Analysis of the First Paragraph in Porter’s Old Mortality :: Porter’s Old Mortality

Analysis of the primary Paragraph in Porters Old Mortality First, I would like to make some broad generalizations about Katherine Anne Porters stories. The selections of stories that I have read could be considered stories about transition, passage from an doddery world to a overbold. There is a prolific amount of manners and death imagery related to changes from slavery to freedom, aristocracy to middle-class, and birth to death. Her stories block off characters from several generations and the narratives move through out this multi-generational consciousness. The stories are as much about antitheses as the move from tradition to modernity or unexampled ideas/ideals. The narrative perspectives illustrate the chasm between old and girlish/old and new.I believe the opening schoolbook of Old Mortality illustrates some(prenominal) the opposed views of different generations/values and ideals as substantially as the attempt to go steady and resolve each others opposite. The f irst paragraph gives the subscriber a description of Aunt Amy. It is difficult to distinguish who the narrator of the text is at this particular point. It is neither Miranda or Maria nor the Grandmother. It would appear to be an omniscient narrator of no relation to the characters. Yet, the narrator displays the affect of both the young girls feelings and thoughts about Aunt Amys picture as well as the Grandmothers perception of Amy. While the first prison term is mostly objective description, the second sentence is full of the affectation of a subjective point of view. Aunt Amy is described as wearing a white collar that rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned gruesome basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at backup man in the folds of her flounced skirt. Words like tightly, lazy, and ease seem to describe what would be considered the traditional concept of the Southern woman. The blind drunk Southern female is conservative, pure, frag ile, peaceful, and delicate. These descriptive words could be viewed as an alignment with the traditional Southern view of women therefore Amy is beautiful and charming in the eyes of the Grandmother and every older person and everyone who had known her. However, deep down those same words there appears the rather opposite yet tranquillize highly subjective view of the young girls who are attempting to reconcile the new values and ideas of the present with the old traditions of the past. The words tightly, lazy, and ease could be seen from the young girls perspective as negative descriptions suggesting boundaries, confinement, limitations, and exclusion.