Review of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Porter depicts the horrors of both WWI and the global pandemic which succeeded it. Through Miranda, a war weary journalist, and Adam, a committed new soldier, Porter contextualizes the pandemic within attitudes toward the war. This allows her to show why it overshadowed the pandemic in historical memory, a development she implicitly questions through her comparison of the two connected experiences.
Porter consistently foreshadows how war preoccupation would lead to neglect of the pandemic. During Adam and Miranda’s visits, the “Spanish grippe” looms ominously in the background. Sentences like, “At the first corner they waited for a funeral to pass”, are effectively placeholders since neither character offers a comment (154). This establishes that public attention was on the war even as the pandemic worsened. When people did notice it, Porter suggests, the severity of the situation did not register with them. Adam displays the archetypal new soldier’s optimism, saying, “let’s be strong minded and not have any of it” (156). The easy notion of soldierly discipline acting as a prophylactic reveals not only that war was on the brain, but that wartime attitudes shaped public perception of the pandemic.
Porter also manipulates the tensions of Adam and Miranda’s relationship to accentuate the pandemic’s burst into the foreground. This underscores her comparison of the war and the pandemic by showing that fears about the former could in fact be realized by the latter. Much of this comes through Porter’s use of the element of time. As Miranda knows that Adam could die any moment in combat, she feels a deep uncertainty about their relationship: “he was not for her nor for any woman…committed without any knowledge or act of his own to death” (161–2). Gradually, these premonitions grow more vague. “This is the beginning of the end of something. Something terrible is going to happen to me”, she thinks without mention of the flu (170). Here Porter hints at how the danger of the pandemic would quietly overtake that of the war while people’s fears were subconsciously displaced from one threat to the other. The murkiness of this process, an effect of the war overshadowing the pandemic, finds expression when a dance hall conversation Miranda is listening to abruptly cuts off, and she wakes up in a hospital bed.
Having shown how the war caused people to neglect the ultimately deadlier pandemic, Porter movingly illustrates the similarities of the experiences and leaves the reader to infer why one outshone the other. Having felt the tranquility of death, Miranda returns to life unable to see the point. She sees through the “conspiracy” underlying “the courage of the living” and cannot connect with those who see value in life — much like the soldier returned from the trenches (205). Countering the notion that combat death was more honorable than death of flu, one potential reason for the war’s stronger presence in historical memory, Porter suggests that these crises inflicted comparably traumatic wounds.
