SOURCE: “Death's Other Kingdom: Dantesque and Theological Symbolism in ‘Flowering Judas,’” in Flowering Judas, edited by Virginia Spencer Carr, Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 99–120.

In the following essay, which was originally published in PMLA in 1969, Gottfried examines Porter's use of religious imagery and language in “Flowering Judas.”

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I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't invent symbolism. You don't say, “I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,” but, of course, it does.

—Katherine Anne Porter¹

The attempt to portray hell and its leading personages by relating them parodically to heaven using inversions of varying degrees of complexity is traditional. Scholastic theologians like St. Thomas regularly related the various virtues and kinds of blessedness to their opposites, and both Dante and...