Flowering Judas and Other Stories is a collection notable for offering a glimpse into the future of Katherine Porter’s literary reputation. These stories are laden with symbolism and metaphor and show Porter’s development of a stream-of-consciousness technique that offers vital information obliquely through indirect associations that often require contextualization on the part of the reader. Reading a Porter short story is in some ways akin to reading a mystery in that the reader must be always on the lookout for subtly hidden clues that must be pieced together to arrive at a solution to meaning. Of course, as with any great writer, some of these solutions may not necessarily arrive at identical interpretations of meaning.
Porter’s value to the history of American literature was immediately recognized with the publication of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and her status has only been elevated since. These stories of strong, powerful and powerfully complex women have made her a virtual icon of feminist literature, but unlike others on that spectrum, Porter’s subsequent work made it impossible to pigeonhole her as only that. The psychological insight into some rather extreme behavioral problems of both male and female characters also put her at the vanguard of the move toward internal analysis of the outward expression of deviance which would dominate American literature after World War II putting these stories some two decades ahead of their time.
That the world of which she writes is inhabited by deviants is not overstating the case. One of Porter’s heroines is a teenage murderer. One of her notoriously submissive men is an artist who literally eats himself him into his grave. The most disturbing story of all—for most people, most likely—is named after a severely mentally disable child referred to only as He and Him and the mother who lives in a constant state of denial and self-delusion in which the child (though loved) becomes primarily a thing to fear as the subject of community gossip. Monsters and the monstrous co-exist side-by-side and often within the strong heroines and the men who never seem able to live up to expectation.
With an added dose of the macabre, it would not be difficult to imagine some scenes in this collection having been written by Shirley Jackson. A little more grotesque indulgence in a character here and there and a move from Mexico to Georgia and these tales could fit rather nicely into the oeuvre of Carson McCullers. While Porter doesn’t rise to the gothic genius of Shirley Jackson and falls short of presenting a 20th century quite as emotionally stunted as McCullers, she leaves both women as well as a host of other famous names standing in the dust in comparison to her precise choice of symbol and assertive management in connecting symbol to theme. That particular genius is demonstrated immediately by choosing the one single symbol from a story to transform into a metaphor that covers the collection as a whole. Within each of the individual stories in a display of a writer so completely in control of the subtleties of nuance of literature and one can almost predict one day the same writer will eventually produce an cohesive novel that is constructed upon symbolic and theme. The hacienda in the concluding story bearing that title is almost like looking into a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. Flowering Judas and Other Stories is Porter’s Ship of Fools in drydock awaiting a miraculous transformation into the author’s only published—and wildly successful—novel. But before that ship could sail, the hacienda had to be built.
