Pale Horse Pale Rider

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) is a Texas-born journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. She was also a big political activist. In 1939, her most autobiographical work was published, and it is her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider. It consists of 3 short stories. The last one carries the same name as the book. Porter mentions real history like World War I, war propaganda, women on the home front, and the 1918 influenza pandemic in her book. Pale Horse can be seen as pandemic literature because we read characters that break with tradition, an individual’s struggle with the virus, and also some societal forces. One of the main themes is war propaganda. The target was the working women who endured harassment, miserable working conditions, and low pay. Those with children struggled with child care and caring for a household on their own. Propaganda tended to depict women as guardians of the home, their gentle nature and vulnerability making them both objects of men's affections and victims of the enemy's barbarous acts, and yet also as resilient, active participants in the war effort. 

Pale Horse Pale Rider focuses on the main character, Miranda, who got the disease and her struggle during the pandemic. The novel starts with the 3rd person narration. In the beginning, she is dreaming; she is a child and she wants to run away before everybody wakes up. Then she does not know her identity anymore. Miranda’s realization that she has been reduced by society’s war-oriented demands. She is not taking society’s rules on women anymore. All of the women were going to see the soldiers to cheer them up and Miranda hated it. She was forced to see going soldiers and cheer them up for the health of the country and give money but of course that was not a necessary situation at that time.

There are some Biblical references like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: the Conqurer (white), War (red), Famine (black), and Death (gray). She mentions the color gray a lot. Miranda’s sense of vulnerability in her identity as a young woman experiences a romance amidst the war and the pandemic. This dream is like a foreshadowing because her boyfriend is going to die in the war and she will survive her illness. That is why she says, “I am not going with you this time” to the stranger (death). She is fighting against death. There is a psychoanalytical criticism here, using the collective symbolism of Death on a Pale Horse interpreted by Miranda in a personal way. Miranda’s disease included dreams and delirious states as an insight into her subconscious. 

Miranda has a boyfriend named Adam, and she sees her in her third dream. In that dream, Adam is dying, and Miranda wants to die instead of him. She does not want to be the last one who loses everyone and stays all alone in the whole world. She was also affected by the pandemic and the war. That is why her dreams are chaotic all the time, but they are foreshadowing the future things that are going to happen. 

This novella is a good example of reading history and getting knowledge about personal struggles. In one of Porter’s interviews, she says, "It [the pandemic] simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So everything before that was just getting ready, and after that, I was in some strange way altered. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really 'alienated' in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the 'beatific vision, and the Greeks called the 'happy day, the happy vision before death. Now if you have had that and survived it, come back from it; you are no longer like other people, and there's no use deceiving yourself that you are." Porter, Interview, 1963.