Research

I think I want to focus on gender within the stories and how the gender roles can be traditional and how many times they are reversed like in "Pale Horse Pale Rider". I'm also very interested in how Porter portrays women in her stories. I always feel like many of her female characters are submissive like in "Magic " and "Theft". I'm interested to find out why Porter has these women letting men and even sometimes women control them.

I'm pretty sure I wanna stick to Porter and her ideas of women specifically how the female charaters tend to lose their narrative voice they become submissive and lose themselves to men and other women's criticism.

Some works I'm interested in pursuing this topic with include:

Magic

Theft

Maria Concepcion

Flowering Judas

The Martyr

Pale Horse

Old Mortality

I also went to the library and checked out some books on Katherine Anne Porter such as:

Katherine Anne Porter/ A life the revised edition

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

Feminie Consciousness in Katherine Anne Porter

and a couple others

In these books I'm looking for reason to why she allows these female characters to become these empty vessels within her work rather than taking the apart and using them as a tool to present postive ideas about women. I also want to look at Katherine Anne Porter as a female writer of the time and how her female characters and her relate whether the Katherine Anne Porter the person, the Katherine Anne Porter the letters and the Katherine Anne Porter in her writings can co-exist. Also the southern influence and if that is the reason for her contradictory lifestyle and writing. I guess I'm just interested in the fact that she seems to be a feminist writer but her female characters do not seem to value feminist ideals.