Second Glance at Maria

The Forgotten Posts of Last Week: (Part One)

A Second Glance at Maria Concepcion:
Katherine Anne Porter reveals glimpses of surrealism in Maria Concepcion by including the presence of evil within this short story. Maria Concepcion seems to be the source of this darkness. She is first described as “always as proud as if she owned a hacienda.” Pride, the most dangerous of the seven deadly sins, seems to be the gateway, allowing evil to enter her character.

After she witnesses her husband’s adultery, she “burned all over, as if a layer of tiny fig-cactus bristles, as cruel as spun glass, had crawled under her skin.” The word burn immediately free associates the image of hell, and the physical experience Maria felt as this moment seems to parallel the idea of Western culture’s hell. The immediate reaction to this moment of pain, mentally and physically bound, led to the desire to “cut the throats of her man and that girl.” The eruption of the surreal evil—in the form of the mental and the physical—open her evil nature.

When she experienced a robbery in her childhood, moreover, a “dark empty feeling had filled her.” The description of a dark spirit filling her is ghastly, supernatural—surreal. When this dark feeling erupts, moreover, child Maria seemed to lose perspective of her surroundings and she “kept moving about the place, expecting it to take shape again before her…she could only curse and threaten the air.” From this detail, we learn that Maria’s evil nature stems not truly from witnessing her husband with another woman, but stems from her character itself. The darkness inside her—described in surrealist terms—she has embodied since childhood.

Less subtly, the townspeople, openly gossip about Maria Concepcion “being devil-possessed” and “punished for her pride.” Later, the readers witness a moment of this rumored possession when Maria “ran with a crazy panic in her head...trying to place herself.” She gives in to the surrealist unconscious, allowing her body to go where her inner desires lead. Eventually, her desires lead her to murder, to revenge, to evil.

Other instance of the surreal: symbolism of the goat. The symbolist movement and the surrealist movement are closely related. I would go so far to claim the symbol of the goat as evil at the end of the story verifies the evilness within Maria Concepcion and ensures its existence in generations to come when the baby drinks the goat’s milk…

I quote from Salvador Dali works really well in the context of this story: “the only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”