Katherine Anne Porter/ M.F.K. Fisher Comparison

My paper will be trying to capture similarities or clear differences on the stories "The Flaw" by M.F.K. Fisher and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter. The most obvious similarity is the times in which they are set; one right near the end of World War 1 and the other on the cusp of World War 2. Both feature female protagonists and tragic male partners.
The first glaring dissimilarity is (despite it being two different world wars) is that Miranda, Porter's protagonist, is totally enveloped in the effects of the war. She is being pressured into buying liberty bonds, which puts her financial standing (and inevitably her ability to survive on her own) into jeopardy, she is constantly haggled by stories and reports of the war while in the newsroom, being a journalist, and even taking on the fruitless job of cheering up wounded war veterans. Her life truly gets complicated when she falls in love with a man, Adam, who has plans on going overseas to fight in the war-which Miranda knows is a near death trip, after all her experience with veterans. "He looked so clear and fresh, and he had never had a pain in his life. She had seen them when they had been there and back and they never looked like this again." (Porter, p313)

The protagonist in The Flaw is the absolute opposite, utterly detached from the impeding war. She seems to be in no immediate danger, nor her male companion, as this passage would testify: "And when we got word that we should go back to our old home in Switzerland and save what we could before war started, we went not so much for salvage, because possessions had no meaning any more to us, but because we were helpless to do anything else. We returned to the life that had been so real like fog, or smoke, caught in a current of air. We were very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better than ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life." (Fisher, p202) M.F.K. Fisher's protagonist seems to have a completely flippant attitude. Throughout the story we also get detailed looks into what they are eating, giving the story an almost elegant, luxurious feel. However, it should be noted that M.F.K. Fisher's writing forte' was with food, so to have lines like "There would be one or two antipasti: the radishes we had watched being fixed, and butter for them in rather limp and sooty curls, and hardboiled eggs and sliced salami," (fisher, p201) is quite common, regardless of the meat and bones of the actual story.

We run into a major tone difference here. M.F.K. Fisher's story was centered securely in the "material world". Everything is just as you'd see it; the train, the booth, the waiters, the food, etc-meanwhile Katherine Anne Porter's story dips from material world to surrealism (or perhaps even magical realism); the beginning is an elaborate dream sequence that at times seems like it could be reality and until I saw/felt what "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" was really about it I was fooled into thinking the events in the beginning were actually happening. Like, "Early morning is best for me because trees are trees in one stroke, stones are stones set in shades known to be grass, there are no false shapes or surmises, the road is still asleep with the crust of dew unbroken. I'll take Graylie because he is not afraid of bridges," sounds well within reality's reason, sure the narration borders on being pretentious but there is definite surrealism at work there. We get another taste of this near the end of the story when Miranda is having hallucinations and she wakens to find she's been in the hospital for months, that the war is over, and her love has died of the same disease she was just battling. It was great use of dreams being an unreliable gauge of time.

Okay, now that the major dissimilarities have been weeded out it needs to be noted that in both stories the girls are the dominant ones within the relationship-the male counterparts are either totally passive, like Chexbres is in "The Flaw" (he doesn't even have an unshared line of dialogue until the second to last page) or a doomed caricature such as Adam in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, who is young, perfect, strapping, who's "never felt a pain in his life", and is casual talking about life expectancy in battle. We all know he's asking to be killed off. So in a way both the male characters are totally absent from their respective stories or that they're not simply absent but are props to help the female protagonists grow and develop.
In each story the man dies of an illness, in Pale Horse influenza is the culprit. The disease goes unspecified in "The Flaw", all we know is that it required Chexbres to be amputated (all limbs). And Chexbres being sick with something fatal wasn't even immediately clear, as M.F.K. Fisher put it, almost in passing, "I could feel my heart beat heavily, and my throat was as if an iron collar hung around it, the way it used to be when Chexbres was first ill." (Fisher, p208) The third to last paragraph she says, "Chexbres was a man with one leg gone, the other and the two arms soon to go," and "I was a woman condemned, plucked at by demons, watching her true love die too slowly." (Fisher, p209) You're not meant to feel bad or empathize at all with Chexbres at this point in the story, I mean sure, he's the one dying slowly, but it's written in a way that you end up caring more for the narrator's feelings in response to this.

The delivery of the news of Adam's death is also done quite dismissively. "The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a strange man at the camp where Adam had been, telling her that Adam had died of influenza in the camp hospital." Again, powerful in regards to Miranda's feelings and her story, but as far as Adam, I don't see anyone caring, as he was used, literally, as a prop (though effectively so).

Ernest Hemingway, someone often linked with misogyny, did something similar with a female character in his book, "In Our Time." One of the book's protagonists, Nick, cold-heartedly dumps his girlfriend, Marge, just pages after we meet her, telling her that love is no fun (Hemingway, p40) and this essentially propels him to a cross country travel and eventually a stint in the military during World War 1, where he gets shot through the spine. This is all alluded to with the line: "His original plan had been to go down home and get a job. Then he had planned to stay in Charlevoix all winter so he could be near Marge. Now he did not know what he was going to do." (Hemingway, p57) Marge was simply a prop.

It is altogether possible that inspired either of these authors to write their male characters so stiffly. Fisher, if one of them, was more likely to be inspired as the story Pale Horse, Pale Rider was based off of what was supposed to be a complete autobiography of Porter, a book she intended to title "Many Redeemers" but since she could not put it together coherently as one piece of work she instead used bits and pieces of what she had written for stories and sketches. (Unrue, http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2979) So it is not as probable, since she was drawing from her own life experiences, that her characterizations were Hemingway inspired; at least as much so as Fisher's.

The endings for both M.F.K. Fisher's and Katherine Anne Porter's stories are extremely cynical. The Flaw shows our narrator about to be corrupted and affected by the war, her lover gone along with her homey, nuanced, trips in the train café (It had been corrupted/flawed by the suicide) and Miranda's distress in being brought back to a world she only willed herself back to for Adam. "Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from the sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her," this passage describing the bliss she had found in what would be death, but then, "something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something valuable in another country, oh, what could it be?" (Porter, p344)

Both of these stories effectively showed pathos and realization in the human (female) condition in a time of war without the use of clichés like a relative being killed by the Germans, their city being bombed, etc. Instead Fisher and Porter take the sentimentalist's route and give us a genuine look at love, love lost, and what happens to people (do they become cynical? Detached?) when something so grandiose breaks apart their routine and way of life; in a way more thoughtful, and arguably more touching, than anything male counterpoint Hemingway had come up with.