Reconstructing Memory in Katherine Anne Porter’s the Old Order Stories (1944, 1955, 1965)

Different from the other collections analyzed in this book, this chapter considers the arrangement of a group of six (eventually seven) stories, first submitted for publication in 1932 and eventually published together in three separate collections— The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas (1955), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). The Old Order stories depict protagonist Miranda’s childhood memories of postbellum South, while only tangentially engaging the inherently problematic social issues related to gender and race that permeate her memories. Porter does not edit the stories’ contents between publications but progressively arranges them anachronistically. Instead of revising the content of Miranda’s memories, Porter (re)contextualizes their significance by their reordering to demonstrate Miranda’s ongoing critical engagement with the past.