Katherine Anne Porter--The Last Leaf, The Grave

It seems to me that while Katherine Anne Porter’s works reflect a period of much change in the South, certain aspects of life seem rooted in Southern thought and will take more time to change. The Grandmother is dreading and resenting many of the gender role changes, for example, that she notices accompanying the change from the Old South to the New South. She laments the modern women, as she considers them, who want to vote and picks apart her grandchildren’s wanton ways. Yet The Grave reveals that even her overall-wearing, bareback horse-riding granddaughter Miranda still follows some of the traditional aspects of the female role that she is supposed to play.

When Miranda and her brother Paul hunt game, “Miranda always followed at Paul’s heels along the path, obeying instructions about handling her gun … learning how to stand it up properly…how to wait her time for a shot and not just bang away in the air without looking, spoiling shots for Paul, who really could hit things if given a chance” (50). I think that this quote shows that even while Miranda was being an unconventional female and hunting for sport, she still acknowledges that Paul is the leader. She must learn from him, and even the act of her following behind him shows that he is in charge and a protector of sorts. Miranda must not interfere, much like the way Grandmother in The Old Order expresses that she “learned early” in life that she must “keep silent” around the men who would visit because “there was no way of accounting for them nor any way of controlling their quietly headstrong habits” (24). I think these quotes indicate that Miranda has picked up on this unspoken law that females are not supposed to interfere in the dealings of men.

The line about Miranda and Paul’s hunt that expresses that Paul can actually shoot the animals implies that Miranda typically cannot, and this reminded me an opinion that was expressed as fact in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. He explains that the Native American male is “less strong than [the white male], but their woman stronger than ours; and both for the same obvious reason; because our man and their woman is habituated to labour, and formed by it” (43). Jefferson means that since white men and Native American women have to do physical labor (including hunting) as part of their work, they are each the stronger sex among their race. I found this notion expressed in the condescending way in which Porter presented Miranda’s ability to hunt and feelings about doing so. Not only was she not skilled at it, but also only likes “‘pulling the trigger and hearing the noise”’ (51). Porter shows Miranda to have a silly perception of hunting, and by choosing to make the female character the one who views hunting this way, Porter reinforces the historical notion that white women are not fit for hunting.

I find Jefferson’s comment about white men’s strength ironic when considered in the context of Porter’s writing. White men hardly have to work at all because they have black servants (that used to be slaves) to do their work for them. The Grandmother describes in The Old Order her husband and a brother of hers each as desiring “everyone around him [to] wait upon him hand and foot” (21). Evidently these men were not doing much work, and it is apparent that the men in her family in general do not work hard because as soon as the servant Nannie, in her old age, goes to live in solitude at the edge of their property in The Last Leaf, nothing gets done anymore. This is because “They had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable of sustained effort or planning” (44). Clearly the white men of the South in Porter’s account are not as strong and capable as the white men depicted by Jefferson. Instead Porter shows that blacks bear the brunt of the work, and she presents neither white women nor white men as being particularly physically strong.

Faulkner's Barn Burning

Faulkner’s Barn Burning provides us with a new component of the South; we are exposed to the views and lifestyle of a poor white family residing in the American South in the post-Civil War era. He presents a criminal family that reinforces the stereotype of Southerners being slow and dumb, especially in his depiction of the twin sisters. They are repeatedly described as having “bovine” characteristics and do not even move when yelled at to catch Sarty at the end of the story. This family does not have the luxurious living conditions of other whites we’ve seen who own vast plots of land and have slaves nor are they treated brutally by a master as slaves were.

Though they are very different from many of the characters we have examined in other works, a similar theme is present in this story as in some of the other pieces. This is the central role that owning land and a family house play in the story. In Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and in John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, the houses that have been in the family for generations are described in great detail and are the pride of the family (although the House of Usher certainly is a bane to the family as well). Frederick Douglass desires to work his own land and even in early works by Thomas Jefferson and John Smith, owning land was given great importance. In Barn Burning, too, the value of land is felt not by the family’s possession of a grand house but by the reactions of Sarty and Abner to the house of their landlord. Sartoris, who usually has feelings of despair, is filled with a sense of “peace and joy” (166) when viewing the house. He is mesmerized by it. His father, however, is overcome by a “jealous rage” (166) as he looks at the house, which is probably what motivates him to soil the light-colored rug in the house’s entranceway. Abner’s resentment of people who have a glamorous house and wealth is also what probably incites him to burn their barns.

Faulkner does an excellent job of casting Abner as villainous. As in his other works, Faulkner uses repeating images and terms. Faulkner routinely describes the father as wearing a black hat and coat, to suggest his dark intentions, and his heavy-sounding limp foot that makes him seem more powerful than he really is. When looking at the house, Abner also seems to have a “greenish cast” (166), possibly suggesting his jealousy. It is interesting to me that Abner is violent towards his wife, just as John McLendon is in Faulkner’s Dry September, but they are given such different build-ups. McLendon is described as a sweaty, strapping man, trying to rally the town to protect their white women from blacks, while Abner is described as “depthless” and someone who would possibly “cast no shadow” (166), almost as if he is not a person. Both would be considered criminal by today’s standards, so what point do you think Faulkner is making by presenting these characters so differently?

Also, why do you think the boy in this story and Bayard’s father in Faulkner’s The Odor of Verbena are both named Colonel Sartoris?

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin’s writing is very different from anything we have read thus far, and it is currently my favorite. First of all, she is the first female author we have read, and she brings a very different perspective, adding to our picture of the South. While the black servant presence is still observed, Chopin focuses primarily on female sexuality, and the slave issue falls into the background. Perhaps this different focus can be attributed to the fact that she is writing in a different period from the one that we have been exploring, this new one being labeled “The New South” by our anthology.

I think that there are numerous interesting components of Chopin’s work. One of which is that she makes great use of literary techniques such as description and irony. Description is employed to give readers a sense of the local color, but it also seems as though Chopin wants readers to understand what type of people the characters are by their appearance instead of their actions; thus, the sequence of events is detailed less than what someone looks like. Eyes are one feature that is frequently described and have much meaning attributed to them. For example, in Désirée’s Baby, when Armand looks into Désirée’s eyes, it is because he is in love with her, but when he later speaks to Désirée “with averted eyes” (302), this subtle change means that he has fallen out of love with her. Chopin also writes a lot about females’ bodies, giving them a sensual quality. It caught my attention that, although Calixta has a bewitching effect on the men at the ball in At the ‘Cadian Ball, she wears a “white dress,” which usually suggests purity. However, I think that Chopin uses white here to represent that Calixta’s sexuality is natural and not wrong. In The Storm, I think white represents something becoming apparent, or a revelation, because the color is mentioned many times when Calixta and Alcée engage in sexual activity, including the reference to a “white flame” (307). The fullness of their sexuality becomes clear to them during this experience.

Chopin’s use of irony relates to another component of her writing that I enjoyed, which is that each of the works of hers we’ve read each conclude with a twist. In Désirée’s Baby, Armand realizes that he just sent away his wife for being partially black when it is actually he who is partially black. At the ‘Cadian Ball concludes with two couples expressing love or marriage intentions for each other, when one member of each couple was not long before intending to run off and have an affair together. It’s an ominous conclusion, which leads to The Storm where Calixta and Alcée have an affair but all ends happily. These conclusions were striking to me because they leave readers thinking about what they just have read. The conclusion to Désirée’s Baby especially drives home the message that rejecting someone for the color of their skin is a preposterous practice because skin color is something that someone has no control over and should make no difference in matters of love.

Lastly, Chopin’s work struck me because it does not cast marriage in a positive light, and I wonder if that relates to her husband having died relatively early and left her with six children to take care of. She was deprived of a sexual relationship but given much work without a partner to help her.

Douglass takes on Fitzhugh

One reason contributing to my enjoyment in reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is because I found it to be a great counter piece to George Fitzhugh’s Southern Thought. While the latter work approached slavery from primarily an economic standpoint and explained the functionality and advantages of the slave system, the former is a much more personal account of the life of an actual slave. Without many exterior sources in citation or an ostentatious vocabulary, Douglass manages to work up great emotion among readers against slavery with his detailed portrayal of the brutality with which slaves were treated. Both writers provide necessary points of view for us to understand the South during the 1800s, but I preferred Douglass’ stance because it coincides with accepted morality of today.

The Narrative also counters Southern Thought by dispelling many notions created in George Fitzhugh’s Southern Thought. For example, at the end of Douglass’ story, he finally makes his way to freedom and is very surprised by what he sees in the North. The North is full of many examples of wealth, such as beautiful ships and well-crafted houses. The reason that these images surprise Douglass must be that all he knew of the North came from what he had heard Southerners say about that region. Douglass reveals his line of thinking. “I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts…of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew they were exceedingly poor” (217-218). Thus, the presence of Southerners who thought like Fitzhugh has been absorbed even by their slaves, but is shown to be wrong by Douglass’ actual description of the North’s wealth. In other words, Fitzhugh’s claim of Southern superiority from its slave system is dismissed by Douglass’ portrayal of at least equal Northern wealth without the use of slave labor.

While I would very much like to agree that a society functioning on the labor of men working for themselves can become more wealthy than or at least as wealthy as a society run by slaves working for masters, I think that Douglass’ account of the North must be regarded with a bit of skepticism. Do you think that his depiction of the North as “clean, new and beautiful” (218) is completely genuine or a product of him just having arrived in this land of freedom? He did write this account years later, so was his excitement calmed and his writing fair or is he still a biased source like Fitzhugh whose work’s accuracy must be regarded with some doubt? I think his description of the North at least shows that he was beginning to relax and feel secure about not being recaptured because at first he was so nervous that he does not describe his surroundings. Only after reaching New Bedford does he begin to notice the beauty in the free states where there is “no whipping of men” (218).