Reluctant to be listed as a "woman writer" or a "feminist," Katherine Anne Porter thinks her works female-orientated. She is really concerned about the female positions or identities in the contemporary world. Most of her stories are women-centered. She tries to defy male-dominated interpretations and to alert her readers to underlying patriarchal assumptions. She not only examines the frustrating process of young girls' initiation into womanhood as it is culturally defined but also reveals the bitterness and disillusion within marriage circle. This paper focuses on Porter's bildungsroman fiction of marriage. With the feminine archetypal approach expounded by Annis Pratt, I intend to penetrate Porter's fictional world vision of married women's positions or identities in the male-dominated society and to further the realization of her attitude toward marriage.
