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1. The Princess of Art
- University of Georgia Press
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CHAPTERONE THEPRINCESSOFART Sometime around 1927, Katherine Anne Porter struggled to complete a strange and bitter tale about a young woman who has dedicated her life to creating art. The result, although unfinished, represents an extraordinary document in Porter’s exploration of gender roles and sexuality and, indeed, in the history of women’s writing. “The Princess” creates a symbolic world that serves to define the cultural conflicts surrounding a woman artist. For Porter, the intellectual freedom allowed in an invented world was clearly libratory, providing a landscape in which she could explore dangerously charged materials with less risk because she made no claims for representational veracity.1 The story presents with mingled irony and bitter humor the generational replication of a gender system, the social control of female sexuality, and a young woman’s attempt to escape cultural conscription through the invention of art. “The Princess” is a remarkable and disturbing tale. Much revised, and incomplete, especially near its close, it yet represents a crucial document in Porter’s gender-thinking, raising key questions that she continued to explore throughout her career.2 In the imaginary kingdom of “The Princess,” daily life is dominated by a religious ideology “dedicated to the love and worship of nature.”3 The kingdom’s inhabitants live naked and unshorn for most of their lives, rejecting anything that would alter what they view as their natural state. Technological developments , they believe, could lead their nation in the disastrous way of their neighbors, “the Ruzanites who put their food in the fire before eating it, so that their stomachs rotted while they yet lived” (232). Women’s lives are strictly regulated in this kingdom, and marriage and childbearing are viewed as their natural goals. Under the authority of a powerful High Priestess, rituals are built around the stages of female physical development; the clothing allowed women functions solely to identify the reproductive status of its wearer’s body. Prepubescent girls and women past the age of childbearing cover their bodies, 14 T H E P R I N C E S S O F A R T ~ 15 wearing white or plain gray shifts respectively. When they reach puberty, girls undergo a springtime ritual at the temple in which a male acolyte takes their virginity. During this “feast of marriage with the god” (230), they discard their white shifts; from then on they remain naked until menopause. Into this rigid “natural” order Porter sets a rebel. At the proper age of thirteen, her Princess, sole child of the kingdom’s current rulers, refuses to participate in the “rites of the spring sowing” (230). In response to demands that she “cast her shift upon the fire” (228) and undertake the ceremony, she dons first one more shift and then many heavy, colorful layers. As her protest builds and solidifies, she invents and then perfects the decorative arts, training her handmaidens in weaving, dyeing, silkworm cultivation, and increasingly sophisticated metal work. Porter’s Princess and her maiden attendants become marvelously skilled, “beating heated metal into divers shapes, and fashioning splendid ornaments of brightly coloured stones” (231). All of their art is dedicated to one purpose— covering the Princess’s body in increasingly elaborate materials. From the moment she refuses to participate in the temple ceremony, Porter’s Princess endures intense pressure to reverse her decision and conform to cultural dictates. For five years she ignores the prayers and threats of the High Priestess and her parents, the King and Queen. Although she attends the temple ceremonies each spring, she remains “by the side of her mother” (230). Finally, despite the Princess’s odd appearance and demeanor, a young acolyte at the temple falls in love with her: “he felt a strangeness about her, and a terrible fated loneliness, and afterward he could not forget her” (230–31). When the Princess is eighteen, this acolyte asks the King for her hand, and he quickly consents, telling the Queen, “whoever wants this mad girl may have her and welcome” (231). But the Princess has other plans. When the marriage ceremony occurs at the temple, she wears so many heavy, ornate layers that she can barely walk. Rejecting the High Priestess’s final command to “disrobe and cast upon the fire your heretical garments” (232), she walks out of the temple with her lover. The two dedicate themselves to “the beauty [the Princess] created out of a dream and a vision” rather than...