Katherine Anne Porterにおける愛

1. The Sterility of Love: Katherine Anne Porter describes various aspects of love in her short stories, but the love is so negative that we can express it in the sterility of love. The reason why Miss Porter inquires into the sterility of love seems to be due to the fact that she, born in the South, is a writer with a keen historical sense. She believes that the South has dissolved itself since the Civil War. When she saw what the western world experienced in the early twentiethe century, she seems to have realized that not only the South but the Westrn World continues to break down. Miss Porter has followed a high ideal, but she can not find out nothing except moral or social disintegration. She represents her disillusion through Laura in "Flowering Judas" and Miranda, heroine of a series of short stories such as "Old Mortality." "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and so forth. Laura is in a sense responsible for Eugenio\u27s death because she cultivates the stoicism and never returns his love. In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" the alienation between Miranda returning to this world after having seen the illusion of the Paradise and Adam having gone to the Paradise is that between heaven and hell. In Ship of Fools, a novel published in 1962, Miss Porter also describes the sterility of love in relation to Nazism. II. The Possibility of Love: Miss Porter is apt to delineate the possibility of love when the scene is laid in primltive society or in the lower stratum of society. The former is Mexican Indians, society in "Maria Concepcion," where there is a severe distinction between good and evil. In this short story Miss Porter tells us why Maria Concepcion was deprived of Juan Villegas, her husband by Maria Rosa and then regained his heart after she killed Maria Rosa. The latter is the society of the second passengers in Ship of Fools. Miss Porter admires the spirit of martyrdom through the death of Echegaray, one of the second passengers and gives a gleam of hope to the novel describing the waste land in modern times