The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

2. Fairy Tales and Foreigners

CHAPTER฀TWO฀ FAIRY฀TALES฀AND฀ FOREIGNERS 27 When the young acolyte looks at the Princess, he sees her alienation and difference . An artist, she is set apart from common women by her creativity and dedication to her craft: “with her red hair braided, her grey eyes wide and cold; he felt a strangeness about her, and a terrible fated loneliness.”1 Similar isolation and extraordinary skill characterize most of the women in Katherine Anne Porter’s earliest fiction, including her first published stories, three “retold” tales of magic and transformation: “The Faithful Princess,” “The Magic Ear Ring,” and “The Shattered Star.” All appeared in 1920 in the children’s magazine Everyland.2 These stories of other women and other worlds mark Porter’s entrance into the tradition of women storytellers, weaving new cloth from old threads, reshaping old tales to express new and personal concerns. Her beautiful and distinctive heroines—alienated, intrepid, resourceful—acquire the skills and visions of those who wield power over them, and eventually become more powerful than their masters, gain love, or create works as astonishing and beautiful as the Northern Lights or the Princess’s bejeweled gowns. In these first heroines, we can find Porter’s own desire for self-determination, her ambition and powerful sense of personal potential. Yet in their physical suffering and psychological sense of difference are apparent her fear of alienation as she gains power and independence, and her deeply conflicted response to the union of those two identities “woman” and “artist.” Overall, these stories mark the beginning of a long career of rich, complex, and productive gender-thinking that fueled some of Porter’s finest fiction. From the start, Porter’s stories reveal her concern for women’s choices, the freedom they can achieve, the ways their creative powers are constrained or distorted. Although Porter later “disowned” these stories, saying they were derivative , “that there was nothing of hers in them,”3 in fact, when compared to 28฀ ~฀ C H A P T E R ฀ T W O the available originals, they reveal that she made significant changes, making them very much her own. All three tales address questions of female authority and creative power, subjects that remain central to Porter’s art; all three present a brave young female heroine whose distinctive abilities set her apart from family and community. Porter’s biographer Joan Givner suggests that these young heroines reflect Porter’s own feelings of difference, both promising and painful. Says Givner, “She had fantasized from childhood that she was a changeling.”4 It is not difficult to see in Porter’s fairy tale heroines her own romantic image of the woman artist: alienated, visionary, possessing extraordinary creative, even magical, abilities. As she revised these tales of magic and transformation, Porter raised crucial questions for a woman writer: How do women gain the knowledge and expertise to become powerful in their own right? How can ambitious women either employ or avoid traditional gender roles in their quest? Can they combine success with traditional heterosexual relationships? Once they have left home, studied, and gained the skills of the masters, can they go home again? In her stories for children, Porter followed in the footsteps of the large company of nineteenth-century women who retold old stories for new purposes. Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers establishes well the genre’s subversive history: “Once this imagined voice was established as legitimate for certain purposes—the instruction of the young— writer’s co-opted it as their own, using it as a mask for their own thoughts, their own mocking games and even sedition.”5 Tales of magic and transformation, often termed fairy tales, were, for several reasons, a suitable form for a beginning woman writer. Such tales belong to an ancient tradition of women’s narrative, as Nina Auerbach points out in her collection of tales by nineteenth-century women: “Fairy tales and romances were grounded in an oral narrative tradition that may well have been initiated by women. The antiquity of fairy tales, their anonymous origins, had the feel (and perhaps the fact) of a lost, distinctively female tradition.”6 Although of ancient origin, such tales are continually updated, retold in ways that reflect the teller’s cultural moment. “Their different versions have authors who, in their turn, have created in response to social, political and cultural values of their context.”7 Presented as fantasy...