Fire in TVBIA, So Far

Tarwater sees fire as a sign of divine election, anticipating his becoming the next Moses. "Often when he walked in the woods and came upon some bush a little removed from the rest, his breath would catch in his throat and he would stop and wait for the bush to burst into flame. It had not done it yet." (355) In conjunction with this, fire is a cleansing force.

The old man "had schooled [Tarwater] in the evils that befall prophets . . . those that come from the Lord and burn the prophet clean; for he himself had been burned clean and burned clean again. He had learned by fire." (332) But the fire does not simply cleanse for the sake of preparing a prophet - it has a more ominous bent, and can act in cleansing as an instrument of punishment. The old man warns the school teacher that "THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN" (379), in reference to Tarwater.

The old man is constantly associated with fire, through his own devices. In reliving his front yard rants, the great-uncle shouts, "'The Lord is preparing a prophet with fire in his hand and eye and the prophet is moving toward the city with his warning.'" (368) The cleansing fire is posed opposite the city, associated with sin. Tarwater reinforces this idea during his visit to the city. "[H]e had realized, almost without warning, that this place was evil - the ducked heads, the muttered words, the hastening away. He saw in a burst of light that these people were hastening away from the Lord God Almighty." (346) So far the fire is vengeful and cleansing, set opposite the sinful city, which is in turn opposed by God and light. And light is shed by fire!

But O'Connor's fire grows complicated, as O'Connor's things are wont to do. The old man, who thinks himself of the fire, is afraid of its agency. His first name is Mason, a layer of bricks, a crafter from clay - the name gives him a deep association with the earth, and the idea of being cremated instead of buried terrifies him. He thinks that the schoolteacher would have him "cremated in an oven and scatter [his] ashes" - twin horrors for his separation from the ground and lying at the mercy of his own nephew. And fire can be an agent of the devil, for when Tarwater drinks from the still it was "A burning arm [that] slid down Tarwater's throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul." (358) Tarwater's opposition fire - or is it his great uncle? - attains a greater profile when he is escaping his own arson and "forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him" (361), those eyes so like the eyes of the great uncle, the prophet with fire in his eye, his eyes, in death, "dead silver" (336). Tarwater runs from this cleansing agent, the devil's arm - to the city, towards sin. Picked up by the salesman, Tarwater panics. "'That's the same fire we came from!'" Meeks contradicts him, saying, "'That's the city we're coming to. That's the glow from the city lights.'" (362)

So a demarcation is made, perhaps, between natural and artificial light. The stranger goads Tarwater that if he stays in Powderhead, he will be "[f]orever by [him]self in this empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in." (353) The natural limits of the sun are no match for the city lights, limited only by the ingenuity of man. Their artificiality represents to Tarwater something completely unfamiliar. He tells Meeks, "'I know everything but the machines'" (380). (This emphasizes the strangeness of Tarwater's uncle the schoolteacher, who is described as machine like. "For an instant the boy had the thought that his [the schoolteacher's] head ran by electricity." "The boy found himself scrutinized by two small drill-like eyes set in the depths of twin glass caverns." (386) Even the schoolteacher's doorknocker makes Tarwater recoil - "He touched it and jerked his hand away, burnt by a metallic coldness." (385) The combination of the foul metal, brass, thus alloyed, thus forged in fire, and its burning coldness greater confuses the role that fire plays in the story.)

As conflicted as the relationship is between Tarwater and fire is, it cannot be ignored that he acts as an agent of fire himself. He sets Powderhead aflame, fulfilling the way its name hearkens to a sitting bomb (361). He is prophesied as the purger of the schoolteacher, the boy the old man would "raise into a prophet to burn [the schoolteacher's] eyes clean" (351). (The role of Meeks in Tarwater as an agent of fire is an interesting one. He is a copper flue salesman (361), and so trafficks in chimneys, the guide to fire's smoke. I wonder what role he will play as the novel progresses?)

And yet, Tarwater "knew that we was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable . . . . [God] set him in a world of loss and fire to baptize on idiot child" (389). Tarwater is to be a baptist, a waterbearer, someone to put out fires. Tarwater is a character in conflict with himself - his name speaks to his conflict. He is associated with water, but it is murky, dark - one can't be sure what one sees in it. The conflict is clear from his relationship with the stranger, too. The stranger's very presence speaks of an internal struggle, and he elaborates on it when he says, "[T]he way I see it . . . you can do one of two things. One of them, not both. Nobody can do both of two things without straining themselves. You can do one thing or you can do the opposite." (354) Only time, and finishing the novel, will tell where Tarwater makes his allegiance: water, fire? the natural, the man-made (and in those, the urban, the rural)?

These questions plague the reader as much as they plague Tarwater. The stranger asks, "what's God going to do with sailors drowned at sea . . . And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they're pulp?" (352)

Fire acts as the will of God and a device of the devil; something embraced and shied from; both a powerful tool and a powerful enemy. The story seems to be leaning towards a coming of age for Tarwater - though having read some O'Connor by now, where the story seems to be going and where it ends up are often divergent ideas, to say the least; are these the conflicts of growing up? Do they represent a deeper struggle? Is there a deeper struggle than coming to terms with maturity?

And maybe someone has additional evidence - contradictory evidence? A different reading of these examples?

Noon Wine

I found Mr. Thompson’s division of gender roles very interesting. He divides not only male and female work but he also divides the boss’ and hired mans work. It seems as though Mr. Thompson is preoccupied with this notion of separating roles even though his wife does not contribute because of her physical health. Not only is her concerned with a person’s roles, he is also concerned with the way in which others view him. The perception people have of him is very important to him because “It was his dignity and his reputation that he cared about” (Porter 233). People had to see him performing only ‘manly’ work or else his reputation, something very important to him, would be tainted. It is evident in the way Mr. Thompson dies that he cares a lot much about what other people think. Mr. Thompson “struck out to the farthest end of his fields” (Porter 267). He did not want anyone to see what he was about to do; he is ashamed and embarrassed and therefore he travels to the farthest corner of his property to kill himself. He knows he is a coward and he does not want others to witness this flaw in his character.

Justification for Murder

Mr. Thompson’s life was radically changed by the presence of Mr. Helton on his farm. When Helton first shows up he finds Mr. Thompson performing a juggling act with his chores on a farm that appears run down and neglected. Mr. Helton provides the work ethic that enables Mr. Thompson to relax into a leisurely life. On the day that Mr. Hatch arrives to return Mr. Helton to the asylum in North Dakota, Mr. Thompson’s biggest concern is the position of his rocking chair on the front or side porch. Mr. Hatch threatens to disturb his balanced and relaxed life. Mr. Helton takes care of all the things that ever caused him to worry in the past, and the idea that he would leave and that things would return to their previous state is enough to drive Mr. Thompson to murder. He doesn’t feel remorse for his actions because he perceives the killing as self-defense, but the only thing that he was defending was his sense of security.

Masculinity Again

I agree with the previous post that Mr. Thompson is absolutely hung up on his masculinity, or lack thereof, regarding his workplace. Specifically, on page 233, he runs around in circles, contemplating the differences between men and women in the workforce. I cannot see the point to his ignorant argument, being that he continues his "women's work," while Mr. Helton takes on the masculine role in the dairy. Mr. Thompson's concern for what others think frustrated me, and I felt sympathy for Mrs. Thompson throughout the entire story because of the way he treated her, and also because of what she didn't know about his character.

Masculinity in "Noon Wine"

That conversation between Thompson and Hatch about tobacco is the most bizarre pissing contest I've ever read. Thompson realizes how ridiculous it is, feeling "that Mr. Hatch was trying to make out that he had the best judgment in tobacco", but continues to egg him on, qualifying his taste with humility but tinging it with pride: "'I'm not a rich man and I don't go round settin' myself up for one, but . . . when it comes to such things as tobacco, I buy the best on the market.'" (249) Of course, Thompson realizes that the distaste that Hatch inspires in him isn't caused by the tobacco (250) - Thompson and Hatch are in competition, two alpha males fighting for dominance.

The time that Thompson has spent delineating women's and men's work - and within that, the work of hired men and men of standing - reminds me of the social hierarchy Mrs. Turpin lulls herself to sleep with, drawing absurdly fine lines between similar tasks. "Killing hogs was a job for the boss, but scraping them and cutting them up was for the hired man again; and again woman's proper work was dressing meat, smoking, pickling, and making lard and sausage." (233) "[T]here were only a few kinds of work manly enough for Mr. Thompson" (233-34), but does that make Helton less of a man, who, "judging by his conduct. . .had never heard of the difference between man's and woman's work on a farm" (235)?

I don't really want to go either way on Helton's status as a man, at least not right now. (Okay, maybe a little: he's bestialized, compared, among other things, to a "mad dog" (259)) But Thompson's pissing contest with Hatch - and his victory in that contest - really calls into question the nature of masculinity, which Thompson thought he had all figured out.

Thompson's sense of masculinity is robbed of him. We are privy to his thoughts: "it would sound mighty strange to say, Well him and me fell out over a plug of tobacco." (250) The falling out that eventually occurs between Thompson and Hatch - that is, the one killing the other - is explained by Thompson as a defense of Helton. "'But Mr. Hatch, as I told you,'" Thompson tells his lawyer, '"made a pass at Mr. Helton with his bowie knife. That's why I took a hand.'" (260) So Thompson was doing as a good neighbor would, with a sense of fraternity and, as a boss, treating his worker well. Thompson considers himself, after all, "a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher's salary, land owner and father of a famiy, employer, a hearty good fellow among men." (234) Thompson is a man's man (and not an Irishman, to boot, 244).

But for this good turn, what does Thompson get? In his dissertation on man's work/woman's work, Thompson lets on that "[i]t was his dignity and his reputation that he cared about" (233). These things make him a man. And so when his neighbor's turn on him (the fairweather friends, the Allbrights, 262-63; that unhappy housewarming with the McClellans, 263-64), and his sons betray him ("'You touch her again and I'll blow your heart out!'" (267), what is left of the land owner and father, the hearty good fellow among men? And how has he lost all this standing that he thought he had?

In the defense of a loonatic? Why not just over a plug of tobacco?

Usurped by his sons and shunned by his fellows, the story ends with Thompson toeing the trigger to his shotgun, because "That way he could work it." (268) He salvages his masculinity by putting a gun (!) in his mouth (!!) to kill himself (!!!). Real men don't do these things! (Especially not in literature when they could be misinterpreted) The only masculine thing about this passage is Thompson's own prowess with the gun, now turned on himself.

Still, the moment doesn't seem like a castration. Thompson's loss of masculinity is a fall from grace, becoming not feminine but just some sexless creature. He has no family. (He scratches out the words "My wife" in his letter. (268)) This seems to be the last straw in measuring his worth, not his standing or his land or his material success - he feels abandoned by his family and can't go on.

Is that a portrait of a real man?

(Edit: I woke up this morning and realized he didn't put the gun in his mouth, he leaned "his head against the gun mouth" (268); this actually helps my point that Mr. Thompson undergoes an implosion of masculinity, rather than an emasculation)

Noon Wine

There is a very odd sense of loyalty and truth in "Noon Wine" Weather it be the sons, and the parents, or Mr. and Mrs. Thompson there seemed to be an unsettlingly disconnectedness between the husband and wife, but most notably between, Mr. Hatch, and the rest of the characters there is a true lack of understanding. Porter, I think, does this in a lot of her stories to keep the momentum and tension palpable, and keep the reader asking questions. Especially with the arrival of the "Fat Man" there is a skewed sense of what really happened, and shame and guilt that can't be justified away.

Noon Wine

Silence surfaces again in Noon Wine. Mr. Helton is a conspicuously silent character as far as speech is concerned, but he fills that silence with his single, repeated harmonica song. I found the intersection of different kinds of texts in this story interesting, in that sense, but I'm not sure what to do with all of them. I'll just list some of the different "texts" I noticed, and maybe someone will have some ideas?...
First of all, Mr. Helton's silence is a text, just as much as his rare speech, and his harmonica song.
Then again, the translation and interpretation of the song by Mr. Hatch is a kind of text in itself (albeit an unreliable one), that alters the way we read the first song text.
The brief information Helton offers about his life is a text, which is opposed and framed by the text offered by Hatch concerning the tale of Helton's past.
Even in Hatch's story, the text within a text--Helton's letter to his mother--acts as a thread between the overlapping texts of the story. I think the fact that Mr. Thompson feels the Mr. Hatch is twisting his words underlines this signficant theme: there is never a pure text in a vacuum--all texts are dependent on others. I think the significance of this theme plays out at the end of the story, when Mr. Thompson is struggling to grasp hold of a single truth.
His visual text told him one thing--that Hatch stabbed Helton. However, his visual text was contradicted by the reports of the police (which represent yet another interdependent text). He attempts to assert an authoritative text through speech, by going around repeating a verbal narration of the event to his neighbors. In the end, he chooses the most authoritative form of text available to establish his own limited truth--as far as he knows it, and to the best of his ability--by deliberately undertaking the act of writing as suicide note. Logos and Parole are jumping all over each other in this piece. Any thoughts on what to do with it?

Noon Wine: Parallels to the Story of Cain and Abel?

To me, the story Noon Wine, draws slight parallels to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Although these parallels are not seen instantly, they become more defined as the story of Helton's arrival on the farm progresses. When Hatch arrives to gather a bounty on Helton, he explains that Helton went mentally insane one day while farming and consequently, killed his brother with a pitchfork. As this story unfolds, evil seems to become ever more present within the story.

Does anybody else see this parallel?

The Enduring Chill

The main character of any story is usually the one who is most easily sympathized with because we, as readers, follow their train of thought and their actions. We understand them more than any other character because we are given situations from their perspective. In “The Enduring Chill”, Asbury is not a sympathetic character. He is nasty, rude and downright unappreciative, especially towards his own mother. He treats her with such disrespect; it would be more believable to consider her a complete stranger than to accept she is his mother simply as a result of the way she is treated. The very first words he says to his mother are, “I don’t feel like talking” (O’Connor 547). Who knows how long it has been since that last time he talked to or even saw his mother and the first thing he says is this rude comment. No ‘thank you’ or ‘I missed you mom’, instead he shows his true colors right up front.

The character I sympathize with in this story is the mother. Mrs. Fox is very understanding and kind in spite of how she is treated by her own son. We see her through Asbury’s eyes and this further proves how she is the most sympathetic character. He shows us just how strong and beautiful she really is. In the end Asbury gets what he deserves; he does not die. Instead, he is left to live with himself and ‘the enduring chill’ of the consequences of his selfish actions.

Afterthought about the letters

I was thinking about the letter that Asbury writes to his mother and I can't help but draw a comparison to O'Connor's letters. We've talked about how even though her letters are not considered fiction, we can not look at them for insight into what her essence or personality may be. I was thinking the same thing with Asbury, how the letters are more like works of art rather than a final word before he dies. He fills two notebooks for one letter to his mother, and all it basically says is that she failed in doing her job as a mother. Why would you need two notebooks for that? Unless it was a very prosed way of doing so.

I guess the biggest difference is that O'Connor expected her letters to be published while Asbury does it as a private humiliation for his mother. But still... they have these target audiences and both seem a little impersonal, in my opinion.

Anyway, this was just an observation that we didn't really go over in class and that just struck me at the moment.

Karma in The Enduring Chill

The first thing I thought after reading O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill" was that karma got Asbury. Convinced that he's dying, Asbury returns home so that he can die in the family home. He's been living in New York City as a writer but he's dropped everything so that he can die at home. He quit his job and has no savings to speak of. He's dependent on his family to take care of him on his deathbed. Once home he breaks the rules by drinking the fresh milk and smoking in the barn. He encourages the black farm employees to do the same. Now that he's dying he doesn't have to think about the consequences to his actions.

However, when Dr. Block comes back with the results from Asbury's blood sample he reveals that Asbury is actually not going to die. Suddenly, Asbury has the future that he hadn't been planning for. He's sick because he's been drinking the unpasteurized milk from the family farm, proving he never really cared about the consequences anyway. Because he didn't follow the rules he's going to be sick with a fever for life and he has to figure out what to do with no job and no money.

Don't live so selfishly or else you might regret it.

Freudian Analylsis of "The Enduring Chill"

I observed the heavily Freudian influenced relationship between mother and son in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill.” From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the hostility Asbury emits toward his mother stems from an underdeveloped or unfulfilled Oedipus complex. According to Freud, every young boy goes through a period in his life—usually from age three to age five— where he fixates on his love for his mother. During that stage, the boy competes with his father to win over his mother’s love. The boy passes through the stage amicably if the parents express their love to the boy without imposing “excessively prohibitive or excessively stimulating attitudes.” However, if he undergoes trauma from his parents, he is subject to experiencing “infantile neurosis” later on in his adult life. Asbury’s Oedipus stage seemed to twist the desire to win over his mother’s love into a bitter hatred of his mother and the love she had for him. Perhaps Asbury felt like he lost any kind of competition with his father who successfully became “a lawyer and a businessman and a farmer and politician all rolled into one.” Mrs. Fox esteemed her husband for his ability to “do anything.” Asbury, on the other hand “in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament” that Mrs. Fox must have recognized early on in his childhood. His inability to win his mother’s love due to his contrasting personality must have hindered his completion of the Oedipus stage. Later in his life, he felt like a failure, and his depression, or infantile neurosis, led him to believe he “had no talent. [He] couldn’t create. [He] had nothing except for the desire for these things.” His mental pathology sprung from his destitute opinion of himself as a failure to his god, Art. He most likely-- again, according to a Freudian analysis—projected his desires for his mother onto Art, and when he realized he could not win over Art in the same way he won over his mother, his neurosis led him to believe he deserved to die. His death would revenge his mother’s inability to love him or understand him and it would produce something ascetically artistic to satisfy his passion for Art. Additionally, the mark of a successfully transitioned Oedipus complex is the affluent completion of the superego. Freud argues for the existence of three parts to the human psyche: the ego, the id, and the superego. They represent, respectively, the human desire for structured organization, the desire for nihilistic fulfillment of pleasure, and the conscience or mediator of the two. Because Asbury’s Oedipus complex stage eventually led him to hate his mother, Asbury most likely has a distorted sense of what is right and wrong, an underdeveloped superego. He cannot see, for example, that his mother truly cares for him but insists that her abhorrent way “had simply been the air he breathed.” She smothered him, and when he tried to break free, he found he couldn’t live without the smothering. To pay her back for chaining him to her, he wrote a letter to “leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was.” A hurtful, almost evil death note to his mother, anyone else would see as wrong. Seeking and longing death, too, anyone else would see as warped sense of reality. Asbury, however, believes death was a “justification, a gift from life.” My questions then, follow: Is Asbury, then, punished for his twisted superego? Is the only way to fix him through the “Holy Spirit” which eventually condemns him? Perhaps the Jesuit priest was correct in believing Asbury was “a good lad at heart but very ignorant.” He is ignorant of what is really right and wrong, ignorant that art cannot define a man, and ignorant of the idea that life is truly a better gift than death.

Art and Product in Enduring Chill

Yes, I think O'Connor is poking fun at this melodramatic "artist." I don't think she would have had much patience with him as a person. But I found it interesting that Asbury has actually developed a significant body of work. He has apparently destroyed a novel, several plays, poems, etc. He claims to have no talent. But I would venture to propose that in "Art" (I guess I have to resort to that unpleasant, big word), the process is more important than the product. Asbury may be frustrated with the results of his efforts, but I think the fact that he has completed projects is quite signficant. In this respect, he is certainly a step ahead of other "artistic" characters (like the Journalist in KAP's "That Tree," or her painter in "The Martyr") who enjoy the melodrama and the aura of "Art," but never get around to producing much of it themselves. I think the obsession with Product (instead of Process) in our culture is the real tragedy of this story--his family wants him to do "some real work--not writing." They want milk--something tangible for consumption--something Asbury's father might have produced. Even Asbury's anxiety to have "a culminating experience" to cap off his life suggests an obsession with Product--instead of celebrating the process of his life, he wants a single memorable event to come away with--an event that will supposedly bring him some desperately-sought emotion sublimation.
I think the tragedy of this story is that Asbury has the potential to understand and embrace the importance of process, but fails to do so ultimately in a culture that rejects art. He tells the priest that "the artist prays by creating" (566). This suggests a vision of art that is a practice, a ritual, a self-fulfilling process, even if it has, like religion, little apparent utilitarian value. Of course, I think it is interesting that, if one accepts my reading, this story actually defends "art" while seeming to satirize it through Asbury's unappealing self-aggrandizment.

The Enduring Chill

In this short story each of the characters seem to embody a certain type of intellect that appears to be completely different from each other and utterly incompatible with each other. Asbury attempts to embody a type of trancendental artistic intellect, his sister dedicates herself to a cold, academic, and objective type of intellectualism and their parents represent an intellegence that adheres to the practicality and utilitarianism of the South. Through free indirect discourse O'Connor reveals the ways in which none of these characters can understand the the beliefs of the others because each believes the others to be inferior in some way. Mrs. Fox attempts to give her children an education but believes that "the more education they got, the less they could do" (551) and that "when people think they are smart... there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight" (550-1). Mary George believes that Asbury "was not an artist and that he had no talent that that was the trouble with him" (552) and that to snap him out of his delusions he needs "two or three shock treatments" to "[g]et that artist business out of his head" (563). Asbury seems to think that he must sacrifice his life to 'Art' and that anyone who does not do so is living their life frivolously. Each character is clearly in posession of the intellect necessary to reconcile their differences, but their own feelings of superiority make them distrustful of the decisions that the other makes. The entire story functions as an allegory for the ways that people fractionalize themselves based on the different values they place on different kinds of intellect and different ideas about the world.

Undulant Fever

In reading this story, I had no idea what undulant fever might be. I have looked it up online, and since most of the issues and themes I also saw in the story have already been posted beautifully, I will give a little background as to what I have discovered.

Mrs. Fox was correct: undulant fever, or Brucellosis, can indeed be caused by consuming unpasturized or bad milk. It is very ironic that she blamed the milk he had "up there" in the big city for getting him sick when every account of the disease I can find online states that the bacteria come from farm animals and their products, thus hinting that he must have gotten sick from the family farm.

All accounts online state that it is indeed treatable with antibiotics, but on pg. 571, Dr. Block states that "it'll keep coming back." Modern research states that this is clearly not so, but I wonder if this was the belief about the disease at the time or if O'Connor is supporting Asbury's claim that Block was an incompetent doctor who didn't know what he was doing.

Interestingly, in addition to all the physical pain, another symptom of undulant fever is servere mental depression. I am wondering if O'Connor meant this to have any bearings on Asbury's gloom and doom. Are we merely to view him as the cliched tortured artist, or is the disease more to blame for his mental state? Any thoughts?

Co-Dependency

The element of "The Enduring Chill" that most stood out for me was the co-dependency between the mother and the son. Their dysfunctional relationship was a self-fueling beast that is fairly common, in my observation.

Mrs. Fox comes across as an over-attentive mother in this story, especially as Asbury resists her efforts to help him. As disgusted as Asbury gets--and as pathetic and cruel his behavior--it is apparent to me that he craves this attention. Otherwise he wouldn't behave in such a manner that elicits this attention.

Like a lot of parent-child relationships, Mrs. Fox still thinks of Asbury as her baby boy. But in a classic role, Asbury resists, saying he's an adult, but then behaves as a child. If Asbury wants to be treated as an adult, then he should act like one. Likewise, if Mrs. Fox wants an adult relationship with her son, she should treat him as one.

Instead, Asbury smokes in the barn, drinks the milk and encourages insubordination among her help. Mrs. Fox demeans his lifestyle, wanting him to find "real work, not writing."

In the end, you could argue, both characters get what they want. For the rest of his life, Asbury can play the tortured artist due to his illness, Mrs. Fox the doting mother. Their co-dependency will keep them together.

The Enduring Chill

I also wanted to comment on the "tortured artist" in The Enduring Chill. I think it is amusing how O'Connor seems to poke fun at the tortured artist in this story ("The artist arrives at the gas chamber" 553), and also how she pokes fun of writing. For instance, "She knew that if he would get in there now, or get out and fix fences, or do any kin of work-real work, not writing-that he might avoid this nervous breakdown" (551). This sentence is very interesting to me. We have talked about the tortured artist and Hemingway in class, and I think this story goes along with that. This story was actually kind of humorous to me (is that a horrible thing to say) because Asbury was so overly dramatic. Anything that happened was just the end of the world to him.

I also think it is interesting how the adult children in a lot of the stories we have been reading (Revelation, Good Country People) are all very well educated (over educated according to Asbury's mother) and yet they act horrible. They act like they are right all the time, they treat their parents with little respect, they are whiny and they act like they are God's gift to the world. I think it is interesting how O'Connor brings these characters down a peg and has them be wrong some of the time.

Ignorance is (not) Bliss

Despite the fact that Asbury is not actually narrating "The Enduring Chill," O'Connor gives us more insight into his thoughts and feelings than any other character. I honestly can say that I did not sympathize with any of the characters. Though I thoroughly enjoyed every part of it, I was angry with almost everyone at least once in the story. My anger branched from the ongoing theme of age/maturity, and levels of intelligence. I believe O'Connor made a point to have Asbury appear to be intelligent, in both a worldly sense and a scholarly sense. A perfect, yet subtle, example of his worldly intelligence was when we travel back one year to the time when he worked at his mother's dairy. The text states, "He had been writing a play about Negroes (why anybody would want to write a play about Negroes was beyond her) and he had said he wanted to work in the dairy with them and find out what their interests were" (p. 551). The text supports Asbury's opinion of his mother, in that she is unintelligent, and ignorant in regards to life.

Asbury wastes no time from the start of the story, in expressing his view on his mother's age and maturity level. "His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn't kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up" (p 547). We understand that Asbury is obviously younger than his mother, yet he feels that she is childish, and falls behind him in the process of maturing. There is not one part of Asbury that holds him back from openly expressing his condescending feelings. Ironically, despite his mother's acceptance of her own lack of intelligence, Asbury is the one who is left in the wrong. For the majority of the story, Mrs. Fox sticks to her gut, believing that her son is not dying, despite Asbury's best efforts to convince her otherwise.

Ultimately, Asbury dug his own grave, succumbing to his illness, and begging for his death. He blames his mother for molding him to fit only into her lifestyle, and depriving him of existence outside of that behavior. Regardless of Asbury's best efforts to hold his mother responsible for his state of being, he claims, "I don't think you have anything to do with it" (p. 562). In reality, Asbury categorizes himself and the rest of the characters in the story according to intelligence, placing himself above the rest, however, he is the most ignorant of all. It is his ignorance that leaves him terrified and alone, with the rest of his life dangling inevitably before him.

Country Art

So far the posts I have read I've pretty much agreed. Although I think that the ending is a symbolic death for him - tragic and dramatic (the way he wanted). In many ways I felt for Asbury because of feelings of being trapped (I think that's why I can sympathize with many of these types of characters, the artists and intellectuals, because I have a constant fear of being trapped) but I also recognize that his main inspiration IS the country, and especially his mother. Maybe when he does die, the letters seem full of passion and might be the only thing WORTH reading. He must have some sort of connection with his mother, otherwise he wouldn't put so much energy into her, especially defying her. He is long past the teenager stage and finding his own way, so this extra defiance must mean something more.

Also, the descriptions of the country were, as seen through his eyes, were very much like an artist's view. It seems the more he fights his connection with the country, the more it consumes him to the point where he must move back and depend on it! The people and the country are self-reflexive to him - he is actually the one who is being "simple" because he refuses to look outside his own little box... pretty much the epitome of an ignorant person.

On a side note, I have to say that I laugh OUT LOUD when Randall and Morgan come into his room to smoke. I couldn't get over it. For whatever reason that scene made me laugh so hard and I realized that the story was kind of a joke at Asbury. I figured Asbury wasn't dying, but the dialogue between them was comical. And it served him right. I felt like he was exploiting them for his own benefit and forgot that they were also people too. Not just a story or a point to be made.

Cities and Agelessness in O'Connor

Asbury considers the urban life far superior to his own rural upbringing. This is evident in the demarcation he makes between Dr. Block and city doctors. He says to his mother, "'Don't you think if I'd wanted to go to a doctor I'd have gone up there where they have some good ones? Don't you know they have better doctors in New York?'" (549) The city functions as an escape for him, and his return to rural life is a failure. "Ever since he had first gone away to college, he had come back every time with nothing but the necessities for a two-week stay and with a wooden resigned expression that said he was prepared to endure the visit for exactly fourteen days." (548) The country is a setting that Asbury powers through, making his surrender to the place - he says to his mother, "This visit. . .will be permanent" (555) - all the more painful to him.

Before actually sojourning there, Old Dudley from "The Geranium" places New York City on a similar pedestal. "[T]here was that thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. . .Big towns were important places. . .It was an important place and it had room for him!" (702) The pace and grandeur of the place thrills Old Dudley - at least until he arrives.

Nelson from "The Artificial Nigger" has a similar attitude towards "the city" (this time, Atlanta), before his second trip. He is anxious to "'see what all it is to see'" (219), if only to best his grandfather in all of their bizarre competitions: "It would be Mr. Head's third trip. Nelson had said, 'I will've already been there twict and I ain't but ten" (211) ; even the fact that Nelson beat Mr. Head to making breakfast inspires in Nelson a proud posture, "his entire figure suggest[ing] satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head." (212)

Nelson and Old Dudley both grow resentful of the city by the end of their stories. After Mr. Head denies his grandson to the toppled woman, Nelson becomes a passionless thing, "his face bloodless . . . His eyes were triumphantly cold. there was no light in them, no feeling, no interest." (229) The entire experience puts a bad taste in Nelson's mouth, and he revises his own history, remarking after his second trip, "'I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never go back again!" (231)

Old Dudley's growing contempt for New York is both a product of loneliness - "Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn't have been so big - he wouldn't have felt pressed down every time he went out in it" (704) - and his daughter's bucking of custom. When he finds out she has a black neighbor, he thunders, "'You ain't been raised to live tight with niggers that think they're just as good as you, and you think I'd go messin' around with one er that kind!'" (707) New York throws Old Dudley into a culture shock, the close living of all sorts without familiar faces dashing his dreams of the big, important city he had seen in the picture show.

Nelson and Dudley's attitudes after their stays in the city resemble Mrs. Fox's, Asbury's mother. Mrs. Fox takes great pride in her little rural empire. "[S]he had said more than once to Asbury, 'You have a home here that half those people up there would give their eyeteeth for!'", especially considering the squalor and close quarters that Asbury occupied during his years in the city (552)

There are blurring allegiances between the rural and the urban, but I think that these are only symptomatic motifs of a larger theme. Though Mrs. Fox is sixty years old, Asbury believes his death will "assist her in the process of growing up" (547). This confusion of age persists in "The Enduring Chill" when Mary George, Asbury's sister, notes that "'there is something the matter with him. He looks a hundred years old." (553)

Nelson is, like Asbury, thrilled by the city - and aged beyond his years. "[T]he boy's look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it" (212). After he and his grandfather's grace experience at the eponymous statue, "Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man." (230) Now Nelson and Mr. Head, both abhorrent of the city, are too of inscrutable ages.

Which brings us to Old Dudley. His age is, in contrast, very scrutable - he insists that had he been left at home, "[t]here was his pension that could feed him and oddjobs that kept him his room in the boarding house" (702), a situation speaking both to his lifetime of work and the accrual of experience, as well as his curmudgeonly stubbornness. But in relying on his daughter to take care of him, Old Dudley embarks on a role reversal - once the parent, he is now the parented. "Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow," "She held him by the coat sleeve and pulled him through the people" (704-05). Dudley's daughter pampers him, even babies him. Dudley may in fact be Old, but in the care of his daughter he is just a child.

These ageless characters all abhor the city - except for Asbury, who pines for it, perhaps because he was poisoned by the unadulterated countryside itself. There too is a difference in his agelessness - Asbury's premature graying is a physical toll on his body, whereas Nelson and Mr. Head have grown the wiser for their conflation, Old Dudley has stopped progressing and instead regresses, and Asbury's assumed naiveté in Mrs. Fox gives her the innocence of youth. The agelessness of these characters is a play on wisdom, achieved or lost; Asbury's agelessness is the petulance of a child that has never been purged. He "crie[s] in an agonized voice, 'can't we go on?' (552), and with all the self-important angst of an adolescent repeats, over and again, "'What's wrong with me . . . is way beyond Block.'" (550)

O'Connor plays urban/rural allegiances off of ageless characters to put the wise at home in the country.

Irony in the Enduring Chill

The motif of the “chill” is perhaps the most ironic element of this story. We first see the occurrence of this motif in regards to the letter Asbury writes to his mother, “He felt that even if she didn’t understand at once, the letter would leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was” (365). This desire of Asbury, for his mother to see herself as she is, parallels the rest of the story. When Asbury is told that he has Undulant Fever and is not, in fact, dying, he is resigned to a similar fate and is forced to see himself as he is (demonstrated by looking at his own reflection in the mirror).

Throughout the story, we see more irony in the ways Asbury ultimately defeats himself, although he is attempting to defeat his mother. Rather than causing her any pain, all of his efforts fail and are reflected onto him. The most obvious example of this reflection of his efforts is in his forbidden drinking of the warm milk. Against his initial thought, neither Randall nor Marshall drink the milk and consequently, Asbury is the only one who falls ill because he drank unpasteurized milk.

Another example of irony is that of death and the letter to his mother. Asbury wishes for the letter to be read after his death, making it that much more painful for his mother. However, thinking he is going to die, Asbury prematurely gives his mother the key to the desk where the letter lies. (We can assume she read it before his death). The next example of irony is that Asbury desperately wishes to be an artist, but he is not gifted in that field. Asbury is convinced that his god, Art, is bringing him death, but that proves to be untrue as well.

Tortured Artist in the Enduring Chill

In O'Conner's "The Enduring Chill," the main character Asbury has to return home due to an illness which he believes is going to be the death of him. Within "The Enduring Chill," the relationship between Asbury and his mother is developed, however Asbury is very vague to why he continuously goes against his mother's will. Asbury consistently tries to defy his mother every opportunity he gets. Asbury seems to get a rise out of contradicting his mother like when he gets Randall and Morgan to smoke and then he tries to get them to drink the milk for many days in a row. Asbury even hurts himself by drinking unpasterized milk to try to get the "Negros" to defy his mother with him. Asbury even writes a letter for his mother to read as soon as he passes away which he says will be a private way and getting to her rather than him killing himself which would be public. So I am just curious to why Asbury seems to have such disgust for his mother especially when all she does is try to take care of him and please him?

I also thought it was interesting that Asbury is so determined that he is going to die but he does not try to get better he just accepts the fact and refuses doctors and going to the hospital even though it might help. This goes along with the themes in O'Conner and Porter's stories as the disabled or sick person whom becomes completely absorbed in their own pity for themselves. Also the fact that Asbury is an artist is another way that the themes are similar the tortured artist whom just wants to die and does not really produce any creativity and is completely obsessed with their own self pity. I think this goes along with how his mother treat him because she gives him pity maybe to much too and he pretends to despise this but he feeds off of his mother's attitude toward him.

Holiday

As with any piece of literature, I try and find someone to sympathize with; someone whose side I can stand on and be able to understand more than any other character. It took me a while to find a character in “Holiday” who I could feel a connection with. I eventually began to sympathize with Ottilie. I chose this character because even though she is not the narrator or the focal point of the story I am drawn to her. I feel sorry for her and her situation. She lives with a family who does not appreciate her. Not only does she live with this horrible disfigurement, which cripples her physically but she also lives with the abandonment of her family. Some may argue that her family has not abandoned her because they still let her live with them. But, they abandon her in the sense of alienating her from the rest of the family. They do not acknowledge her presence nor do they acknowledge her contribution to the family; they treat her as if she were a complete stranger. She is a servant and nothing more. I feel for Ottilie because I do not understand how a family can simply discard one of their own; they get rid of her. I find this upsetting.

The Muller family is described as very strong and hard working; they work from dawn until dusk everyday. Even though Ottilie is alienated from this family and portrayed as weak because of her disfigurement I believe she is the strongest member of the Muller family. She deals with a constant neglect from her family. She bears this burden every single day of her life and who knows how many years this has been going on before our narrator arrives. She has put up with this feeling of never being good enough and she never falters. She carries on her daily chores and routine as if nothing were wrong with the current situation. This ability to carry on proves her strength. She may not be out in the fields or working with the animals in the barn but she is still strong.

Holiday

In “Holiday” there is such an earnest pity that comes from the narrator that really we don’t get from the author often, if at all. Ottilie I think may be a character that imitates Porter’s own life. Porter then felt muted, and taken advantage of even in her works, felt misunderstood. Her narrator has such empathy for Ottilie that I can’t help but see the over the tones of sorrow and grief. When the revelation that Ottilie is in fact the eldest daughter, and neither deaf nor dumb you see the inward reflection of Porter’s narrator and the idea of self worth.

I think it is also telling that the ailments Ottilie has are ones that limit expression. I am not sure if Porter then is making a commentary on women being restricted by their families, or if it is more of a broad social message of women oppression. Or perhaps it is even the lack of dignity given to these that fail to assert them selfs properly, and that society then blames them rather than their environment. Either way Ottilie is a completely pitiful, sad and helpless character and maybe ven a little bit of an emotional "low blow" for Porter.

disappointing

 

I had a difficult time getting through this text. Honesty, this is the first of Katharine Ann Porter’s short stories that I found dry, and boring. So perhaps, for my online blog discussion, I will start with delving into what made this text so unappealing? The lack of character depth triggered my instant detachment. Never do we learn of the narrator’s back-story, interests, or even her name. Why did she feel the need to go on such a holiday? Why did she distrust her friend, Louise, so much? To briefly touch on the subject of Louise, I do not condone Porter for mentioning a character who could potentially have been a sneaky liar but never referring back to her. Louise served no purpose other than providing the narrator with a vacation spot. Why even mention her? The other characters, in the story, furthermore were unrecognizable as people, much less individuals. The narrator received the impression that her host family was “one human being divided into several appearances”  and that she could not tell one member from another, but they acted as one person. I disagree to the extent that I could not even mentally create one person from this family. All I know from them is that are blonde with blue eyes, hardworking, continually hungry, and calloused toward Ottilie. I felt their description of interests—dancing at the Turnverein, reading “Das Kapital” etc.—delved into shallow depth of who they were as people. Dialogue, in my opinion, could have helped readers recognize their humanity instead of categorizing them as a hardworking, dancing, stereotypical German family. To the extent of character analysis, the narrator suffers the most from lack of psychological depth. The one point where I felt we were about to penetrate into the mind of the narrator came when Fraa Mueller died. The narrator began to think about the circumstances around her and “realized for the first time, not death but the terror of dying.” My expectations fell with the truncation of the narrator’s introspection. Perhaps we were supposed to infer from her taking Ottilie away in the carriage that she acted upon this courageously upon this enlightenment, but truly, I felt like her self discovery came too late and was anti-climatic. Furthermore, unlike other Porter stories where the subtext creates a type of understory, the plot truly incorporated almost nothing exciting until the very end. Porter blatantly comments on Ottilie and her treatment as a social commentary and breaks the first rule of great narrative fiction writing: show us, don’t tell us exactly what you want us to know. The  superficial narrator, the stereotypical characters, the dry, uneventful plot, and Porter’s preachy overtones provoked  me to distance myself from “Holiday” and judge it—perhaps to harshly?—as one of Porter’s least developed works. 

Holiday

One of the things that interested me a lot in this story was this passage after the narrator sees Ottilie as a small girl, "Let her sit down quietly in her rickety chair by the stove and fold those arms, and let us find her like that, with her head fallen forward on her knees. She will rest then. I would wait, hoping she might not come again, ever again, through the door I gazed at with wincing eyes, as if I might see something unendurable enter through it" and also, "...for in some way that I could not quite explain to myself, I found great virtue and courage in their steadiness and refusal to feel sorry for anybody, least of all for themselves" (Porter 428). This passage got me thinking about how disabled and handicapped people are treated in the stories we have been reading. We have touched on this in class, but I thought I would post on the topic. In a lot of these stories there is a person who has some sort of a disability, whether it is a sever disformity or a missing leg. These things go along with the grotesque, but I am wondering why these authors choose to include people with physical (and sometimes mental) disabilities so often in their stories.

Another issue brought up by this passage is if people that are handicapped or disabled are better off dead than alive. Though the passage I quoted does not come out and say that that is what the narrator is thinking, I think it alludes to this line of thinking with the way she says, "She will rest then" and "ever again." Especially since her family treats her as a slave and do not care for her or respect her. I do not think that O'Connor and Porter are trying to say that people with disabilities are better of dead rather than alive, but I think it is interesting to consider why they do this in their stories and what effect it has on the reader.

I think these authors include people with disabilites so often in their stories so that we feel sympathy for these people. They give voices to these people that do not usually have voices and let us see their side of the story and how they are treated. I think they also let us come to understand thes people, and with understanding usually comes a sense of what is right. They are not able to step completely into the shoes of a person with disabilities, but by showing us how the people around them react, we start to reflect on how the people in our lives treat others, and also how we react to these people. I think overall they are trying to bring an awareness to something that they feel is important.

Any other ideas on why Porter and O'Connor include people with disabilities so often in their stories?

Style and Silence

The most noticeable stylistic element in Holiday is voice. In this short story,
Porter employs a first person narrative, something we have not yet seen in either Porter of O’Connor’s works.

Furthermore, the voice of the first person narrator is distinctly male. Something about this voice sounds formal and Victorian, reminiscent of the narrator in Wuthering Heights. This voice ultimately serves to put distance between the narrator and his world and the world of the German immigrants. Thus, despite the narrator’s involvement with the family (pulling weeds with Hatsy etc.) he still maintains the viewpoint of an observer.

The distant viewpoint of the narrator helps to maintain the motif of silence that is so prevalent in Holiday. This motif of silence is especially prevalent with the character of Ottilie. Although the audience is compelled to feel sorry for Ottilie, we cannot evoke a sense of ethos because she does nothing to help herself and simply resigns herself to her fate. After one scene where Ottilie takes the narrator and shows him a picture of herself as a child, before she was deformed, she simply pretends as though nothing has happened between them. The author however, cannot see Ottilie in the same way as he did previously and is confused as to what this woman feels and sees and thinks in her own silent world.

Class and Hypocrisy in "Holiday"

One element of "Holiday" that stood out for me was the role of class and Father Mueller's reading of "Das Kapital." At first, the narrator describes the family as salt-of-the-Earth folks, but slowly we begin to see there is more going on. And it seems Father Mueller is not the giving socialist he imagines himself to be.

The hint that all is not as it seems is the big meal on page 415, which continues Porter's theme of gluttony. "The children ravened and gorged and reached their hands into the sugar bowl to sprinkle sugar on everything they ate..."

Earlier in this same section, Porter begins a theme where she contrasts passages of idyllic scenery with suffering servitude: "In the large square room the whole family was gathering at a long table covered with a red checkered cotton cloth, with heaped-up platters of steaming food at either end. A crippled and badly deformed servant girl was setting down pitchers of milk."

Here Porter uses language to show how out-of-place Ottilie appears to be. (Her displacement is addressed more directly on page 417: "The crippled servant girl brought in more food and gathered up plates and went away in her limping run, and she seemed to me the only individual in the house... But the servant, she was whole, and belonged nowhere.")

On Sundays, the entire family goes to a community gathering while Ottilie stays home and prepares the Sunday spread. On page 421: "Her muteness seemed nearly absolute; she had no coherent language of signs. Yet three times a day she spread that enormous table with solid food, freshly baked bread, huge platters of vegetables, immoderate roasts of meat, extravagant tarts, strudels, pies--enough for twenty people."

It is later revealed that Ottilie is a member of the family that, due to her condition, has been designated a servant, one who is better off forgotten.

This makes it all the more ironic that Father Mueller fancies himself a socially conscious Marxist. On page 422 he reads from "Das Kapital," which is ironic as he is the richest man in their area and has bought up all the land to rent to other farmers. In his mind, he sees this is a public service, but then uses this as political leverage to get his son-in-law elected as sheriff.

The narrator addresses the cognitive dissonance between his socialist thoughts and his capitalist actions: "And here was this respectable old farmer who accepted (socialism's) dogma as a religion--that is to say, its legendary precepts were just, right, proper, one must believe in them, of course, but life, everyday living, was another and unrelated thing." (422)

Mueller doesn't even practice his principles in his own home as witnessed in the treatment of Ottilie: "It was not a society or a class that pampered its invalids and the unfit." (427)

It seems that the narrator is the first person to even reach out to her on a human level, which exposes Father Mueller's principles as a sham.

Silence in Holiday

In the Holiday, I was interested in the ways in which silence and speech define and reinforce communal boundaries and the boundaries of the individual. First of all, this is the first time we've read a Porter story in the first-person: a hint at the importance of the ability to speak, and to tell one's narrative, an ability which Ottilie conspicuosly lacks. The narrator is able to reinforce her place in the narrative, and by proxy, her place in the family. She uses the act of narration to maintain the distance of an observer, and specifically celebrates her semi-solitary state, occassioned, tellingly, by the language barrier.
There is a great silence from our narrator on the subject of her past--we are conspicously never told why she has come to the farm, but we do understand that some great, personal pain has occasioned her need for a solitary holiday, where none of her present connections can trace her. It seems strange that someone who wished to be left alone would seek out lodgings in a house full of strangers. However, Porter’s narrator makes clear that she appreciates her sense of distance from the family’s daily communications: they “were not talking to me and did not expect me to answer” (413). She finds explicit comfort in this niche, remarking that “it was good not to have to understand what they were saying. I loved the silence which means freedom from the constant pressure of other minds and other opinions and other feelings” (413). Usually, language acts as a social lubricant, but here, it anchors the narrator firmly in her social role as outsider. (Interestingly, she gradually transcends this barrier and becomes part of the family circle not through communication, but through a shared communal physicality: she begins helping Hatsy in the garden, and during the flood, she helps save a drowning lamb and sweeps broken glass in the kitchen. )

I think a deep concern in the story is whether language can actually create real bonds between humans—whether it can truly allow them to communicate their deepest selves—or whether another mysterious, extra-lingual factor must be at work. Of note is the lack of dialogue in the story, including unquoted thought dialogue: much of the narrator’s delivery is reportage of her immediate, physical world—the descriptions of trees, the landscape, fireflies, etc. These descriptions of nature—though they come to us directly from the narrator herself, have less quality of reflection, thought and language, and more the quality of physical impressions (supposedly, though artificially, unmediated by language within the necessary context of a piece of literature). In fact, the narrator initially compares her inability to understand the language of her hosts to the “music” of the sounds in the natural world. She “could be moved and touched but not troubled by [German], as by the crying of frogs or the wind in the trees.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator believes that silence will bring her to her consummate, individual self: she remarks that the linguistic barrier which initially leaves her in such pleasing silence will allow her the “freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to my own center” (413). Her linguistic isolation as an individual is contrasted to the communal physicality at dinner. The family is tied by language, certainly, but also more emphatically by “the enormous energy” and “animal force that was like a bodily presence itself in the rooms” (416). The emphasis on shared familial features (blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek-bones) posits a very physical interpretation of communal (Porter even uses the word “tribal”) bond. They communicate as a family as much through shared physical characteristics and shared physical labour as much as through common language. (And while they are brought together as a family in shared German
conversation, they are also bonded by shared, emotional silence—inarticulate, shared weeping—at the death of the mother).


I am interested in the role of Ottilie as a crux between physical and linguistic communication, and as a crux between the individual and the communal. She shares the physical traits of the family, but they have been marred by childhood disease. Yet her inability to communicate seems to place her apart—she is, in parallel to the narrator, linguistically isolated. She, however, does find her place in her family through a fixed, physical role as a producer of tangible foodstuffs. The narrator writes that, in her lonely silence, Ottilie “seemed to [her] the only individual in the house” (417).
Remarkably, she notes that even she herself “felt divided into many fragments,” but her following descriptions of fragmentalization are all implicitly physical in nature: she had “left or lost a part of myself in every place I had travelled, in every life mine had touched, and…in every death…that had carried into the grave some part of my living cells” (417). The narrator seeks the silence of the linguistically isolated individual, because her unavoidable physical presence in the human drama has caused her so much pain. Yet in Ottilie, she finds an object of pity for her inability to communicate, at the same time she herself sets about gradually creating physical bonds with the family through aforementioned housework.
Ottilie’s isolation upsets the narrator, who feels uncomfortably about the servant/daughter’s seeming neglect. She is frustrated that “nothing could make her seem real, or in any way connected with the life around her” (425). It is only when she feels Ottilie’s actual skin under her belt that she realizes the woman is a real, physical object. Paradoxically, she had realized in her previous encounter with Ottilie (in which she is shown the photograph), that Ottilie has a real, interior consciousness of her own identity—in short, that she is real in the sense that she has a mind. But strangely, here in the carriage, the narrator only realizes Ottilie’s reality by dint of her physical presence.
When the narrator here realizes that Ottilie’s emotions are not necessarily connected to having been left behind her mother’s funeral procession, the narrator has a jarring realization of her ultimate inability to communicate with Ottilie—to have a mental communion on any level, even an extra-lingual one. By this unexpected “ironical mistake,” we see the intrenched tension between the individual and the communal—a connection that perhaps cannot be breached by an outsider, either by acquisition of shared language, shared physicality, or shared silence.

Holiday by Porter

I think the biggest theme in Porter's "Holiday" is alienation, which we can see in Ottilie but also in the narrator. Of course, the readers see Ottilie's alienation from the Muller family right away when she serves dinner to them and no one acknowledges her presence. They obviously treat her like a servant that should be invisible. I found this behavior interesting because, although they are a wealthy farming family, they work hard everyday and are not the cliche upper class family that would have servants. They are working class so I would have thought they would acknowledge Ottilie's hard work as well. However, she simply doesn't exist to them. She serves dinner and they don't interact with her unless they need something, like needing her to make dinner for the narrator when she is out late. Ottilie is obviously alienated from the Muller family but the reader doesn't find out just how alienated she is until it is revealed that she is actually one of their daughters. She is the eldest daughter but since she is mute and deformed she is shunned from everyday interaction with her family and is forced into a position of servitude.

Ottilie's alienation is mirrored in the narrator. First of all, she is not a member of the family and is just visiting them for a holiday from her "real life." She does not interact with them as a member of the family but more as an observer. Like Ottilie, she is not able to speak to the family since they speak German. She is not expected to understand them or answer them so her interaction with them is limited to begin with. Her lifestyle also alienates her from the Muller family. She is a single and childless woman in a bursting family. She does not fulfill the female role in the family so they are unsure how to interact with her. In fact they force her into the role that is closest to how she behaves, having her sit with the men at the table since she does not fulfill the role of women in the family. Dinner time is when the family comes together, all except Ottilie. The narrator actually misses dinner one night and that is what brings her together with Ottilie. Both of them are alienated from the family.

When Mother Muller dies, neither Ottilie nor the narrator are included in the funeral. The narrator is left behind in her attic room and Ottilie is left in the kitchen. Together they go out in the wagon to catch up with the funeral party, together in their alienation. Abnormal people in this story are alienated from everyone else. Ottilie is abnormal because she is deformed and mute. The narrator is abnormal because she chooses not to live the stereotypical female role of society of the time, being a wife and a mother.

Malice Versus Ignorance

My first thought after reading these two short stories was why O’Connor wrote two extremely similar stories. What is the difference between the two? Multiple parallelisms run between the two texts that seem to address the same concerns. Both texts portray New York as an unsettling, unnatural environment. Both Tanner and Old Dudley resent their daughters for taking them away from their homes and treating them as invalids. Both daughters feel more of an obligation to their fathers rather than an altruistic desire to serve them and are married to truck drivers. Tanner and Dudley each feel attached to one black friend back at their homes, but disdain the black Northerners after an attempt to befriend them as inferiors. They feel—and Tanner actually is—abused by them. So why does Tanner deserve to die in the end while Dudley lives? Perhaps the degree of racism each man holds toward the black Northerner contributes to the type of punishment he receives. Tanner believed befriending black people can only stem from dominating them mentally. His way of “handling” a black person was to “show him his brains didn’t have a chance against yours; then he would jump on your back.” Tanner compares them to monkeys who cling to the backs of those they depend on; in my opinion, that kind of comparison is one of the worst kinds of racist thoughts. To consider African Americans an “apelike” being is to consider them, primitive, bestial, and uncivilized. I seethed when Tanner blatantly said that when his friend Coleman “was young he looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey” but with himself, “it was the opposite.” I interpreted Tanner’s statement to mean that white people evolved from monkeys, but black people evolved back into monkeys. He uses the philosophy of the advanced intelligence of the white man to poke fun at the New York actor. Calling him “preacher” solidifies the stereotype of black people as simpleminded religious zealots—the same religious zealots who sang gospel chants in as slaves in the plantation South. Recognizing this undercut, the actor eventually employs revenge. Tanner claimed he would escape hell because he “never killed [a black person] but handled them with wits and with luck” but really, he murders the idea of equality, of their humanity, a much deeper sin than the physical. Ironically—and somewhat deservedly?—O’Connor allows the black neighbor to find a distorted justice, but a justice nonetheless. Dudley, then lives, in my opinion, not because he harbors malice toward the black race, but because he, plainly, is stupid. The geranium—according to Google search—symbolizes stupidity and folly, and Dudley focuses his entire elderly existence in New York on whether his neighbor sets out the geranium in the sun. Dudley centers himself around himself, living in his own bubble existence of fishing and pseudo possum hunting. His friend Rabie found the outdated stories of a visit to Atlanta most intriguing about Dudley. Dudley exalts his name; he is a dud. We feel pity for his embarrassment, then when his African American neighbor abuses him by helping him up the stairs. O’Connor allows Dudley to live because he is too ignorant to realize the truths of racial equality. But then, I beg the question: Is it better to live in ignorance than not at all? Is it just that Dudley lives?