Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price

First published: 1986

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1937 to 1984

Locale: North Carolina and Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Kate Vaiden, a fifty-seven-year-old woman suffering from cervical cancer
• Frances Vaiden, Kate’s mother
• Dan Vaiden, Kate’s father, who murders his wife, then commits suicide
• Caroline, Frances Vaiden’s sister, who rears Kate
• Holt Porter, Caroline’s husband
• Swift Porter, Holt and Caroline’s son
• Walter Porter, Holt and Caroline’s son
• Gaston Stegall, Kate’s first love
• Douglas Lee, a boy who impregnates Kate when they are both in their teens

The Novel

Kate Vaiden’s protagonist is an aging woman trying to exorcise the demons of her past. She needs to recount the events of her troubled life to the son she abandoned more than forty years ago, when he was four months old, to win his forgiveness. In piecing together her story, Kate discovers much about herself and reveals an impressive inner strength.

In 1984, Kate Vaiden is recovering from cancer surgery. Her life-threatening cervical carcinoma causes her to reflect upon her life and makes her determined to find the son she, as a frightened, unmarried, ashamed seventeen-year-old in a small Southern town, left in the care of her aunt, Caroline Porter. Kate lives near Macon, North Carolina, where her son is reared, but she has suspended all contact with her family there.

From age eleven, Kate’s life is melodramatic. Price, however, succeeds in raising the story above its surface sensationalism by focusing on universal truths that direct Kate’s life. The only child of Dan and Frances Vaiden, Kate was reared by her Aunt Caroline, Frances’s sister.

Early in the novel, Kate has come with her mother from Greensboro, where they live, to Macon, the small town near the Virginia border where Frances was reared, for the funeral of cousin Taswell Porter, recently killed in a motorcycle accident. Frances’s husband, however, has refused to attend the funeral, and he is enraged when his wife insists on going. Kate learns late in her life that her father suspected Frances of having an affair with her cousin, Swift Porter, who would surely attend the funeral.

The day after Taswell’s burial, Swift asks Frances to go with him to check the grave. Dan Vaiden, smoldering with jealousy, has come to Macon and is stalking his wife. He follows her when she goes into the woods with Swift and, confronting her, fires his revolver, wounding her fatally before turning the gun on himself.

Kate, orphaned at age eleven, is overcome by sorrow, confusion, and guilt. She thinks that if she had accompanied her father when he went to look for her mother, as he asked her to, the deaths might have been avoided. She is too innocent to realize that if she had done so, she too might be dead. The events of this memorable day fester in Kate’s troubled mind and color her existence. Price, who in several of his other works has been intensely concerned with how the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, clearly demonstrates that after the events Dan precipitated, Kate must bear a crushing burden from which she will never be free.

As a result of Kate’s early life, she has never been able to trust people. The shattering blow of her parents’ deaths heightens her distrust and makes her distant. When she is thirteen, however, Kate has an affair with a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Gaston Stegall. She grows to love Gaston. Just when Kate has begun to find some stability in a relationship, Gaston, now eighteen, joins the Marines. When he is killed during a training exercise, Kate becomes more withdrawn and suspicious than ever. Kate’s mother once made her a penny-show garden with a slogan, “People will leave you,” that seems prophetic for Kate. If the people she loves do not run away, death will snatch them from her.

Shortly after Gaston’s death, Kate is impregnated by Douglas Lee, a youth whom her cousin Walter has rescued from an orphanage and taken to Norfolk to live with him. Walter uses Douglas sexually; Douglas, defiant and retaliatory, impregnates Kate. Rejecting Walter’s suggestion that all of them live together in Norfolk after she bears the child, Kate sets out for Raleigh with Douglas.

Fearing, however, that living with Douglas will not work out, she bolts when the train stops in Macon, returning to Aunt Caroline, who sees her through her pregnancy. Kate then tracks down Douglas Lee, now a chauffeur to Whitfield Eller, a blind piano tuner in Raleigh. Soon, Eller is brutally attacked by an unidentified intruder—most likely Douglas, who disappears. Kate takes Douglas’s place chauffeuring Eller, who begins to have romantic inclinations toward Kate. Later, Douglas is found dead by his own hand in Eller’s bathtub.

Kate goes to Greensboro. She finishes high school by correspondence and works for the next forty years, never communicating with her family. As the novel closes, Kate has established contact with her son, now past forty, who has inherited Walter Porter’s house in Norfolk, where he lives and serves in the Navy. Kate is preparing to meet him and tell him her story. The novel ends before they meet. One thing, however, is clear: Kate Vaiden is facing realities that she could not face from the time her parents’ violent deaths robbed her of her childlike innocence and confirmed her inherent distrust of people.

The Characters

Kate Vaiden recounts her first-person narrative partly as a means of dealing with her tortured past and partly as a rehearsal of what she will tell her long-lost son, Lee. Price presents Kate as a woman who fears intimacy, who runs from commitment. The people young Kate admits into her life and emotions die: her parents, Gaston Stegall, and Douglas Lee. In her convoluted way, she feels guilt for these deaths. Life for her is easier if she strikes out on her own and shrinks from intimacy, because intimacy— even platonic closeness—threatens her. People are drawn to Kate, but as a part of her self-protective mechanism, she eventually must shun them.

Aunt Caroline Porter is extremely interesting. She is a saintly woman but nobody’s fool. She always steps into the breach when she is needed. She rears the orphaned Kate, she sees Kate through her pregnancy, and she ultimately rears Kate’s child. On the surface, she seems self-sacrificing, but underlying her actions is deep-seated guilt. Caroline has some inkling that Kate’s parents are dead because of her son Swift’s romantic involvement with Frances. This is why she insists that Swift break the news of the murder-suicide to Kate. She also realizes that the intentions of her son Walter are not entirely pure when he takes Douglas Lee from the orphanage to live with him. Her good deeds can be viewed as an expiation for her son’s bad deeds. Readers learn more about Caroline Porter from what she does than from what she says.

Douglas Lee has a temper, but readers see little of it. He once cut Walter’s hand with a knife and, almost certainly, he has beaten Whitfield Eller, the blind piano tuner, although he is never directly accused of the attack. Douglas seethes with internalized anger. He seduces Kate to retaliate for the sexual liberties Walter takes with him. Douglas’s suicide is aimed directly at hurting three people: Kate, Walter Porter, and Whitfield Eller.

Gaston Stegall is a sympathetic character who joins the Marines to serve his country in time of war. He never sees active duty; during a training exercise, he unaccountably stands up in the line of fire and is killed. His death is officially labeled a training accident but can legitimately be called a suicide. Price offers no overt motivation for Gaston’s brash act; the episode, however, certainly helps the author to build his characterization of Kate Vaiden, because her reaction to Gaston’s suicide leads ultimately to her pregnancy and her forty-year absence from Macon.

Holt Porter, Caroline’s husband, although a minor character, plays a definite part in building the milieu in which Kate Vaiden takes place. Caroline runs the household and makes the decisions. Holt goes along with them, although they certainly cost him both money and the freedom that many people crave in later life. Holt is not exactly the henpecked husband, but he is compliant and dutiful, never complaining, never running from responsibilities that really should never have fallen to him.

Critical Context

Reynolds Price published thirteen books before Kate Vaiden appeared. Five of these were novels, including his much-heralded A Long and Happy Life (1962). He had produced as well two collections of short fiction, two of poetry, a translation of thirty stories from the Bible, two plays, and a collection of essays.

He finished the first third of Kate Vaiden the day before he had surgery for a spinal cancer that nearly killed him, the aftermath of which left him without the use of his legs. In an effort to control the incredible pain he was enduring, Price underwent a course of hypnotism that was aimed at helping him control his pain through posthypnotic suggestion.

The result of this treatment was that Price was put in touch with vivid memories of his early life, going back as far as the first few months of his existence. The result was an outpouring of writing, including his autobiography, Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides (1989). Kate Vaiden assumed a new shape following Price’s hypnotism and, upon publication, became both his greatest commercial success and a notable artistic triumph, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction.

In Kate Vaiden, Price connects with many of the feminist concerns of the 1980’s, although he does so without overt intention: that is, he did not set out to write a feminist tract. Rather, his picaresque narrative, his occasional use of epistolary technique in the revelation of plot, and his graceful use of flashbacks all result in a book that was precisely right for its time.

Bibliography

Dewey, Joseph. “A Time to Bolt: Suicide, Androgyny, and the Dislocation of the Self in Reynold Price’s Kate Vaiden.” The Mississippi Quarterly 45 (Winter, 1991): 9-28. Dewey argues that Price’s portrait of Vaiden as a viable female character succeeds because of her disassociation from the limits of gender. He contends that Vaiden emulates male behavior in order to distance herself from her understanding of the female as passive, thereby transcending gender so that the author’s male voice speaks through Vaiden while not making her into a male.

Price, Reynolds. Learning a Trade: A Craftsman’s Notebooks, 1955-1997. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Price’s notebooks offer a rare glimpse of the sometimes tortuous, often glorious creative process that a writer is compelled to engage in if he or she is serious about the craft. Price shares the observations and feelings that led to the writing of Kate Vaiden and some of his other novels.

Price, Reynolds. “Narrative Hunger and Silent Witness: An Interview with Reynolds Price.” Interview by Susan Ketchin. The Georgia Review 47 (Fall, 1993): 522-542. This interview focuses on Price’s religious beliefs and how his convictions influence his writing. Although he is sometimes regarded as a Christian writer, he tries to convey a nonjudgmental vision of the world and thus believes that the label is inappropriate.

Schiff, James A., ed. Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. This outstanding collection of critical essays from major literary figures and scholars, reviews, and previously unpublished material offers an in-depth view of Price’s work. Includes pieces on Kate Vaiden.

Schiff, James A. Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Schiff offers an astute critical analysis of Price’s essays, memoirs, poetry, drama, and biblical interpretations. An excellent source for understanding the whole spectrum of Price’s work, Schiff’s book features essays on individual novels, including Kate Vaiden.