Humanity In "Holiday"

Just like in “He”, I am trying to find evidence of Ottilie’s humanness in “Holiday”. She is introduced in the story simply as “a crippled and badly deformed servant girl” (Porter 415). It is not until we are almost ¾ of the way through the short story that we learn she is in fact one of the Muller daughters.

The Mullers live on a farm in Texas, so their lives revolve around animals. Just like the Whipple family in “He”, the Mullers rely on their animals. Their way of life is provided for them by animals; their existence depends on their animals’ production. At the end of the short story, during mother Muller’s funeral, Ottilie is described as howling like a dog. She cannot express her true feelings and therefore she makes animal noises; this is all she knows how to do. Perhaps being around so many animals on the farm and these being the only creatures that show her compassion, these animals are what she relates to. And therefore she learns this howling from the dogs that surround her. Even though Ottilie howls she is still human. Upon showing the photo of herself as a child to the narrator, the narrator realizes that “she knew well that she had been Ottilie, with those steady legs and watching eyes, and she was Ottilie still within herself” (Porter 426). Ottilie is fully aware of what happened to her and her current circumstances in life. She is not stupid. She knows who she is and where she came from. Therefore, her daily chore of cooking for and serving a family who has disowned her must make her so much more miserable.

Her own family does not show her any form of recognition or gratitude for her contribution to the family. They treat her as they would a stranger off the street. To them she is the servant girl and nothing else. It must have been hard enough for Ottilie to go through whatever childhood accident she went through, but on top of that she now has to live day to day with a family that no longer appreciated her.