The Epistemology of Reputation in "Old Mortality"

Porter seems to be calling to the forefront the unreliability of reputation in "Old Mortality." The story opens with a photograph of Aunt Amy, but its accuracy in representing her is almost instantly called into question by Miranda's father, Harry. "'Her hair and her smile were her chief beauties, and they aren't show at all. She was much slimmer than that, too.'" (174) And then Harry's account of Amy is called into question by Cousin Eva in Part III, when she says that Amy "'was too thin when she was young, and later I always thought she was too fat, and again in her last year she was altogether too thin.'" (214-15) What are we, the readers, supposed to make of this elusive portrait?

Temper that response with what Miss Honey must think of Amy, when her husband brings Maria and Miranda over to demonstrate that the "'[b]oth of 'em rolled into one look a lot like Amy,'" (200), and with the feeling of Eva that the relationship between gabriel and Amy was "'a kind of lifelong infidelity . . . and now an enternal infidelity on top of that.'" (211) To Miss Honey, the quarrel is not was Amy beautiful, was she slim - she is constructed as entirely something else, as the other woman, even in death.

Reputations are constructed - but upon what? Consider the grandmother who, "twice a year compelled i her blood by the change of seasons, would sit nearly all of one day beside old trunks and boxes in the lumber room, unfolding layers of garments and small keepsakes "; Miranda and Maria "examined the objects, one by one, and did not find them, in themselves, impressive." (175) These little pockets of meaning for the grandmother, the combs and locks and feathers and flowers, are meaningless to the younger generation without some kind of exposition to understand them. Instead of sad souvenirs, artifacts of the past, they are tacky anachronisms, like fish out of water: they are "dowdy," "moth-eaten," "clumsy," "silly-looking," "yellowed," "faded," "misshapen," "cracking," and a host of other words that mean out of place and time (175).

So are reputations constructed on nothing? Several artifacts included or referenced directly in the narrative can surely establish the character of, or at least credible witness to, a person. The photograph of Aunt Amy is first and foremost - but Harry discounts its credibility. There are two letters near the end of Part I. The first is from Amy, and we find that she constructs herself within the letter - she is fond of frippery and horses, keen on scandal, and adoring of her mother. There is little insight to be gained from this letter except how Amy sees herself, or how she expects others to see her. The second letter is from Amy's nurse, and it hints to the suicide that Eva alludes to in Part III. It amounts to only another third person account of a character. (Is that a reflection of the narrative?)

The last artifact is Miranda's mother's diary. When Eva goes off on a diatribe about sex-obsession, Miranda defends her mother on habits that she hopes construct her character - cooking, sewing - and a personal record, Mariana's diary, which Miranda has read. Eva says, "'Your mother was a saint,'" - she is constructing a reputation - and Miranda is outraged, and so constructs a reputation of her own. "'My mother was nothing of the sort" (217).

So even personal testaments, such as letters or journals, cannot be trusted to be evaluated objectively - they are simply more supporting evidence in the inevitably subjective construction of a reputation.

What a flimsy construction! "Old Mortality" seems to say. Miranda's father "had a disconcerting way of inquiring, "How do you know?" when they forgot and made dogmatic statements in his presence. It always came out embarrassingly that they did not know at all" (184). Although every character is guilty of retelling someone else's story to fit their own motives, including Harry, each interpretation of another's life is equally as valid - provided that it is a qualified statement, open to common reinterpretation. Harry and Cousin Eva talk in the back of the car about "common memories, interrupting each other, catching each other up on small points of dispute" (220), leaving reputation open to interpretation long after the events that it is constructed from have transpired.

This reading is why the closing of the story struck me as so sad. Miranda sulks in the front seat, thinking, "I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer . . . Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me" (221). The narrator lets on to the foolishness of this promise, calling it ignorance - for even as Miranda prepares to leave her vast, intersecting family and their stories for each other about each other, she will live on in their memories. In every letter they receive from her she will have constructed a self to be remembered by, to be reread later by a different generation as she read Amy's and so reinterpreted. Her exploits will live on at home despite the fact that she won't be there; Cousin Eva remembers that Miranda was "planning to be a tight rope walker . . . going to play the violin and walk the tight rope at the same time." (207) This brief snippet of a story serves, until the train, as Eva's last meemory of Miranda - and what bearing does that have on her character now, on who she is as a person?

Miranda cannot remove herself from herself to know the objective truth of her life; she will be constructing herself and play the victim to others' constructions of her and have a reputation created in which there may be small truths about her character, but no grand overarching ones.

So is Porter letting on that there is no real, objective truth - or simply outlining the means by which reputation is constructed?