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CHAPTER฀SIX฀ RUMORS฀AND฀ REPRESENTATIONS 118 Made hopeful by the Princess’s sudden willingness to marry the young acolyte, the Queen expresses her heartfelt wish, “May I live to dandle my grandchildren upon my knee.” But the Chief of the Royal Council remains baffled by the Princess’s strange vocation; he cannot understand why she would reject motherhood for her glittering and painful art. “Why” he asks, as have so many others in this strange story, “Why do you suffer the torments of these robes and the dark mask and the sharpened jewels of your gloves?” The Princess responds in her familiar cryptic fashion: “I will make beauty after my own secret thought . . . and I will also devise my own cruelties, rejecting utterly the banal sufferings imposed by nature.”1 Her art, it seems, is simultaneously personal creation and punishment; it replaces the bodily pain of physical relations and maternity. What can be made of the Princess’s beautiful yet masochistic dream? Creation and defense, prison and self-punishment, her art is a lover, an enemy, and—most significantly for the rumors and speculations that make up this chapter—her alternative to a child. As Jane Marcus once rather bluntly summed up such a concept, “The virginal vagina was the place and the space for the production of female culture. Women could not be the producers of culture while reproducing humankind.”2 At the end of chapter 4 we saw how the silver dove, embodying both the father’s word and the mother’s fertile potential, could become an icon for a woman artist. Her art becomes her creative labor, the child of word and body fused into one. “The Grave” ends in comfort; the sun shines on the young boy whose hands slowly turn the shining dove. Yet preceding this peaceful resolution is the marketplace with its evoked terrors, and these lead not only back to the story’s epiphanic evisceration but also outward from the text to Katherine Anne Porter’s own life. In their work on “The Grave,” both Darlene Unrue R U M O R S ฀ A N D ฀ R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S ฀ ~฀ 119 and Jane Krause DeMouy speculate on the connections between the content of Miranda‘s memory and the Mexican marketplace in which it suddenly springs, painfully, back into her mind. On the surface, Porter provides clues in the linked smells of the market and the graveyard. Visually, too, the dyed sugar sweets shaped like baby rabbits connect the past event with Miranda‘s present. However, a biographical connection, unacknowledged in the text, provides another level of relatedness. Submerged beneath the Mexico scene, binding the hot marketplace to the eviscerated rabbit, is an event that explains the anguish associated with Miranda‘s memory: an abortion Porter had in Mexico sometime in the early twenties. Mentioned in an autobiographical fragment and confirmed by Mary Doherty, one of her closest companions in the 1920s, the abortion repeats the pattern of fertility transformed to death that informs “The Grave.”3 The connections of Porter’s own personal struggles and her story do not transform “The Grave,” but they do deepen the significance of the resolution found in the symbolic dove. From the empty womb, the grave, comes the fertile word, a source of comfort, a means of closure, and a treasure that outlasts mortality. To draw such connections between an author’s life and her writing is compelling, often illuminating and almost as often suspect, for the connections often rely on felt associations; speculations; private, cryptic records; and rumor. Yet, this said, it is intriguing to probe two other places where Porter’s fiction is interwoven with her own personal, painful relations to maternity, children hoped for, loved, and lost. In each, art provides a potential alternative creation or healing resource. The first of these is again “Holiday.” Like “The Grave,” this story emerges from the loss of a child and is, in a fascinating, wonderfully indirect way, connected to Porter’s greatest work of art, her heroine Miranda. The second is an interconnected pair of unfinished stories, “A Vision of Heaven” and “Season of Fear,” both faintly yet clearly tied to the originating events and emotional resonance of “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” In the places where life and art intersect, it is possible to trace with a light hand the threads that bind experiences to their textual representations, and from...

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