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matt Wanat

From jilting to jonquil Katherine Anne Porter and

Wendell Berry, Sustaining Connections,

Re-engendering the Rural

“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope.”

—Ecclesiastes 9:4

Sustainability, new agrarianism, localism, and other contemporary place-based interests invite reconsid- eration of our priorities as teachers and scholars of literature. Demonstrating rootedness in traditional agricultural work and place, Wendell Berry’s liter- ature voices a number of place-based concerns.1

However, our much-needed reconsiderations of the value of place raise questions about the ways in which we might reimagine gender as part of the discussion. The following essay reads Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929), Berry’s “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” (1992), and Porter’s “Noon Wine” (1937) with additional atten- tion to each author’s larger body of work and ideas.

I am particularly interested here in Porter’s and Berry’s intersecting, but often at odds, treatments of female isolation and connection within commu- nities. Whereas “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” with narrative skill both formally and psycholog- ically complex, addresses the alienation of its title character, Berry’s story of a rural Kentucky woman, Mary Penn, functions as a reclamation of com- munity connections from the alienated distances of Porter’s and others’ modernism. Nevertheless, Berry’s work begs questions about his tendency to

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gender characters’ spheres of action and point of view, questions about gender and agrarianism explored six decades before “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” in Porter’s “Noon Wine,” a long story that speaks to patriarchal violence and gendered limitations of visual and psychological perspec- tive on an early twentieth-century Texas farm.

Placed in conversation with one another, Porter’s and Berry’s litera- ture represents an important literary and cultural series of intersecting issues pertaining to modern alienation, the connective potential and shortcomings of community, and the gendered nature of community, work, and point of view.

disconnection and wholeness On Katherine Anne Porter’s “Miranda” stories, which recall the aftermath of southern slavery and plantation culture, Mary Ann Wimsatt notes the author’s “depiction of southern ethics, manners, mores, and codes of behavior” (82), and Porter has, in Mary Titus’s words, “produced a com- plex, gendered analysis of southern womanhood” (190). Moreover, on the projects of Porter and other Southern women writers, Mary Burgan notes how certain authors work “to recover some kind of personal iden- tity for characters” who have had “to dismantle the past and then . . . to put it back together again in a revisionary way that would permit them to survive its racist and sexist myths” (271). In other words, Katherine Anne Porter’s stories have been read as dramatizing individual identities com- ing to terms with a southern agrarian past of opportunities narrowed along lines of gender and race.

In more modernist terms, Porter’s stories demonstrate what Harry J. Mooney Jr. calls “the terrible predicament of the individual in the modern world,” with reoccurring characters like Miranda and her grandmother, Sophia Jane, living “like Miss Porter, amidst a world always falling to pieces” (49). Similarly, Mary Titus compares the author with T. S. Eliot, describing Porter’s works as “modernist visions of intertwined personal and cultural malaise” (137). Barbara Harrell Carson convincingly identi- fies the feminist modernist characteristics of much of Porter’s life and work when she writes that Porter “found herself in one of those ‘epochs of social disintegration’ during which, according to de Beauvoir, ‘woman is set free’” (246).

The preceding survey of criticism establishes some of the advantages and shortcomings of Porter’s work on the rural South—where, on one hand, voices traditionally marginalized by sexist and racist ideologies

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emerge in sometimes heroic moments of self-expression but, on the other hand, characters are often individualized to the point of alienation, inadequately connected within their communities just as Porter herself, the wandering modernist, seems never fully to have been connected to a single place for very long.

Deborah Tall, in her essay “Dwelling: Making Peace with Space and Place” (1996), notes how many “modern writers have applauded the con- ditions of ‘perpetual exile’ as ethically healthy, a necessary severance from the sentimentalities of nationalism” (107), but she also points out the degree to which modern obsessions with exile (and with time over place) play into our increasing uprootedness, where we have become “awash in a landscape of mobility that eschews connections to particu- lar plots” (106). While Tall clarifies that cultural conditions of diaspora make it difficult to generalize about the various causes of uprootedness, Tall’s essay raises significant questions about the cultural priorities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where the individual inner jour- neys of psychoanalysis and streams of consciousness were answered by the solipsistic wanderlust of global consumer capitalism and where increasingly everyone is on an inner journey of self-discovery with aid from an enclosed automobile or some virtualizing consumer gizmo assembled in multiple distant locations from materials extracted from who-knows-where.

Ours is an uprootedness not only inherited in conditions of diaspora and in an intellectual culture of exile privileged by a number of twenti- eth-century literary movements but also inherited in loss of local diver- sity amid the homogenization of franchise food strips. Our uprootedness, furthermore, constitutes a continuing failure of local communities, a disconnection from nature, and, generally speaking, an unsustainable way of life. Nevertheless, like Eliot’s speaker in “The Waste Land,” the “fragments [we] have shored against [our] ruins” (line 430) all too often come from what Eric Zencey describes as academe’s beloved “cosmo polis, the mythical ‘world city’” where the “boundless world of books and ideas and eternal truths” trumps the “particular world of watersheds, growing seasons, and ecological niches” (15). And to this elitist variety of cosmopolitan generalization, the variety favored by many modernists, one might add the many generalizations and abstractions of postmo- dernity or, more particularly, of mediated global consumer capitalism. Because the preoccupations of modernism and postmodernism often

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favor abstract generalization over the material and the specific, it is hard to say how many of Eliot’s shored bits of a collapsed cosmo polis or how many irony-laden explorations of alienation, self-reflexive movies and TV shows, and virtual Farmvilles or Minecrafts it might take to address, say, Appalachian mountaintop removal. What is clearer is that we might make wiser decisions about the resources and extraction sites on which our various mediated discourses run if more of us understood the mate- rial consequences of our behavior. We need re-rooting.

Of course, no single author like Porter can be blamed for our uproot- edness, and though it is my intention to make out of Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” an example of the limitations of studied discon- nection, it is not my intention to dismiss Porter’s works, some of the greatest of the twentieth century, for their not succeeding at what they did not set out to do. Nevertheless, the social critiques, inner journeys, and exposures of alienation in much of Porter’s work have consistently left me in search of resolution, begging for unwritten sequels: for exam- ple, to “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” where Ellen might be reunited with Hapsy, or to “The Grave,” where Miranda might find more than memories as she wanders the open markets of the earth. Therefore, while Porter succeeds, in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and other works, at teasing out of alienating situations the importance of human connections, her resolutions often emphasize characters in isolation, in states of disconnection. As one of the most pronounced problems not only of modernism but also of much of the twentieth century, our ten- dency toward disconnection begs for solutions beyond critical appreci- ation of modern tragedy and irony. Rather, our literature of alienation and disconnection begs for a counter-literature of reintegration and wholeness, a kind of literature that Wendell Berry has been producing for nearly sixty years.

While I cannot claim with certainty that Wendell Berry’s “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” is a direct response to Porter, or to any modernist, the similarities are striking, and it is productive to put Porter’s and Berry’s works into conversation to see what Berry’s work might add to Porter’s questions about human connections and what Porter’s work might offer to our discussion of Berry’s agrarianism, particularly with regards to gender. Along these lines, let us first consider a comparative analysis of Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and Berry’s “A Jonquil for Mary Penn.”

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From “jilting” to “jonquil” In Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” an elderly woman on her deathbed argues with her doctor and with her caregiver daughter Cornelia as, internally, she withdraws into memories of past achieve- ments and disappointments. Ellen Weatherall’s withdrawals into her past seem driven by her illness and her regrets, and they afford the author a modernist opportunity to explore, via omniscient and free indi- rect narration, the psychology and interior point of view of a single char- acter. Foremost among Ellen’s disappointments is her having been left at the altar, or “jilted,” by her fiancé George. However, Ellen also wants her husband John, who died young, to be proud of her for having built a fence and, generally speaking, for having gotten along without his help (83). She is particularly preoccupied with a mysterious character named Hapsy, whom many critics read as one of her children, and others, par- ticularly Roseanne L. Hoefel, read as another woman.

As the story progresses, Ellen’s visions of the past become increasingly agitated, and as is the case with a number of Porter’s works (“Flowering Judas,” “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” “The Grave”), “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” ends in ominous ambiguity, with Ellen apparently dying in a state of frustration. Porter writes in the story’s last paragraph, “For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this—I’ll never forgive it” (89). Most immediately, one might argue that Ellen conflates the past jilting with the failure of Christ’s arrival at her death- bed, or perhaps one might argue that her inability to forgive the jilting is a distraction blocking the passing over of her soul, Porter’s version of Emily Dickinson’s famous interposing fly. But the possible interpre- tations accumulate based on readers’ assumptions about the pronoun “this,” which may refer to the jilting by the bridegroom Christ, but also may refer back to the jilting by George or to some other grief like, for example, the death of Hapsy.

The possibility that Hapsy might be the source of Ellen’s grief is rein- forced by the penultimate paragraph of the story, wherein the narrator and Ellen refer mostly to Hapsy: “You’ll see Hapsy again. What about her? ‘I thought you’d never come.’ Granny made a long journey out- ward, looking for Hapsy. What if I don’t find her? What then? Her heart sank down and down” (88).2 Nevertheless, while the origin and nature of Ellen’s unforgivable grief is worth debating, for now it may be more

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productive to generalize about what each of these possible sources of grief (the jilting by George, the jilting by God, the loss of Hapsy) have in common. With this in mind, I am struck with the general sense in which Ellen Weatherall dies in a state of disconnection: frustrated with her children and male onlookers, not fully reconciled with God, unable to forgive past debts, unable to reconnect with the mysterious Hapsy, in short, frustratingly disconnected from virtually everything and everyone except her own thoughts.

Depending on how we decide to read Porter’s story and Ellen’s state of mind regarding George, her children, and Hapsy, we might finally describe it as an extraordinary formal and psychological experiment in point of view, or as a feminist critique of the burdens and unmet needs of its protogonist, or as both. But when I have asked my students “What does Ellen need to be healthy and whole?” our myriad answers generally have boiled down to her need for healthier connections: to Hapsy, to the men in her world, to her children, to the others in her world, to her sense of her place in the world. More interesting still, when my students and I revisit Ellen’s needs alongside the needs of Mary Penn, from a story that Wendell Berry published more than sixty years later, the similarities and differences are telling.

The similarities between “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” begin with the stories’ titles, each of which moves from an article and noun to a prepositional phrase with the title charac- ter as prepositional object. Also, in each story, a woman contemplates her marriage from her sick bed through a series of illness-induced visions of her past. In both cases, the struggles of marriage are considered along- side the struggles of human relationships in general, with attention to the differences between men and women and to the various ordering systems (marital, social, religious) by which humans are linked to one another. Of course, there are also many differences between the protago- nists’ situations, the most obvious being that Ellen is an elderly woman who is dying while Mary Penn is a teenage farm wife suffering from tem- porarily debilitating flu-like symptoms. But the most pressing thematic difference for my purposes lies in each story’s treatment of individual needs within a larger familial and social community.

Among other ideas, “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” dramatizes the title character’s feelings of doubt and disconnection, which come with a bad fever, the first line of the story beginning, “Mary was sick” (61). After Mary’s husband Elton goes to help neighbor Walter Cotman plow, “she

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[does] something else that [is] unlike her: she [allows] herself to feel sorry for herself” (65). As the lamps that Elton lit and the fire he renewed at dawn now dim and the cold wind breaks Mary down, she gives way to her isolation. Berry writes, “She was miserable, she told herself. She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified” (65). This acknowledgement of Mary’s sorrow mixes with implied skepticism that comes either from herself, via free indirect style, or from the third person narrator as an editorial voice. In either case, Berry manages here to acknowledge the legitimacy of a physical condition while also keeping alive the notion that Mary is never as completely alone as she begins to feel she is—that she is, in fact, part of a “membership” that includes herself and her husband, the place in which they live, and the community of farmers with whom they live and work.

The narration and Mary’s thoughts drift to her being disowned by her parents for marrying a poor farmer instead of “a solid professional man” (66), and to her husband’s dark moods of dissatisfaction and self-doubt (78). Nevertheless, opposite these feelings of separation from her hus- band, who works with Walter somewhere beyond her sight, with “their day and hers seem[ing] estranged” (72), Berry juxtaposes more optimis- tic thoughts about the marriage: “And yet they were often happy” (73). This basic happiness is both individual and paired insofar as it is the happiness of two individuals who, though sometimes estranged, mostly belong to one another’s worlds. But the individual or paired happiness is only possible, the story suggests, insofar as they are part of a larger working community of men and women: their neighbors, by whom each has been supported and mentored, Elton as Walter’s “student” and Mary as “a daughter to every woman in the community” (69). In spite of Mary’s illness-induced feeling of aloneness, we are reminded that Elton prepared a fire for Mary before he left. And Berry closes the story with Mary, at the lowest ebb of her strength, going to sleep and waking to find herself attended by a female neighbor, who sits in Mary’s house embroidering a “jonquil—or ‘Easter lily’” (81). Josie Tom, the neighbor whose embroidery, even the weeds, receives compliments for “leaving nothing out,” has cleaned the lamps and rebuilt the fire, just as Elton did earlier (80).

Mary realizes with Josie Tom’s sudden appearance that Elton has not simply abandoned her to her illness. In turn, we, the readers, begin to realize the importance of the larger community to the marriage and the

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individual in the story, which acknowledges, among other elements, a community of women as a part of the larger marriage of person to place and to culture. This feature of Berry’s story, which jibes with his much discussed notion of the interconnectedness of individuals, communities of work, and natural places, offers an alternative to the alienation ex- plored in so much of our most important twentieth century writing. Ber- ry’s is a place-based, community-driven, agrarian alternative to modern alienation, an alternative not necessarily idealistically pastoral, but nev- ertheless restorative, where weeds of regret and doubt exist but, like the weeds in Josie Tom’s embroidery, are part of a larger connectedness that “[leaves] nothing out.” In this sense, Berry offers a “jonquil” for a “jilting,” the promise of community, or “membership,” as an alternative to discon- nection, a promise embodied in many hands making light work and rep- resented by the hands of Josie Tom, and of Berry, “leaving nothing out.”

sustaining connections, re-engendering the rural P. Travis Kroeker describes Berry’s ideas about marriage and commu- nity as follows: “A flourishing marriage needs the community to sustain it and will in turn build up the community and the life of the world” (122).3 This interdependence and mutually nourishing relationship between marriage and community is part of Berry’s larger worldview, a way of seeing the world that is accessible through most of his works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The most common assumption of Berry’s worldview is that many things important to human life—health, soil, social and biotic community, marriage, culture, work, social and natu- ral economies—are interdependent. Berry’s is a world of interconnec- tion, described in his nonfiction masterpiece The Unsettling of America by use of religious concepts like the Wheel of Life and the Chain of Being, but in most cases less hierarchical than the latter, instead advocating shared humility, or what Kimberly K. Smith calls Berry’s emphasis upon sophrosyne: “self-control (moderation, temperance), prudence, and good management” (53).4 Berry’s vision is both religious and ecological and ultimately aimed at modest, sustainable human and biotic co-existence, a vision wherein, as he writes in Another Turn of the Crank, true “health” is “wholeness.” Berry writes that “wholeness is not just the sense of com- pleteness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common” (87). In other words, when we are healthy and whole, we are profoundly interdependent with others, both human and nonhuman,

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connected through communities and economies of shared work and responsibility that in turn are part of other larger and smaller commu- nities and economies. To be alone is, most often, to forget or deny these interconnections, and it is also unhealthy, for, as Berry has written, “In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot ful- fill” (qtd. in Shuman 4).

One might assume, then, that within Berry’s worldview, alienation is not so much recognition of one’s real isolation as a forgetting of our common interdependence and interconnection. This forgetting is what Berry, with reference to his fictional farm community of Port William and vicinity, has referred to as “membership”: the interconnections, through love and work, of a people and their place. Hence, when in Remembering (1988), protagonist Andy Catlett finds himself isolated and alone after los- ing his hand in a farm machine, Andy’s alienation lies not in the world’s turning him out but rather in his own self-exile, his fractional dismem- bering of self from the Port William membership of people and place after the psychological trauma following his physical dismemberment. Andy’s alienation is a kind of forgetting, through individual weakness, of “the pattern of membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it” (50). And Andy does choose it, partly by remembering past connections and shared work and partly by remembering a pre-ex- isting “pattern of a succession of . . . returns” of himself and others to the community of Port William (55). In the process, he learns a lesson much like the novel’s epigraph, taken from Ecclesiastes: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope.” The novel’s title refers not only to Andy’s memories but also to his use of memory to re-member himself by rejoining the membership of Port William.

Berry’s emphasis on locally, naturally, and socially interdependent membership offers an alternative to the isolation, disconnection, and general alienation so common in modern literature, yet few critics have bothered to notice this alternative and the potential connection to the modernist and postmodernist canons. One critic who has noticed is David Crowe, who reads Berry’s “Making it Home” (1992), a story from the same collection as “A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” as a response to Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925). Crowe begins by noting that Berry calls “into question . . . literary styles and authorial world- views,” namely Hemingway’s modernism (192). Specifically, Crowe shows that Berry’s essay “Style and Grace” (1990) and short story “Making it Home” combine to offer a criticism of and an alternative to Hemingway’s

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famous modernist story in which Hemingway’s Nick Adams seeks post- war healing through a fishing trip. According to Crowe, Berry acknowl- edges Hemingway’s suggestion that the “intact and nourishing place” of the river can help Nick become whole again, but Berry sees Hemingway’s ending as inadequate (Crowe 196). As Crowe writes, “Berry has detected that Nick Adams is an unusually alienated character, cut off from his own history and community” (195), and Nick’s is an alienation that might be healed by what Berry calls the “connective power of culture” (197). Here, however, Berry thinks Hemingway’s story fails, leaving Nick iso- lated from this potentially “connective power,” hesitating at the thresh- old of renewed health and wholeness and remaining in Nick’s and the world’s postwar wasteland. Crowe then moves on from Berry’s analysis of Hemingway to argue that Berry’s own story, “Making it Home,” heals returning veteran Art Rowanberry by offering the character exactly what Hemingway withholds Nick: a return to the wholeness of a community doing work with and in a natural place.