Katherine Anne Porter

From the 1920s to the 1950s there was a remarkable flowering of the Southern short story in the work of three writers: Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), Eudora Welty (1909–) and Flannery O'Connor (1925–64). Katherine Anne Porter came originally from Texas, from a family with illustrious Southern roots. She saw herself above all as a writer of short stories, publishing five main volumes: Flowering Judas (1930), Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939, three longer stories or novellas, comprising the title story, ‘Old Mortality’ and ‘Noon Wine’), The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) and The Old Order. Her Collected Stories were published in 1964. Her single novel, The Ship of Fools, by contrast took her over twenty-five years to write, and did not appear until 1965.

In Flowering Judas the title story draws on Porter's experience of Mexican revolutionaries in the 1920s. It is a portrait of a chaste young woman (based on an Irish girl Porter knew) who dutifully helps with the revolution but is averse to the blandishments of the overweight, self-indulgent leader Braggioni (who sings to her, excruciatingly, accompanying himself on his guitar) and holds herself conscientiously aloof from him. The predominant tone seems to be sardonic, but it is complicated by a strain of romantic longing in the heroine who at the end dreams of escaping with a young prisoner she has been visiting in the local jail: the dream turns into a nightmare of death and sacramental murder, as she eats the petals of the Judas tree outside her window and the young prisoner calls her ‘murderer’ and ‘cannibal’.