The St. Olaf Interview

Mary TitusMary Titus ,
Associate Professor of English

By Clare Kennedy '07

St. Olaf English major Clare Kennedy '07 interviewed Associate Professor of English Mary Titus about her book The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter , which has been nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. The book chronicles the life of Porter (1890-1980), an acclaimed American writer who confronted issues of gender in her work and life. Drawing from Porter's unpublished papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction and poetry, Titus traces Porter's complex response to cultural changes in the gender roles of American women.

 

Q Why did you choose Katherine Anne Porter as a subject?
A

I wanted a woman writer, and Porter had a lot of unpublished material and some really rich papers. She was an incredible correspondent and wrote wonderful letters. I also found the time in which she lived fascinating. She was a part of many of the major moments in the 20th century. She was born very poor, but her life was so full. She lived in Greenwich Village when it was cool, went to Paris with the expatriots and lived in revolutionary Mexico. She experienced the twenties and the sixties and the transformation of American women.
Q Why is she not as well-known as some other authors from that period?
A

One of the reasons she isn't remembered more is that she wrote so few books. Her only full-length novel is Ship of Fools , which she wrote during the last part of her life and just isn't a very good novel. Her best work is her short stories. She wrote beautiful, fabulous short stories. So she never created an opus or a canon, but she shows up everywhere because she fascinated a lot of people and was at all the right parties.

Q What was the source of Porter's ambivalence. Why did she view a female artist as a monstrosity rather than a woman?
A

Because she grew up with the 19th-century version of womanhood. She thought she should marry and start a family. When she got into her first marriage -- which was terrible -- at the age of sixteen, she literally ran away from it. She never had children, and she felt that she had failed as a woman. She couldn't stand traditional female roles, even though she exploited them like crazy. Her work is always about the struggle between female power, creativity and individuality and loss.

Q Do contemporary women's issues such as body image figure into her writing?
A

Body image isn't very prevalent. The range of the female body was less demanding then than it is now. A lot of her stories were about a recurring character, Miranda, coming of age, and the transition from being a young girl who's free to being gendered and restrained. The stories were about Miranda initially resisting the transition and then accepting the limitations of female identity within our culture at that time.

Q How is Porter's influence felt today in the literary world?
A

I'm sure that her influence is there in terms of short stories. She was considered one of the masters of the form. She's part of the tradition of American women writers concerned with freedom. Her life expressed the re-imagining of female sexuality and the struggles of a woman being creative and independent.