pale horse pale rider three short novels katherine anne porter

Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York and London: Harcourt, 1972), 354. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Transformed into a walking caricature of Death, she becomes an independent flâneuse ready to both perceive and write in an altered world. The novella’s conclusion allows for the creative possibilities of apocalypse, according Miranda, who survives, a new identity. Yet the apocalypse of simultaneous war and global pandemic Miranda faces is not obviously commensurate with the traditional consolations provided by elegy, which focus on cyclical renewal and rebirth. She combines the visual vocabulary of World War I propaganda posters, end time, plague, and pestilence to convey Miranda’s elegiac attempts to find proleptic consolation for the impending losses of Adam and possibly herself.

In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter evokes the iconography of both the Biblical apocalypse and the late medieval Black Death to represent the 1918 influenza pandemic. Although her perceptive abilities initially may seem ironic or diminished rather than redemptive, Miranda’s alternative states of consciousness-including dreams, feverish delirium, and a near-death mystical vision-grant the private experience of influenza iconic meaning and historic depth. In Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction, the character of Miranda Gay, frustrated by wartime propaganda’s hegemonic control of language, fulfills this visionary role. Dalloway, women’s literary narratives of the 1918 influenza pandemic emphasize the generative powers of feminine vision. Wheeler’s culminating vision in One of Ours and Clarissa Dalloway’s reciprocal visuality in Mrs.

Pale horse pale rider three short novels katherine anne porter