Psychoanalysm in Literature: Facing Nature and the Unconscious Mind

Welty's "A Curtain of Green" is the story of Mrs. Larkin, a widow who is haunted by the memory of her husband's death, tortured by Nature's unfeeling disposition and by her tumultuous unconscious mind. Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is the story of Miranda, who is cursed by Nature when she faces the possibility of her own death and that of her significant other because of plague and war, and at the same time is flooded with repressed memories of her past. Welty's Mrs. Larkin and Porter's Miranda are both entrapped in a chaotically relentless world where Nature cannot be controlled and memories come back to haunt the characters. The imagery within the stories depict the outward distortion of things while at the same time symbolize the interior chaotic nature of things. The characters try to escape Nature's cruel senselessness and fail doing so, but they accept their failure; acceptance of their inability to control nature, is what essentially sets them free. Ultimately, Mrs. Larkin and Miranda both travel through the dark depths of the unconscious mind and essentially undergo a transformation where they are free. Both characters face the ordeal of losing the love of their lives to Nature's dark side, but most significantly they accept their painful realities and learn to carry on with their lives.

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" shows Nature's unforgiving and cruel behavior through Miranda and Adam's contraction of influenza and later encounter with a literal and/or metaphorical death. Miranda contracts influenza and she must suffer from this curse of Nature, and risk possible death. Adam goes to war, but ironically it is the influenza (which he likely contracted from Miranda), that terminates his life. Outside the hospital bed where Miranda lays, crowds and crowds of cadavers are carried around as funeral processions take place, and the cause of their death was influenza. Nature's manner of taking countless lives is such a menacing and vicious manner proves how pitiless Nature can be. Nature murders Adam through influenza. Miranda has wholly emotionally attached herself to him, and is so devastated with Nature's decision to take away her only true love; emotionally she is dying, even though physically she remains alive. Adam is literally dead because of the plague, but Miranda is figuratively dead upon hearing the news of Adam's death. Miranda's nightmare best depicts the emotional trauma of facing Adam's death. "No, no, like a child cheated in a game, It's my turn now, why must you always be the one to die? and the arrows struck her cleanly through the heart and through his body and he lay dead, and she still lived..."(Porter 191). Miranda's mind torments her on how Nature has killed her lover, but left her alive to endure the suffering of his loss. The arrow shooting her heart is symbolic of her emotional death.

Similarly in "A Curtain of Green", Nature shows its viciousness when Mrs. Larkin's husband is killed by a tree that falls on him in the driveway. Mrs. Larkin was always very in touch with her natural world, always gardening and admiring her natural surroundings; she is "betrayed" by nature when a Chinaberry tree kills her husband. Ironically, Mrs. Larkin tries to busy herself with gardening and tries to repress the memory of her dead husband, but the memory persistently tortures her psychologically.

"But memory tightened about her easily without any prelude of warning or even despair. She would see promptly as if a curtain had been jerked quite unceremoniously away from a little scene...and the blue automobile in which her husband approached, driving home from work. It was a summer day, a day from the summer before. In the freedom of gaily turning her head, a motion she was now forced by memory to repeat as she hoed the ground, she could see again the tree that was going to fall, there has been no warning. But there was the enormous tree, the fragrant chinaberry tree, suddenly tilting dark and slow like a cloud, leaning down to her husband." (Welty 214).

Mrs. Larkin's husband is dead and she must deal with the psychological trauma of losing someone whom she has built her psychic security around. Nature has betrayed Mrs. Larkin by killing her husband even though she trusted and adored Nature , and Nature betrays Miranda by killing Adam, when she expects she will die of influenza, and even wishes she were the one to die, not him.

In "The Curtain of Green", Mrs. Larkin must confront both the traumatic death of her husband, and her dangerous unconscious mind. Mrs. Larkin tries to deal with her husband's dead by continuing gardening; at least with gardening she has some control of the natural world around her, while at the same time she can repress the thought of her dead husband. "Mrs. Larkin's hardening has the same mixture of innocence and arrogance, as if by releasing the garden's limitless productivity she will somehow compensate for her husband's absence." (Schmidt 24). Despite Mrs. Larkin's continuous efforts to repress the memory of her husband's death, it still haunts her psychologically. Mrs. Larkin grows upset with Nature, and how everything continues to live and be blissful in her husband's absence; her mind turns against her and she tries to kill Jamie. "If nature may punish randomly, so may she; in this moment of temptation, it is murder, not gardening, that seems to offer her the best compensation for her husband's death." (Schmidt 24). Manic anger and pain persuades Mrs. Larkin to not only control Nature, but wants to take Nature's place by taking life away from happy Jamey. "Nature itself becomes personified in a surreal mental image, a sort of primal spirit-being in her thought. Her ruined psyche feels itself contacted by fate itself, represented in Nature's embodiment in human form, Jamey." (Arnold 33). Mrs. Larkin decides to take Jamey's life to make up for Nature having killed her husband. Fortunately, she undergoes a change of mind and makes peace with Nature, instead of trying to become it.

Death is a prevalent theme in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" because it appears both literally and in the unconscious mind. Death is another one of Nature's twisted methods of proliferation. According to Jungian psychology, an individual's unconscious contains the darkest aspects of the brain, and those deepest fears must be faced to become a more fulfilled individual. Miranda must confront Death; the horseman riding along in his pale horse summoning her to come forth. In her nightmare, Miranda's unconscious mind brings forth her much repressed fear of dying; the vision she encounters is ominous and terrifying as that of a jungle. "leopards with humanly wise faces and extravagantly crested lions; screaming long-armed monkeys tumbling around broad fleshy leaves that glowed with sulphur-colored light and exuded the ichor of death, and rotting trunks of unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime." (Walsh 6). The Nature of death is best comparable to the viciousness of a jungle and "Miranda's entry into this jungle symbolizes her journey into the unconscious." (Schwartz 77).

In "A Curtain of Green" the entangled and chaotic imagery effectively depicts Mrs. Larkin's the entrapping and suffocating nature of her unconscious mind. Mrs. Larkin's garden is a tangled mess, and instead of running in a straight line it is slanted; her unconscious mind is also "entangling" and disorderly. "Within its border of hedge, high like a wall, and visible only from the upstairs windows of the neighbors, this slanting tangles garden, more and more over-abundant and confusing, must have become so familiar to Mrs. Larkin..."(Welty 210). Mrs. Larkin's physical world gets messy and grotesque and this suggests that she is undergoing the same hideousness in a mental states. Mrs. Larkin's clothing is dirty, messy and her hair is unruly and tangled: all qualities which resemble the unconscious mind. "Wearing a pair of the untidy overalls, after with her hair streaming and tangled where she had neglected to comb it."(Welty 210). Mrs. Larkin has neglected to tend her unconscious mind, by repressing the memories of her dead husband, instead of confronting them directly. Psychologically Mrs. Larkin is tormented, and her suffering becomes apparent though her disheveled physical self.

In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", the entangled and knotty imagery suggest Miranda is faced with physical and mental entanglement. In Miranda's first dream, the past she tried so hard to repress comes back in a frightening way. Lying sick in the hospital bed, her mind brings up troubling memories of her family overwhelming her with questions and demands: "Where are you going? What are you doing? What are you thinking?...How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines."(Walsh 2). Not only must Miranda endure the physically "entangling" pain of influenza by being stuck in a hospital bed without means of escape, but she must also deal with the psychological "entanglements" of the unconscious mind; entangled with memories of her dysfunctional family, Miranda must unwillingly struggle with tormenting memories of her family's nagging and complaining. Miranda tries so hard to escape her family by repressing them in her psyche, but they still manage to show up again when she is feeling the worst, both physically because of her influenza, and mentally because she is having a nightmare. The image of entanglement returns one of Miranda's nightmares where she faces death. "A writhing, terribly alive and secret place of death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents, rainbow-colored birds with malign eyes...."(Schwartz 77). Her nightmarish encounter with death is entangling and suffocating; she in a terrifying situation where she is entrapped by death psychologically. Like Mrs. Larkin, Miranda is stuck in a physically and psychologically nightmarish world, where she must face the dark aspects of her unconscious mind in order to be free.

Ultimately, In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", Miranda learns to accept Adam's death, and that she can't control Nature, but most significantly she is transformed. She evolves from a vulnerable and hopeless person to a stronger more hopeful person. Upon the news of Adam's death, Miranda is so helpless and weak that she wishes death upon herself. But as time progresses, we see a gradual change; she awakens from her nightmares eager for a brand new start. Memories no longer taunt her, and she has awoken from her unconscious/nightmarish state; she is alive. "Miranda, smiling, tells the friends who visit her 'how gay and what a pleasant surprise it [is] to find herself alive. She prepares a list of things she needs to take up the challenge of life again: gray suede "gauntlets", gray sheer stockings, perfume, lipstick..."(Schwartz 79). Miranda wants to look well-groomed and pleasant; she no longer wants to look tired, sick, and messy-looking as she did before. She is no longer the physically and psychologically weak person she used to be; she has undergone a complete change both physically and mentally. Miranda is ever so alive and full of eagerness to face the new day now that she has survived influenza, Nature's curse. She has survived Nature's strangling death grip, and instead of letting herself be overcome by Adam's death she has learned to accept his death and has learned to continue living her life with an optimistic mind-frame. "Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me my top hat and stick" (Porter 207). She has resuscitated from her death bed, and has essentially accepted death, and by doing so , she overcome her battle with Nature and her unconscious mind.

Finally, In "A Curtain of Green", Mrs. Larkin similarly accepts her husband's death, and the fact that she can not control Nature; she succumbs to it, not in a vulnerable way but in an accepting way. Mrs. Larkin becomes "one" with Nature and learns to accept her inability to change it. "Then Mrs. Larkin sank in one motion down into the flowers and lay there, fainting and streaked with rain. Her face was fully upturned, down among the plants, with the hair beaten away from her forehead and her open eyes closing at once when the rain touched them. Slowly her lips began to part." (Welty 219). "Mrs. Larkin now understands nature, her primitive interlocuter, with empathy." (Arnold 36). Mrs. Larkin has grown to accept Nature she no longer wants to be Nature, she changes her hasty decision to kill Jamey; now she accepts Nature and is transformed into a new person by rejected her past self.

In Finality, Welty's Mrs. Larkin and Porter's Miranda are entrapped in a chaotic relentless world where Nature cannot be controlled and memories come back to haunt the characters. The characters try to escape Nature's cruel senselessness and fail to doing so, but accept their failure; acceptance of their inability to control nature,is what sets them free. Ultimately, Mrs. Larkin and Miranda both travel through the dark depths of the unconscious mind and essentially undergo a transformation where they free themselves. Both characters face the ordeal of losing the love of their lives to Nature's dark side, but most significantly they accept their painful realities and learn to carry on with their lives.

Works Cited

Arnold, St. George Tucker, Jr. Consciousness and the Unconsciousness in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International,1975.

Porter, Katherine Ann. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1990.

Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story Eudora Welty's Short Fiction. University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Schwartz, Edward G. "The Fictions of Memory". Katherine Anne Porter:A Critical Symposium. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969.

Turner, Craig W. and Harding, Lee Emling. Critical Essays on Eudora Welty. Boston:
G.K. Hall & Co, 1989.

Walsh, Thomas F. "The Dreams Self in 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider'".Wascana Review, Vol.
14, No. 2. Fall, 1979, pp. 61-79.

Welty, Eudora. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1979.