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“The Old Order” in Collected Stories (1965). Miranda Rhea, the central character
in “The Old Order” and two of the narratives in the 1939 collection, is semi-
autobiographical. Growing up in the South, she has to learn simultaneously about
the limitations inherent in the codes and traditions transmitted to her by her family
and about the scope of her responsibilities. Eventually, these two levels of her story,
the examination of impersonal myth and the issue of personal development, become
inseparable, since the static and disciplined world into which Miranda is born is
seen to be typical of the Old South and of childhood; while Miranda’s gradual
freeing of herself from her environment and the forms of behavior it dictates
is, Porter intimates, as much the consequence of its general decay as of her own
increasing maturity. Becoming an adult, she becomes less of a conventional
Southerner; forsaking childhood and childish things, she forsakes along with them
the codes and ceremonies of the old plantation. The lessons learned by Miranda in
growing up are consolidated and confirmed in a story like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”
Set during World War I, it is nominally about her love for a soldier who dies in an
epidemic. More fundamentally, it is about Miranda learning to rely on nobody but
herself because, in the final analysis, everyone is alone. Experiencing near-fatal
illness, she sinks “through deeps under deeps of darkness” in a kind of delirium,
until she reaches one “minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself
alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for strength.” It is her self, her individual
consciousness and her stubborn will to live: “Trust me, the hard unwinking angry
point of light said. Trust me. I stay.” That trust in an independent consciousness
is the core value in Porter’s stories; and it is expressed not only in what Porter says
but how she says it. Her finest pieces demonstrate that agility and luminosity of
mind apparently so essential to travelers along what she called “the downward
path to wisdom.” All her characters need to guide them through their lives is shown
to be there in the controlling intelligence of the narrative; in this sense, as in so many
instances of modernism, the medium of Porter’s work is its meaning.
The volume of Porter’s work is small. It includes one novel, Ship of Fools (1962),
which was well received when it was first published, but it is her little over two dozen
short stories and novellas that represent her real achievement. By contrast, Elizabeth
Madox Roberts produced several volumes of poetry and no less than nine novels. It
is, however, on two books, The Time of Man (1926) and The Great Meadow (1930),
that her reputation rests. In a sense, The Great Meadow is a historical novel: set in the
early nineteenth century, it deals with the settlement of Kentucky. Only in a sense,
however; what it is really about is an act of creation. “Life is from within,” Roberts
declared; and what she shows here is her central character, a young woman called
Diony Hall, making her own errand into the wilderness to build there a world and
identity for herself, to create something adequate to her needs and commensurate
with her capacity for wonder. In The Time of Man there is, again, a feminine central
consciousness shaping the subject. This time, the consciousness is that of a poor
white woman living in the twentieth century, Ellen Chesser. Born to a family of
tenant farmers, her life of wandering and “a-walken” from one small patch of hired
land to another is described in harsh detail. Nothing is spared or excluded from the
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