Katherine Anna Porter Old Mortality Essay

In these stories by Katherine Anna Porter such as "the Old Order" she illustrates the inner lives of her characters with precise and crafty prose. The south, dreams, cultural norms, and self-delusion are all common themes. In the story "Old Mortality," the character Miranda Gay shakes off "the legend of the past," resolving to make "her own discoveries." Yet Porter emphasizes how difficult making one’s own “discoveries” and breaking from norms is to do. Porter sends characters’ minds to the past frequently. In “Flowering Judas” which blends religious faith, political belief, and eroticism with a narrative both concrete and abstract, Laura is committed to socialism, but still "slips now and again into some crumbling little church.” Braggioni tries each night to seduce Laura who sees him as a betrayal of the revolutionary ideal, but also realizes her idealism is romantic nonsense. Though she still runs Braggioni's errands, smuggling pills into prison for a friend of his who uses them to kill himself. Near the end Laura dreams that the suicide returns to punish her; this shows the impact the past can have. In “Old Mortality” John Jacob remembers girls he knew in his youth and declares that “they

All of her characters find themselves trapped in memory that impacts their choices and actions. It poses the question of how these character would be able to escape this entrapment. In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" it is only when Miranda is about to succumb her illness that she discovers "there were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them". Another example is in "Old Mortality." At the story's end Miranda rejects the oppression of tradition, but the final tough line describes "her hopefulness, her ignorance", and implies she still remains tied in some way to tradition, that maybe it cannot be escaped