In the following essay, Redden argues that Porter does not present a unitary view of life through her character but a view of life in tension between the way one lives life and the way life should be.

Katherine Anne Porter's "Flowering Judas," an unusually cryptic, complex, and challenging story, has been variously interpreted. Of the two bestknown and most complete readings, that of William L. Nance maintains that Miss Porter follows "the principle of rejection," while Ray B. West, Jr., argues that she "embodied an attitude that demonstrated the necessity for the application of the ancient verities of faith and love as a fructifying element in any human existence." Though contradictory, both conclusions are right; each underestimates the presence of the other—an equally forcible opposite "principle," or opposite "attitude"—in the story. The paradoxes of Miss Porter's fiction, it seems to me, are...