Title: The Dis-ease of Katherine Anne Porter's Greensick Girls in "Old Mortality"
Abstract: Readers of "Old Mortality" have been anything but remiss in bringing attention to the rebellious behavior of Porter's women characters. Her principal female characters have been said either to display a proud rebelliousness or, at the very least, to attempt resistance even though they will inevitably fail because of their ambivalent relationship to a past they cannot quite relinquish and a future they cannot quite embrace. 1 Many of these same critics have considered her characters as semi-autobiographical creations of what Joan Givner called Porter's own "fatal ambivalence": "She craved the protectiveness and support that she never had from her father and at the same time she was disposed to be independent and dominant as her grandmother was" (92). Porter's readers over the past decades, decades in which American culture has been marked by the optimism and anger of second-wave feminism, have typically celebrated the struggle undertaken by her female characters to achieve independence and to survive a headstrong (southern) patriarchal culture. Having inhaled the cultural air, which is not to imply that all Porter's readers are feminists, critics have often read "Old Mortality" as a story of American girlhood: a story not of Jamesian resistance abroad, but of resistance at home since the time when first-wave feminism was making itself felt. The nature of her female characters' resistance, however, needs to be reconsidered. I propose that instead of presenting girls engaged in healthy rebellion against their assigned adult social roles, "Old Mortality" brings sharply into focus the pressures and anxieties suffered by adolescent females in Victorian America and their willingness to take [End Page 80] their destinies into their own hands by deferring as long as possible--and at great risk to their own lives--the inevitable crossing from the freedom of girlhood to the restrictions of adult womanhood. The power of cultural ideology to shape and distort a girl's identity and body seems to have riveted Porter, perhaps because she felt they were ideologies that persisted with equal force in her own age. Reconsidering "Old Mortality" in this light leads one to the realization that this was not the only occasion in which Porter paired the struggle for self-autonomy with the sick body of girlhood.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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