The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

9. Southern Belle, Southern Lady

CHAPTER฀NINE฀ SOUTHERN฀BELLE฀ SOUTHERN฀LADY Elaborately dressed and bejeweled, never stepping out of her role as the visionary virgin artist, the Princess becomes a living legend. Soon the people of her kingdom forget her past and see only her presence. As Porter writes, “She became even as she lived among them, a legend. There were many who professed that they could not remember her face.”1 The transformation of a woman from human to symbolic status fascinated Katherine Anne Porter, as we have seen in her stories of women as artists’ models, explored in chapter 3. In the 1930s, fueled by new friendships with members of the Agrarian/Fugitive writers group, Porter returned again to questions of performance and identity from a new direction, scrutinizing the popular roles of white southern womanhood—the Belle, the Lady. Her portraits of southern women, especially Aunt Amy and young Miranda Gay, contain some of her most complex and interesting gender-thinking, for she sees both power gained and lost for women who achieve a symbolic social status by embodying cultural fantasies. It is fascinating to discover that while Porter was composing these stories, she was also drawing on family stories passed down by her paternal grandmother, Catherine Ann Skaggs Porter, to construct a personal legend of genteel southern womanhood for herself. Becoming a professional southerner, performing southernness for her readers and her friends, eventually Porter (like her Princess) became herself a living legend; in her final years neither she nor her audience could recall Katherine Anne before she claimed her affiliation with that “white-pillar crowd.”2 Southern gentility came as much through invention as through inheritance to Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Porter in Texas poverty. Janis Stout, one of Porter’s biographers, aptly terms Porter a “borderlands writer,” one whose work and identity have been deeply divided by life experienced on the edges of differing cultures, for Porter not just Texas and Mexico, Stout argues, but 178 S O U T H E R N ฀ B E L L E , ฀ S O U T H E R N ฀ L A D Y ฀ ~฀ 179 also the American South and Southwest.3 Two interacting forces moved Porter toward her self-presentation as a product of southern gentility in regretful decline: the first her increasingly close ties with the Agrarian fellowship and their influential, ideologically drenched version of the South, past and present, the second her own deep and painful ambivalence about her family and her childhood. The origins and intellectual attitudes of the Agrarians need little rehearsing here. Their published work in the 1930s represents the most sophisticated articulation of the ideological cluster that sustains popular versions of antebellum white southern life. The Agrarian response to the modernization and moral upheaval accompanying World War I was a retreat to “the past,” as Richard King argues, a “yearning for an organic, hierarchical order such as allegedly existed in the ante-bellum South.”4 Their ideal society represents a solidly patriarchal construct; it reverences the white southern family, identifies the landed gentry as inherently superior by virtue of birth, enthrones the white man, and sets the white woman up on a pedestal. It is a vision of family stability and class privilege that appealed deeply to Porter. As Stout also argues in her discussion of Porter as a self-made southerner, “Especially after she became closely acquainted with such (white) pillars of Southern letters as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Andrew Lytle, Porter constructed herself as an heiress of the Confederacy, ‘the grandchild of a lost war,’ a southern woman of distinction, elegance, and agrarian roots sprung from aristocratic, even if not moneyed, origins.”5 Through the 1930s Porter composed autobiographical fiction that drew on family stories to construct her own family myth while simultaneously deconstructing idealizations of southern womanhood. Her gender-inflected version of the Agrarian pursuit proved difficult on two fronts, however. First of all, she was keenly aware of the sexual repression and anxiety that accompanied the idealization of young white women in the South. Second, like other southern women writers, she had to contend with the sexist assumptions of those very Agrarian writers she admired and sought as compatriots in the creation of a regional social identity and literature. Although men like Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle sought to liberate southern letters, they were not equally ready to liberate southern women. Porter’s ties with the Agrarian group were long and intimate. In the late...