After reader “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” I tried to find the Bible verse containing the ‘Pale Horse” reference. This text can be found in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. Time rides upon the White horse; War rides upon the Red horse; Famine rides upon the Black horse and Death rides upon the Pale horse. According to this story the four horsemen are named after the dangers that they embody and carry with them; they represent the forces of man’s destruction.
Revelation 6:8 “I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.”
According to the Bible the pale horse signifies death and widespread devastation, which in the case of this short story seems to be the influenza epidemic. Death would be the appropriate rider for this horse given what it brings forth. After knowing the significance of this passage from the Bible it is easy to notice the foreshadowing presented by Porter in the beginning of the story. In Miranda’s dream she mentions a “lank greenish stranger” which gives the impression of a very sick and weak person (Porter 269). She then chooses to ride Graylie, a horse whose name implies that its color is gray or even pale. Miranda then acknowledges that the stranger is Death because she say’s, “Come now, Graylie, … we must outrun Death and the Devil” (Porter 270). The stranger’s horse was also gray, which further proves that this horse and rider in her dream are death and the pale horse referred to in the Bible. She tries to outrun Death on her own gray horse, which she eventually does because by the end of the story she has survived the epidemic.
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Very intersting research. I thought that the reference to this song was extremely creepy. It was almost grotesque that Miranda wants to sing a song about death, when she is very sickly and people are dying all around her. I think her choice of song was also strange because both she and Adam connected the song to black people of a lower status. I cannot imagine why Porter choose to make this connection. Maybe because their pain seemed so tangible and well articulated in their songs?
Also, I thought that the pale was referring to something ghostly or not completely real. This reminded me of some of the images present in "Artificial Nigger"
Going off your reading, I think we could view the opening dream as indicative of her running from the weight of death and pain that emanates from her family, with its obsessive ties to the past. She is running from all that generational baggage so she can live her own life, free from all that. But the world outside of her family proves to be full of death and destruction itself, which begin to take new tolls on this "new" individual, Miranda. She finds the pale rider follows even those without bonds or history, in the forms of war, disease, and lost love.
Good research on that. That certainly reframes the story in a new light. And regarding the song, boy, that reminds me a little bit of Prince Prospero throwing the Halloween ball in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death."
That is really interesting and it really elaborates on the dream within the story and how it connects to the flu and Miranda. The out running death part is the most influential to the story and it shows how she is able to beat the devastation that is occuring to everyone else around her. I also think it is really interesting how Porter uses the idea of the horses not only to connect it to the four horsemen, but to connect PHPR to Old Mortatlity and the Mirandas.
Because the pale horse pale rider statement originally came from the book of revelations, an apocalyptic book revealing what will happen at the end of the times, I looked for the similarities between Porter's story and the book of revelations. Both are filled with visions and dreams, include foreshadowing of death, and are very symbolic. I asked myself why Porter chose to stylize her story after the Biblical story. I concluded that Porter's time period could very much have seemed like the end of times; the plague of influenza and the world war must have seemed like the end of times for many people. It is no surprise to me, then, that Porter paralleled PHPR to an apocalyptic text. It was not just that Miranda was running from death, the pale rider, on her pale horse. It was that the entire world was running away from death, a universal pale rider. Think of the historical context...crazy scary.
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