Abundance and Loss in Cheever and Porter: Part II
This is the second part of an essay examining short stories by John Cheever and Katherine Anne Porter. Part I is available here.
In comparison to the obvious material abundance in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer," (1964) Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” (1930) is a story about abundance of another kind: abundance of choice. Or, rather, the illusion of choice. As in Cheever, our unnamed heroine is representative of the modern individual. She possesses her own agency; she has no qualms about staying up late, getting “nicely set up” on cocktails, and searching for a suitable partner. In this portion of the discussion, I seek to explore how gender, alienation, and class unfold together within her “abundance of choice.”
At the beginning of “Theft,” the unnamed heroine drunkenly leaves a party with Camilo, a suitor addicted to performing chivalry in the form of “smaller courtesies” while “ignoring the larger and more troublesome ones.” Camilo is “graceful,” but only ironically: he has “the habit of seeing her up the steps and dropping a nickel in the machine before he gave the turnstile a little push and sent her through it with a bow.” Our heroine sees through this. She knows that “he was almost as poor as she was,” which is why she is prepared to pay her own fare at the station and resists Camilo’s insistence on taking a taxi home. In spite of this, she chooses to entertain Camilo’s desire to play the gentleman.
Katherine Anne Porter
At the end of the evening, the protagonist tacitly rejects Camilo, under the pretense of fearing that he would “certainly break [his] neck” on a drunken descent down her stairs. She chooses not to hurt the man’s ego by being subtle about her rejection, willingly fulfilling his need to feel like a man. When she spies Camilo quickly sheltering his hat from the rain under his overcoat in the distance, she feels a strange regret: she knows that “he would have been humiliated if he thought she even suspected him of trying to save his hat.” She is inclined to preserve Camilo’s perceived masculinity even though she is not obliged to do so. This impulse stems, it seems, from a need to make up for Camilo’s deficiencies in character. During their date, the protagonist continually compares Camilo to other suitors in her head. It is not clear that any are good options; but in absence of material wealth, her perceived abundance in choice is what comes to ground her sense of self.
After Camilo’s departure, our heroine runs into a long-time friend, Roger, who invites her to share a cab ride home. During the ride, they encounter two interesting scenes out the car window. The first scene involves two men beating up a third for mocking the first man’s desire to marry his girl for love. The second scene involves a woman who complains about her boyfriend not being sensitive to her needs to a friend, who validates her perspective. These two scenes later serve to reveal a deeper insight into the contents of our heroine’s letter, whose existence is made known in response to Roger’s mention of Stella, his love interest.
Our heroine tells Roger that she thinks it is time for Stella and him to “do something definite.” Her advice could point to her own ostensible desire to settle down. It is clear, however, that she has been sabotaging her own efforts. The sender of her own letter writes that he is “thinking about [her] more than [he] mean[s],” but expresses his frustration (in fragments) that she was “so anxious to destroy” and “not worth all this abominable. . .”. She eventually burns the letter.
On the most obvious level, Porter is leaning into the (by now well-worn) narrative of the breakdown of modern romance. Her modern heroines and heroes desire a partner who is completely ideal, which causes them to never be satisfied because, in principle, they will always have better options. For the heroine of “Theft,” this simply becomes “a matter of holding out,” leading her to alienate her potential partners, and ultimately herself.
But the deeper insight from Porter’s story comes from how this alienation reverberates throughout the protagonist’s life, particularly in terms of gender and class relations. At the end of the story, trapped in her own self-alienation, the resentful heroine realizes that the building’s janitress had likely stolen her purse. She initially decides that “it would be impossible to get it back without a great deal of ridiculous excitement,” and so she tells herself to “let it go.” But immediately, “a deep almost murderous anger” rises within her. Enraged, she descends the stairs to confront the (allegedly) thieving janitress. This confrontational behavior is something that we have hitherto not seen in our heroine. Before this, she entertains Camilo’s performative chivalry; she allows Roger to shortchange her on the cab fare; and enables her neighbor Bill’s greed against his wife’s spousal rights. She has never been the kind to hold people (notably men) accountable for their misdoings—until now, when the evidence for misdoing is slight. She exerts class power onto the janitress, demanding the return of her purse. The janitress initially denies the accusation, prompting our heroine to bitterly declare: “keep it if you want it so much.” She walks away with a realization that reveals to us why she is so angry with the janitress in the first place.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Up until this incident, “she had never locked a door in her life.” This was due to “some principle of rejection…that made her uncomfortable in the ownership of things.” Simply put, she had a naive understanding of the world, holding onto “a certain fixed, otherwise baseless and general faith” that was motivated by the simple fact that “she had never lost a penny by theft.” The janitress’s ironic defiance of her worldview forces her to come to terms with the reality that “she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible.” There was only one person to blame: “I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.” She could have easily avoided losing her purse if she had just locked the door, just like how she could have easily settled down with someone if she were willing to compromise. But she refused to act, as it would have negated her other options. Such is the illusion of choice within the modern age: overwhelming the subject with an abundance of freedom to the point of passivity. Just like Cheever’s Neddy Merrill, an insatiable desire for more leaves her, paradoxically, with less.
Cheever and Porter both crafted narratives that unravel issues of gender, alienation, and class within the context of abundance. Their works provide insight into the avarice of the modern subject who only short-changes themself in their own pursuit. Cheever’s Merrill, caught up in his chase for the lavish life, ends up stranded in front of a house that is as empty as he is. Likewise, Porter’s heroine, caught up in her chase for the ideal partner, ends up all alone in her home having lost so many things that “were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.” The two find themself isolated, left with neither love nor material possession, having only themself to blame. Porter and Cheever are both out to warn us: they remind the modern (wo)man not to be swayed by modernity’s “culture of abundance,” lest it consumes them whole and leaves them with nothing at all.
Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib is a student of creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He has a poem published in Men Matters Online Journal under the pen name Ratu Yousei.