Katherine Anne Porter: A Feminist Critique

This chapter discusses Katherine Anne Porter, focusing especially on her story "Flowering Judas," in terms of whether she was actually more radical a thinker than the famed John Reed. The question being investigated is whether a woman writer is capable of being more subversive, more revolutionary than someone like Reed, who remains trapped within the capitalist power system.

An adequate feminist critique of Katherine Anne Porter must begin ultimately from the socially radical recognition that the only scientifically verifiable differences between men and women are in the mechanics of biological reproduction, and that all other apparent differences are therefore caused by cultural and social conditioning. There could in theory be a society in which the only difference between men and women would be that women become pregnant and give birth; in every other way men and women could be equal. Even if this statement were not 100 percent certain, it would have to be assumed in order to provide a stable launching point for a rigorously critical analysis, since the typical male viewpoint in Western society (and most others) makes a vast variety of assumptions about inherent and even biological differences between men and women.

The human mind, or perhaps the male mind, has a great penchant for creating dualities: male/female, active/passive, logical/intuitive, rational/emotional, light/dark, good/evil, strong/weak, and so on ad nauseam; and most of these

Related Essays

Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter are very different sorts of writers, with different styles and different ways of structuring their material. .... (2692 11 )

"Noon Wine" Katherine Anne Porter's story "Noon Wine" has been labeled a masterpiece by some critics. .... Porter, Katherine Anne. "Noon Wine." In Three Novellas. .... (1154 5 )

Heat & He The short stories He by Katherine Anne Porter (1927) and Heat by Joyce Carole Oates (1989) share many similarities as Oates tended to re-imagine the works of .... (821 3 )

Women of the Left Bank .... But, after detailing the incomprehension of the critics and the public she allows the heterosexual novelist Katherine Anne Porter to stand in for the rest of .... (1453 6 )

ed, Porter was perfectly conscious of everything she had put into it. To claim, as some critics have, that she had unconsciously created various abstract symbols and structures that she continued to remain unconscious of is essentially nonsense. It is a type of special pleading, a forcing of Porter's work into an alien mold dedicated to the service of some theory or position that was never one of her concerns. Thus one cannot argue that "Flowering Judas" is "really" about the failure of the Mexican revolution or about the political and spiritual corruption of the Roman Catholic church in Mexico or about some equally abstract concern. Such an argument implies that the story could not be important if it were not about some such typically male concern, and that the characters in the story are not important except in relation to that concern. One might characterize such a form of criticism as Platonic or Hegelian, in regarding ideas as the ultimate reality and as the source of such values as importance and meaningfulness. Instead, one must face the fact that "Flowering Judas" is really about Laura and Braggioni, or, one may grant, perhaps about the real-life people whom Porter transmuted into these two characters. For Porter, as

Category: People - K