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CHAPTER฀FOUR฀ SEEKING฀THE฀MOTHER฀ ฀ TONGUE In one fragment of “The Princess,” Katherine Anne Porter’s artist heroine describes the beauty she creates as both bodily and transcendent, both in her flesh and existing independently of it. “This is the beauty I have dreamed and made,” she proclaims. “If you should strip me, you will find nothing but that beauty I have made . . . and if you kill me, you cannot destroy my dream.” Generative, weighted with her art, the Princess is mortal and yet the creator of something that will endure beyond her. Her language evokes both suffering and maternity: “If I am heavy with it, it is because the love of beauty is a heavy sorrow, and the making of beauty a task too great for the soul to endure for long.” For the people of her father’s kingdom, such misdirected female creativity bespeaks madness and heresy. As one “old lawgiver” sourly complains, “Since when has she become a god, to create with her hands?”1 The links loosely drawn here between female artistic labor and the labor of childbirth form part of an enduring metaphorical chain in Western culture, one that represents creativity through the imagery of maternity. For women artists, these images are both attractive and disturbing, on the one hand suggesting that women are naturally creative, that in fact women artists are akin to their mothers, rather than unnaturally different. On the other hand, maternity’s associations with pain and sacrifice, as well as the mere fact that motherhood has been so insistently women’s rightful role, makes such imagery less compelling. Porter looked long and hard at the relations of mothers and daughters, motherhood and vocation. Born in 1890 to a Texas family rooted in nineteenthcentury social and aesthetic values, but living in the midst of the modernist world, Porter experienced fully the divide between her nineteenth-century predecessors and her twentieth-century peers. As she once observed, “I was bred to mid nineteenth century standards by a grandmother of unusual strength 69 70฀ ~฀ C H A P T E R ฀ F O U R of character.”2 Like her foremothers, she often viewed motherhood in opposition to writing, yet like her contemporaries, she sought revisionary metaphors that would heal the gap between her present achievements and her maternal legacy. In this creative quest, Porter followed the path illuminated by other modernist women writers who turned to that maternal legacy as they sought to chart a new aesthetic of female creative power. As Heather Ingman writes of modernist women in her study Women’s Fiction between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters, and Writing, “Their attempt to recover the maternal inheritance . . . is a quest to find a female identity which will empower them as writers.”3 In the rich and relatively unexplored landscape of motherhood, modernist women found many possibilities for their own art. Some sought a mother tongue, a feminine language, preverbal, embodied, speaking of presence, one that could replace a masculine language of symbol and absence. Others turned to childbirth imagery, seeking affirming metaphors for women’s creative labor. Perhaps writing, thought some, brings women into closer relation with their mothers: rather than becoming unnatural or unsexed by their vocation, women who write are fruitful bearers of the word.4 “Far from being a regressive influence which has to be left behind in order for the daughter to enter the symbolic order of language and culture,” suggests Ingman, “the mother and the recovery of the mother’s voice in many cases frees the daughter’s writing.”5 Like many of her peers exploring the question of their maternal legacy, Porter found a rich resource in Virginia Woolf. Few writers received Porter’s unqualified praise. However, her admiration for Virginia Woolf never wavered. In a 1954 letter to her nephew Paul, Porter lamented Woolf’s death, naming her “one of the wonderful beings of our time.” As she confessed to Paul, “I am haunted by a vision of her figure, tall and gaunt as a tower, leaving her stick and her cloak on the bank, and walking into the water on that cold March day. . . . Think of any one being so lonely as that! I still shed tears about her, for some reason her death hurt me more than any I have known in my time.”6 Of all of Woolf’s writings, Porter spoke most often of To the Lighthouse, including this great novel of motherhood in her list of...

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