SOURCE: "Symbolism, the Short Story, and 'Flowering Judas,'" in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Wayne State University Press, 1971, pp. 70-9.

In the following essay, Liberman explores the significance of symbolism in "Flowering Judas" and addresses previous critical readings of the story.

If one opens Jean Stafford's Collected Stories to, say, "The Lippia Lawn," which begins, "Although its roots are clever, the trailing arbutus at Deer Lick had been wrenched out by the hogs," he is promised the work of a poet, and this promise the other stories generally keep. It is the "clever," employed for all its worth, including its root sense, that does it almost all, and this is as it should be if, as I suppose with a few others, the short story is, in crucial ways, most like the lyric in that its agent is neither plot nor character, but diction. When its language is...