SOURCE: “Mentioning the Tamales: Food and Drink in Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and Other Stories,” in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter, 1984-85, pp. 44-57.

In the following essay, Gwin discusses food related visual images and how they are used in Porter's short stories, noting that the rich descriptions enhance the realism of Porter's writing.

Many efforts have been made to penetrate what Eudora Welty has called, with deliberate contradiction, “the eye” of Katherine Anne Porter's fictional art.¹ Welty finds this “eye”—the penetrating vision of Porter's stories—to be interior, subjective, and nonsensory. Yet, even though Porter often eschews visual images, choosing to “see” within rather than without, her fiction, in Welty's judgment, intensifies rather than diminishes life.² We may gain a deeper understanding of this apparent paradox by observing Porter's sensitivity to the rich textures of life and her startlingly complex renderings of those textures as...