To find herself as a woman artist, she must first escape this language, and thus escape the expectations for women which it inscribes. Finding a location outside patriarchal texts is a necessary act for the narrator early in “Holiday”; it is a stage in her personal revision and healing. As Jones argues, the break from language in “Holiday” represents a break “from the stable and coercive representational structures, relational possibilities, and dichotomous subject constructions of the patriarchal … household.” It is just such a break that the narrator desires: she is looking for a new way to define herself as a woman, outside of those structures. She seeks to construct her own language, first by finding silence.

Looking for guidance on her journey, the narrator follows the advice of her friend and mentor, Louise. Louise is an interesting figure, most notably as a storyteller, who possesses “something near to genius for making improbable persons, places, and situations sound attractive. She told amusing stories that did not turn grim on you until a little while later” (407–8). Louise sends the narrator to a place rich in symbolic potential for an aspiring woman writer—the attic of a patriarchal household. Although the narrator could sleep downstairs with the family, in what womanly Hatsy clearly thinks is a “better place,” both the narrator and Louise love the attic—“My attic,” as Louise fondly calls it. High in the rafters of the Mueller house, the attic is a small sloped-ceiling bedroom that has sheltered at least one other literary women in the past. Piled in a corner are the writings of nineteenth century women: “The Duchess, Ouida, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems.” The inhabitant before Louise was “a great reader,” who passed on these women's texts to her successors (408).

The description of the attic room in Porter's “Holiday,” with its shingled ceiling, “stained in beautiful streaks, all black and grey and mossy green” (408), recalls the inscribed walls of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In fact the room as a whole, tucked up at the top of the patriarchal household, is a familiar location in women's writing: the place of retreat and creativity.¹⁵ Porter's manuscripts indicate that she worked at length on her description of the attic; in fact it was the location of most of her revisionary labor. Not only does she place it atop an especially patriarchal household, but she also describes the house itself in a way that recalls the Gothic manor houses in which fictional women guilty of too much imagination so often have languished. In the final version of “Holiday,” the house is “staring and naked, an intruding stranger” in the landscape; “The narrow windows and steeply sloping room oppressed me,” the narrator confesses, “I wished to turn away and go back” (411). In contrast to the house, the attic room is far from alien—it is “homely and familiar.”¹⁶ The attic comforts the narrator, for it confirms Louise's description, but even more is suggested. Although it is a place the narrator has never been physically, yet it is a place she knows, and has visited before. Perhaps entering this space so familiar to creative women within the patriarchal household, she feels she has come to her own right location. Joan Givner succinctly points to this possibility, noting: “In short, the situation [of the attic bedroom] is that of the woman writer's anomalous position under patriarchy.”¹⁷ It is interesting that in her drafts of “Holiday,” Porter's description of the attic contained images of both the sexual renunciation and the deathliness she feared accompanied her vocation. In both the second and third draft, she elaborates on the room's bed. To draw from the third draft, “The puffy big bed suggested goosefeather under the white knitted counterpane, the flat white pillows stood up like small marble tombstones.”

“Holiday”'s exploration of a woman writer's anxiety about vocation and patriarchal expectations coalesces in the narrator's relationship with Ottilie, the Mueller's handicapped daughter. The narrator powerfully identifies with Ottilie, feeling that she and this mute woman are “even a part of each other” (426). The text invites a reading of Ottilie as the narrator's double,¹⁸ a doubling that Jane Krause DeMouy extends further when she reads the unnamed narrator as Miranda, Porter's fictional counterpart (166). Certainly all three women—Porter, the narrator, and Ottilie—are linked by their estrangement from women's traditional lives. In “Holiday,” the narrator and Ottilie are both alienated from the patriarchal household, from its visual affiliations, its language, and its cycles of marriage and parturition. Like Ottilie, this self-conscious, literary narrator is “a stranger and hopeless outsider” (421).

Because she simultaneously believes in and rejects the definition of female identity everywhere expressed by the Mueller women's labors, the narrator is both drawn to Ottilie, and horrified by her. She sees a woman free from sexual and emotional attachments, mute and unknowable, and she sees a woman who is unsexed and disfigured, barred from participating in the traditional life patterns of the other Mueller women. In the narrator's mind, Ottilie is both the most complete and the most damaged human being in that household; in short, her feelings toward “the servant” are deeply ambivalent. In an extended passage, she meditates on the consequences of Ottilie's isolation:

I got a powerful impression that [the Muellers] were all, even the sons-in-law, one human being divided into several separate appearances. The crippled servant girl … seemed to me the only individual in the house. Even I felt divided into many fragments. … But the servant girl, she was whole, and belonged nowhere.

(417)

To be bound or to have been bound to others is to lose one's wholeness and individuality. Yet in the common mass there is comfort, familiar rituals, shared love. Ottilie represents a location outside patriarchy; she “belonged nowhere.” Like the intellectual or rebellious woman in the 19th century attic, this mute, painfully crippled woman in the Mueller kitchen and her counterpart, the solitary, observant narrator with her secret wound, inhabit “the marginal life of the household” (417).¹⁹

The narrator's anxiety about her pursuit of an alternative language is also apparent in her descriptions of Ottilie with her uncontrollable body, “formless mouth,” and eyes “strained with anxiety” (420). Outside of language, Ottilie appears outside of meaning, incomprehensible, unreal: “Her muteness seemed nearly absolute; she had no coherent language of signs;” “nothing could make her seem real, or in any way connected with the life around her” (421, 425). Ottilie's alienation disturbs the narrator, for it suggests the risks of her own quest to escape patriarchal inscription and limitation. Rejecting the verities of language and tradition, she risks losing all order and meaning, risks incoherence, silence, or insanity.

Throughout “Holiday,” the narrator suffers painful, contradictory emotions through her identification with Ottilie. At times it seems to her that Ottilie is whole and unplaced, “neither young nor old, living her own secret existence.” At other times she sees Ottilie as a victim, her face broken in “blackened seams as if the perishable flesh had been wrung in a hard cruel fist” (420). In her identification with Ottilie, the narrator draws up waters from her own well of unhappiness. She watches the kitchen door through which Ottilie enters with “wincing eyes, as if I might see something unendurable enter through it.” (428). What is unendurable to confront is her own projected suffering, and in her wish for Ottilie's death—“Let it be now, let it be now” (428)—the narrator expresses a desire to escape the profound suffering that accompanies her own sense of isolation and difference.

Ottilie and the narrator are the women in the Mueller house who do not marry and bear children; they are outside, unsexed, “mutilated, almost destroyed” (426). Ottilie's illness, which the narrator describes as “congenital” (415)—or from the womb—bespeaks her own womb-sickness, or unnatural female condition. In this sense of being unnatural, even monstrous, the two women express Porter's own fears. Jane Krause DeMouy makes this connection well, noting that the narrator—like Porter—“cannot change her ingrained view of femininity and its fulfillment; neither can she live that way. Thus in her mind she is like Ottilie, an arrested and crippled figure of a woman who will never bear life” (176). Yet “Holiday” manages to work through this terrible confrontation with the mutilated female self to some reconciliation. Ottilie is as much the narrator's double—in whom she confronts the dangers potential in her vocational choice—as she is the vehicle of the narrator's joyous realization that this choice may bring not only losses, but also positive, compensating rewards. Bound by their difference, both women are excluded from traditional womanhood, but in “Holiday” this does not mean, finally, that they are entirely “not natural” or “monstrosities”—Porter's words for women artists and saints.

To counter such anxieties, Porter turns to the natural world, and shows how her narrator lives in and is even blessed by its beauty. Although her culture may view her as unnatural, she yet participates in the essential life impulse that flows through everything and finds a joyous freedom in the marginality and difference that sets her outside of patriarchal expectation. “Holiday” achieves its affirmative vision in a series of epiphanic moments. In each the narrator finds that both she and her double—the figure of her most extreme sense of alienation—belong to nature and participate in its festive beauty.

Porter establishes the narrator and Ottilie's distinct difference from the Mueller household in a single, sweeping perspective. Out for her morning walk, the narrator looks back toward the farm and sees that “The women were deep in the house, the men were away to the fields, the animals were turned down into the pastures, and only Ottilie was visible” (424). The two women literally stand out from the mass life of the family and the animals. This moment of recognition leads to a complex and intimate moment with Ottilie. Obeying the mute woman's gestures, the narrator follows her into her cloistered bedroom. In contrast to the attic, which suggested the intellectual inheritance of literary sisterhood, Ottilie's room suggests the prison of silent, unwanted women's lives. It is “bitter-smelling and windowless,” with a “blistered looking-glass”—an image suggesting Ottilie's distorted reflection of the narrator (425). Here the narrator learns that Ottilie is not only the eldest of the Mueller sisters, but also bound to her with ties equally intimate. Looking at a photograph of Ottilie as a sturdy child, the narrator realizes that “the bit of cardboard connected her at once somehow to the world of human beings … for an instant some filament lighter then cobweb spun itself out between that living center in her and in me, a filament from some center that held us all bound to our unescapable common source, so that her life and mine were kin, even a part of each other” (426). This recognition is powerful and fearsome; Ottilie flees and the narrator is left gazing at “the photograph face downward on the chest” (426). If she glanced up at this moment, one wonders, would she see her own face in the “blistered mirror” “mutilated, almost destroyed,” like Ottilie's face?

The moment is brief. Yet in her epiphanic recognition that she and Ottilie are not only kin to each other, but bound with all life to an “unescapable common source,” the narrator realizes that no matter how much she may be alienated from what the story figures as the natural cycles of human life, yet she is no less a part of life itself. In their source, she and Ottilie are joined to humanity. This healing knowledge, which the narrator reaches through her bond with a woman who is as much or more Other to patriarchy than she is herself, builds on an earlier moment in the narrative when the narrator found that although her freedom from domestic duties separated her from traditional women's lives, it also freed her for aesthetic appreciation. In fact her freedom brings her into a relation with the natural world that may be equally if not more enriching. Rather than being a laboring participant, she can become an appreciative observer.

Often spending her days following a narrow lane down to the river, “passionately occupied with looking for signs of spring” (419), the narrator seeks renewal and vocational confirmation from the natural world, and she receives both in one glorious gust of beauty. Returning late to the house, she finds the orchard “abloom with fireflies”; she had never seen “anything that was more beautiful”:

The flower clusters shivered in a soundless dance of delicately woven light, whirling as airily as leaves in a breeze, as rhythmically as water in a fountain. Every tree was budded out with this living, pulsing fire as fragile and cool as bubbles.

(419–20)

The soundless, intricate movement of the fireflies evokes thoughts of art as much as nature in the narrator. She is touched both literally and figuratively in their transforming light: “When I opened the gate, their light shone on my hands like foxfire. When I looked back, the shimmer of golden light was there, it was no dream” (420). Entering the house, she immediately meets Hatsy “on her knees in the dining room, washing the floor with heavy dark rags,” doing her labor at night so that “the men with their heavy boots would not be tracking it up again” (420). The juxtaposition is vivid and intentional. Bound to her domestic labors, particularly her service to men in the household, Hatsy may be part of the cycles of parturition, but she is also alienated from nature as a source of aesthetic beauty, and from the blessing it can lay on the hands of the woman artist. Her hands are full of “heavy dark rags,” not of visionary light that is yet “no dream.”

It is the death of Mother Mueller that brings the narrator to a final sequence of confrontations with her own life choices, her underlying fears, and her recognition of the viability of laughter and the possibility of joy. While the funeral procession gathers outside the house, the narrator, up in her attic, undergoes a vicarious experience of dying. Porter rewrote this moment several times in her drafts, it was important to her, yet its meaning remains elusive. The published narrative tells us that the narrator realized, on the funeral day, “for the first time, not death, but the terror of dying.” And overcome by that terror she lay in her room and felt that she too was passing away—“it was as if my blood fainted and receded with fright, while my mind stayed wide awake to receive the awful impress” (433). In her first draft Porter was even more explicit about the death experience:

I went to my room and lay down, an awful foreboding certainty closed over me like a vast impersonal hand. Life was squeezed away drop by drop, a cell at a time I was dying as I lay there.

In both versions, when the funeral procession moves off, she is relieved; “As the sounds receded, I lay there not thinking, not feeling, in a mere drowse of relief and weariness” (433). The vicarious experience seems in part a passing away of all the mother stood for in the story. Lying on her white bed, with its pillows like “small marble tombstones,” the narrator may be letting go of her own motherhood. With the passing of the matriarch's body, she is set free from the rigidity of Mother Mueller's view—milk is the business for a woman. Relinquishing once essential, self-defining beliefs, she experiences a sort of death and release. Her drowse is broken by a howl, not from a trapped dog, as she first imagines, figuring still her own entrapment, but instead from Ottilie crying out in the kitchen below. Ottilie's grief is her own, but at the same time it is the narrator's. Both women are experiencing—as internal and external fact—the loss of the mother. It is interesting that women who have become mothers cannot hear this grief. As she heads toward the kitchen, the narrator sees Gretchen peacefully asleep, “curled up around her baby” (433).

When the narrator enters the kitchen, Ottilie lays her “head on [her] breast” (433), as if she is the narrator's child, the grieving, crippled self birthed with her aspirations. Gathering Ottilie in her arms, the narrator helps her into the spring wagon, which she can now harness herself. Her journey seems ironic at first, for initially she imagines that Ottilie wishes to be a part of the funeral procession, to belong to and be governed by the family rituals, and thus she hurries to join the others, “a bumbling train of black beetles,” “going inch-meal up the road” (434). Her haste suggests she will attempt to bring her crippled and anomalous self back into the old order, pursuing a mindless, insect-like uniformity. But as the narrator guides the wild, swaggering spring wagon toward the dark procession, she touches Ottilie and confronts fully and irrevocably the fact of this other woman's—and her own—difference:

my fingers slipped between her clothes and bare flesh, ribbed and gaunt and dry against my knuckles. My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing as her own rose in me unuttered and died again, to be a perpetual ghost.

(434)

In an intriguing discussion of “Holiday,” Joan Givner reads this moment in a biographical light. Touching Ottilie's bare flesh, she argues, the narrator touches the possibility of love between women, particularly women artists, a love that frees them to take paths other than those laid out for traditional womanhood.²⁰ For this reader, it is more likely that touching Ottilie, the narrator experiences not potential physical relations but rather pure anguish, touching once again her own crippled womanhood, as she viewed it. The howl that rises in her is again grief at the loss of the mother within herself, echoing Ottilie's earlier howl at the mother's death without. The narrator's “unuttered” yet “despairing” howl expresses a never completely comforted grief that belonged to her creator as well as to herself. As Porter's fiction again and again confirms, the loss—the giving up of traditional womanhood—remained in her mind like a “perpetual ghost” that continued to haunt her for most of her life.

What is marvelous in “Holiday” is the recognition of joyous compensations for the loss of traditional womanhood. As the narrator reverberates with shock and despair, Ottilie breaks into laughter and “clap[s] her hands for joy. … The feel of the hot sun on her back, the bright air, the jolly senseless staggering of the wheels, the peacock green of the heavens: something of these had reached her” (434). Ottilie's joy springs from the natural world around her and thus repeats again for the narrator the lesson of her epiphany in the blooming orchard. Although she may not lead the life considered natural for a woman, she is yet a part of nature, in no way alienated from its beauty and blessings, and thus neither is her counterpart Ottilie. Together the two women share a celebratory moment that is rebirth and liberation. Like a baby, Ottilie “gurgled and rocked in her seat.” She leans on the narrators and marvels Miranda-like, “waving loosely around her as if to show me what wonders she saw” (434). The narrator joins her celebration, recognizing that both she and Ottilie are “equally the fools of life” (435). This is a healing realization, full of the laughter that accompanies the rollicking wagon and Ottilie's wagging head.

Yet Ottilie and her companion are also “fellow fugitives from death” (435), as the narrator goes on to realize; they have escaped the mother's funeral, and they are momentarily beyond the patterns of life and death which governed the matriarch. In its final paragraph, “Holiday” echoes Frost's poem, “The Road Not Taken.” The narrator turns the spring wagon away from the “main travelled” road to one less taken, her narrow lane to the river where she first sought the signs of spring (435). Now with her new healing knowledge, she can take that different path, with Ottilie close beside her. “We had escaped one more day at least,” the narrator exults, “We would have a little stolen holiday” (435). With these words “Holiday”'s narrative repeats itself, but with a difference. Whereas the narrator's first holiday from her troubles took her only to the margins and attics of the patriarchal household, this second springtime holiday takes her completely away from the household toward new, less charted possibilities.

“Holiday” represents Porter's most positive fictional resolution of the conflicts between being a woman and being an artist. The story does show the alienated narrator inhabiting the symbolic space of her nineteenth-century predecessors; like them she risks social condemnation—“madness”—by her choices, risks always being a “hopeless outsider” to traditional women's lives. Yet for this narrator, brought into existence in 1924, the attic of her literary foremothers is a “homely and familiar place.” In the same way, she can come to terms with her dark double, expression of her fears of alienation and unwomanliness—her monstrous, unsexing vocational choice. Ottilie is the reflection in a blistered mirror of the narrator, yet this narrator comes to realize that neither she nor Ottilie are unnatural. Both are bound to each other and to a common life source. Ottilie is part of the patriarchal family, wrung by its hard fist into her mutilated form. The product of that system, she yet escapes it by her difference. With the narrator she goes on a holiday, celebrating a joyous relation with nature that is free from nature's demands. The road less travelled takes these two women, shoulder to shoulder, wagging and clapping in joyous irreverence, away from the rituals of motherhood. Ottilie and the narrator are an odd, absurd, even grotesque couple. Although a holiday from patriarchy begins in alienation and ends with a suppressed howl of anguish, it also provides epiphanic moments of joy and freedom. Outside of language and thus free from its constraining definitions, inhabiting the very margins of the father's household, the lives of these two women are not inscribed in the narrative of patriarchy, and they simply ride, laughing together, out of the whole story—enjoying a “stolen holiday … on this lovely, festive afternoon” (435).

Notes

1. Despite the fact that it is one of Porter's most successful stories, and clearly invites a feminist approach, “Holiday” has received few full-length critical readings. Most suggestive is Jane Krause DeMouy's discussion in Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction, pages 166–76. DeMouy's reading corresponds with my own in its attention to the Mueller's fecundity and the narrator's sense of personal sterility. Also notable are George Core's 1969 essay, “‘Holiday’: A Version of the Pastoral” in Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium, ed. Lodwick Hartley and George Core (Athens: U Georgia P, 1969) and Darlene Harbour Unrue's discussion in Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (Athens: U Georgia P, 1985). In both readings, “Holiday” emerges as a text about “universals”: life and death, order and disorder. Most recently Robert Brinkmeyer sees the story as an expression of Porter's concerns with social order and individual freedom in Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993).

2. In her fictional portrayal of her grandmother's power, Porter shows both the creativity and limitations arising from what we now call the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. Stitching quilts, preserving fruits, maintaining household discipline, the Grandmother of Porter's “The Old Order” is an admirable, entirely capable matriarch, her achievement inscribed in both the beauty of her several homes and the number of her children—eleven in all.

3. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg notes, “From the 1870's through the 1920's, between 40 and 60 percent of women college graduates did not marry at a time when only 10 percent of all American women did not” (253).

4. The New Woman appears in Porter's marvelous portrait of Aunt Eva in her novella Old Mortality. Here, Miranda—Porter's fictional representative—listens to her fierce older cousin's battle for women's suffrage, and thinks “it seemed heroic and worth suffering for, but discouraging too, to those who came after: Cousin Eva so plainly had swept the field clear of opportunity” (Collected Stories, 210). However, in the portrait of independent Aunt Eva, one can trace not only Porter's admiration for the generation of women that preceded her, but also the influence of the social arguments that eventually discredited their story. Although Eva is clearly admirable, she is also “chinless,” “withered,” and bitter.

5. With the newly acknowledged fact of female sexual desire, apparent in the figure of the flapper, the 19th century concept of a separate women's sphere became potentially threatening to heterosexual hegemony. Two responses were the ideology of companionate marriage and the conclusions of the sexologists, who linked ambitious career women to homosexuality. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's research has revealed, “By the 1920s charges of lesbianism had become a common way to discredit women professionals, reformers, and educators” (281). See also Christian Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers 4.3, 54–9, and Lillian Faderman's chapter, “Keeping Women Down” in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (NY: William and Morrow, 1981), pages 332–40.

6. Porter's homophobia became increasingly apparent as she grew older, until her belief in what was “natural” to sexual identity shaped her appraisal of literary history and her assessment of many of her contemporaries. See Givner, 239, 317, and Porter's notes for an essay, “The Twenties—notes,” Series II.I, Box 28, Katherine Anne Porter Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

7. “Life of St. Rose,” Series II.I, Box 19. Katherine Anne Porter Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. I am grateful to the special collections staff at the University of Maryland for their kind assistance with my research. I also want to thank Barbara Thompson Davis, the literary executor for Katherine Anne Porter, for permission to quote from unpublished materials. Finally I want to thank my colleague, Diana Postlethwaite, for her clearheaded editorial comments on a draft of this essay.

8. Because the manuscript evidence of “Holiday” not only contributes to a reading of the story, but has also been somewhat misrepresented in critical accounts, it is important to briefly survey what records we do have of Porter's composition. Porter uncovered the manuscript in 1960, while digging through boxes in her Georgetown home in the company of a neighbor, Rhea Johnson. Drawing on an interview with Johnson, Joan Givner argues that the “certain spot” that always stymied Porter was the conclusion: she “wrote three versions of the ending and set it aside indefinitely.” Then in 1960 she reread her drafts, “saw how the story should go [and] triumphantly finished it” (Givner 434).

   Although the archival evidence confirms the rediscovery of the text, marginal dating in Porter's hand suggests a different sequence of composition. Of the extant drafts of the story—three typescripts in the Harry Ransom Research Center Collection, University of Texas, Austin—one carries Porter's marginal comment: “Written 1923. Rhea, this is my first draft. The others are attempts to rewrite it. I have returned very much to this version in my final copy. I destroyed the first five pages, alas!” This typescript, missing the opening pages, begins with the first dinner table scene and continues unbroken all the way to the story's conclusion. Except for the addition of a few words, that conclusion is identical to the one in the final copy. Clearly the “certain spot” that troubled Porter was not the ending. Another far less complete typescript, labelled by Porter “paper scraps of second draft,” begins with the narrator's entrance into her attic room and continues for a page beyond the dinner scene. It is interesting that the first page of this typescript is numbered “2”, as though the story began only shortly before the entrance into the attic. Finally, a third typescript, labelled “Part of 3rd draft begun in Georgetown, July 1960,” begins at the train station, “For half an hour I waited on the station platform, seated on my small trunk.” This draft then moves back to the conversation with Louise (that conservation precedes the station scene in the final version). This four page typescript continues to resemble the opening of Porter's final version fairly closely; it describes the narrator's journey to the farm and ends with her entrance into the attic. What the typescript evidence suggests overall is that the “certain point” that stumped Porter was the beginning of “Holiday,” not the conclusion. In all discussion of the drafts of “Holiday,” I am referring to these three typescripts at the University of Texas, Austin. In the Katherine Anne Porter Collection at the University of Maryland, College Park, there are only corrected galleys and a clean typescript of the final version.

9. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 407. All further quotations from the published text of “Holiday” will be from this cited edition and will be indicated parenthetically.

10. As she told the scholar Edward Schwartz in 1958, “Once a long time ago I had a very romantic (though fickle) Spanish beau. I received a letter from him beginning: ‘Ariel to Miranda: Take this slave of music for the sake of him who is a slave to thee!’” This address, she informed Schwartz, led to Miranda's name:

    Well it was all foxfire and soon over, but just the same that is why the young woman (and the child) named Miranda represented me, or rather the observer, in those stories you know. All this happened several years before I published a book … yet from that far-off episode I took my alter-ego name which now I can never abandon. (qtd. Givner 170)

11. “Genevieve Taggard 1924–39,” Katherine Anne Porter Collection, Series I, Box 30. University of Maryland, College Park.

12. Jane Krause DeMouy notes, “although this is a family of strong sons as well as daughters, one hardly notices because Miranda [the narrator] is so fascinated with its women … she describes the appearance and function of each daughter, all of whom are absorbed in bearing, rearing, and nurturing life, like their mother” (169).

13. In Porter's third draft of “Holiday,” the narrator's interest in language is developed even more explicitly. Here, she weighs the quality of phrases for her letter in true writerly fashion: “‘Unparalleled betrayal’—it wouldn't do. Too pompous if she chose to take it seriously, which I didn't expect; too facetious if she should at that moment be seeing the gay side of everything.”

14. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Katherine Anne Porter's ‘Holiday’ and the Gender of Agrarianism.” Unpublished essay. I am grateful to Anne Jones for generously sharing this paper with me.

15. Louise's beloved attic in “Holiday” belongs in the company of other women writer's significant hideaways. From the attic in Jane Eyre to the nursery in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” such a room in women's fiction has represented the condition of women under patriarchy, at times it is a prison, suggesting the isolation and oppression of creative women in the patriarchal household; at times it is a symbolic location, suggesting the suppressed, enraged, and even insane creative impulse within the silenced woman artist. Gilbert and Gubar explore the attic and related images extensively in women's texts, concluding that the room suggests the way women perceived themselves as trapped “in the architecture—both the houses and the institutions—of patriarchy” (85).

16. In her drafts, Porter took pains to exactly describe the room's welcome. “It was as homely and familiar as a place revisited, long remembered” (third draft); “It was not even a strange room, but a homely place revisited, though I had never set foot in it until now” (second draft).

17. Address at the Katherine Anne Porter Centennial Conference, Georgia State University, Atlanta, 1990. I am grateful to Joan Givner for sharing a copy of her unpublished talk.

18. Another figure of the oppressed creative woman that so often inhabits the margins of women's texts, Ottilie is, in Gilbert and Gubar's terms, a “dark double” (79).

19. It is interesting that the name Ottilie, pronounced O-teel-ya, sounds like Ophelia, another woman driven mad within the patriarchal household, and a common figure in 19th century painting's obsession with beautiful, insane women, sisters of the literary and women spinning words in their attics.

20. Considering the power of Porter's homophobia and her enduring association of womanhood with childbearing, it is difficult to imagine that she would consider a lesbian relationship a personal possibility, and Givner is quick to qualify her reading: “It was one [possibility] that she did not consider for very long. However much she felt alienated from the mainstream world, the idea of all-female associations and the idea of physical contact between women was distasteful to her.” Joan Givner, Address at Katherine Anne Porter Centennial Conference, Georgia State University, Atlanta, 1990.

Works Cited

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

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.

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

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Vision of Gender in Victorian American. NY: Oxford UP, 1985.

Warren, Robert Penn. “Introduction,” Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979, pp. 7–29.