ENGL 4310

Wow, Pale Horse Pale Rider is an incredible story — it’s loaded! I am intrigued with the complexities of defining a woman’s role in the story. Chuck becomes an interesting character in this light. He makes statements such as “I think women should keep out of it, they just add skirts to the horrors of war” and “It was Florence Nightingale ruined wars”(p.286). It is interesting that he would prefer Miranda’s newspaper position of theatre critic, one of those unimportant female designations according to Miranda, to his own. Miranda is trying to do her duty in war time (though she has not purchased a Liberty Bond, perhaps giving insight to her ongoing battle), visiting sick soldiers, entertaining them in the dance halls and keeping her public chin up. None-the-less, we find she is in the middle of war. That collapsing of characters that O’Conner has done is showing up in this story as well. Porter collapses the role of men and women evidenced through Miranda and Adam. We find Miranda in the sick bed like a soldier who has been fighting a war of her own. Or is it? Wasn’t it a German ship that spread the influenza she contracted? What are all the things that are making her sick, it seems more than just this influenza? Her battle to support seems to provide another “front” to this war. When she falls casualty in it, her “Nightingale” nursemaid is Adam. Ironically it is his nursemaid efforts, not combat, that kill him. If Miranda has become the soldier, why is it that she survives her combat? It could be that fighting as a soldier in war is the simplest part to war. Pale Horse, Pale Rider leaves us a fascinating depiction of the survivor of war’s complex moral dilemmas, a ghostly remnant of her original, that “pale rider” on the vehicle that has carried her. “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns” (p.317).