The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

7. Romantic Love

CHAPTER฀SEVEN฀ ROMANTIC฀LOVE For a time, the acolyte in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Princess” proves the perfect lover for a woman artist. Although he longs for a physical expression of their love, this young man willingly subordinates his desires to his beloved’s dreams. At their marriage altar, the Princess refuses to undress, to set aside her ornate and beautiful robes, her consummate works of art. Instead she turns to the acolyte and announces, “This is the beauty I have created out of a dream and a vision, and I shall wear it until my death. But if you will, let us be betrothed , in a way I shall devise.” The acolyte agrees that her artistic creation not only comes first but that he will serve it rather than any vision of his own. He unhesitatingly replies, “I accept all, for the sake of our dream.”1 Unfortunately, Porter found her male contemporaries far less willing to subordinate their desires to her art. In her personal experience of and related gender-thinking on the conflicts between her art and her desire for love, Porter joined many of her female contemporaries for whom the liberation of modern womanhood proved a mixed blessing. Her recurring struggles between emotion and aspiration are echoed by many of her peers, for example Isadora Duncan, who bitterly observed , “My life has known but two motives—Love and Art. And often Love destroyed Art, and often the imperious call of Art put a tragic end to Love. For these two have no accord, but only constant battle.”2 From 1919 through the course of the 1920s, Porter was a frequent resident of New York’s Greenwich Village, and she participated fully in the decade’s labors to reform Victorian views of the relations between women and men. Like many of her contemporaries, Porter was both inspired by and unsure of the social changes she observed. As Leslie Fishbein notes of New York’s earlytwentieth -century bohemian community, “Prewar rebels were in a quandary regarding the political implications of personal behavior. Many of them were 129 130฀ ~฀ C H A P T E R ฀ S E V E N Freudians uncertain of the relationship between art, normality, and rebellion.”3 For the idealistic men of Porter’s generation, a central arena for enacting their generational rebellion was sexual relations; in Esther Newton’s summation, “For male novelists, sexologists, and artists rebelling against Victorian values, sexual freedom became the cutting edge of modernism.”4 Eager to be on the “cutting edge,” Porter embraced the idea of sexual freedom but found the actual practice less than ideal. As Ellen Trimberger observes in her essay on “Feminism, Men and Modern Love,” “Even the more independent and successful women in Greenwich Village—women like Susan Glaspell, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Austin, Crystal Eastman, Dorothy Day, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Margaret Anderson—operated in a setting where men articulated cultural and ideological positions” and women found themselves still struggling for autonomy. “Women might give each other private support, but there was not at this time a women’s movement that publicly discussed changes in personal life, marriage, and sex, nor one that helped women articulate what changes were in their interests.”5 Many women in this time period found the pressure to be sexually active as confining as it was liberating. Furthermore, the new liberation was itself still male-defined; it did not end the social convention of judging a woman by her sexual status, it merely changed the terms of the judgment. As Porter bitterly observed much later in unpublished comments on the twenties, “If you did not want to expose yourself to every passerby , it was because you were deformed. If you did not want to sleep with every man or woman who asked you, you were sexually a cripple in some way. The strangest blackmail went on in this line.”6 Her frustration with social pressure toward sexual experimentation also echoes that of other women from the period . Lillian Hellman, for example, once told Jay Martin, Nathanael West’s biographer, “In those days, in the late 20s and 30s, we all thought we should be sexually liberated and acted as if we were, but we had a deep uneasiness about sex too.”7 Most of Porter’s friends and acquaintances were on quests similar to her own, and most viewed freedom from family and tradition as prerequisite to a career in the arts. Yet...