"Theft" by Katherine Ann Porter

Whenever I read “Theft” by Katherine Ann Porter, I find myself mesmerized, as I was by certain horrible fables and nursery rhymes when I was a child. The protagonist, referred to only as “she”, is a writer struggling on the margins with no one but herself to attend to her needs; rather than collecting and holding onto possessions-concrete or abstract- she chooses to “let [them] go” (83), putting herself at risk of becoming not literally homeless (although such a situation is almost foreseeable) but homeless in the sense that everything from books to love is “missed” (85).

The curtain of the story rises, and Porter’s protagonist emerges from her bath to see that her “gold cloth” purse is no longer on the bench where she spread it out to dry the night before. As she recalls the previous evening, trying to discover when it may have gone missing, we learn that she has been robbed several times either “material[ly] or intangib[ly]”(85), but not of the purse.

The subtle yet critical thefts of the night before take place, as so many petty thefts can, under the guise of friendship. As they leave a cocktail party together, her friend, Camilo, insists on walking her through the rain to the Elevated and in doing so ruins his hat; still, she thinks, he will “associate her with his misery” (79), as if his offer to walk her through rain puts her at fault. Roger, another artist friend, spots her on the steps to the Elevated and offers to take a taxi with her, but then borrows ten cents, a quarter of all the money she possesses, to pay his fare. Once in her apartment building, she runs into a playwright who owes her money for writing the third act of his play, but he won’t give it to her; instead, she is supposed to understand that his money goes toward alimony payments to his wife and child. “Let it go, then,” (83) she says. In every interaction she is, in one way or another, complicit with the thief.

The character then recalls that the janitress entered her apartment while she was in the bath in order to check the radiators and reasons that she must have taken the purse. The woman’s response is to “let it go, then” (84), but then “there rose…in her blood almost murderous anger” (84). When she confronts her, the janitress explains that she stole the purse to give to her seventeen-year-old niece who has got “young men after her maybe will want to marry her…[and] oughta have nice things”(86). The janitress adds that she did not think the protagonist would mind because she “leave[s] things around and [doesn’t] seem to notice much” (86). When the protagonist attempts to repossess her purse, the landlady says: “It’s not from me, it’s from her you’re stealing it,” (86) as if in asking for the return of her purse, she is ruining the prospects of the janitress’s niece. Also, the janitress cannot resist pointing out that the protagonist’s romantic opportunities have passed; she does not need lovely accessories with which to attract men.

The purse, possibly a gift from an ex-lover and certainly containing her last thirty cents, is something the protagonist feels the momentary loss of more than anything else. The janitress’s trespassing and robbery jolts her awake. She sees that the “general faith” (85) by which she operates (not locking doors, for instance) and her “rejection” (85) of the “ownership” (85) of things have prevented her from shoring up all kinds of essential belongings- everything from simple objects to sustaining relationships. Porter allows us to feel the full weight of her realization: “In this moment, she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible…all that she had had and all that she had missed were lost together…in the this landslide of remembered losses”(85). Later, she concludes that she is the thief. In being permissive of various kinds of potential belongings, instead of possessive, the protagonist has participated in every robbery, small or large, superficial or deep.

I enjoyed how the images of cold and wet work in the story to identify the character’s unmet needs. Over the course of the evening (the evening takes place off stage, before the story begins) the rain alters her more and more. Roger describes her as “looking as though she’s going to catch cold” (82) and encourages her to take a bath. Bill says she is “perfectly sopping” (82). At the moment the story begins, the character is walking across her apartment “holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand” (78). In the final moment of the story, just before the curtain falls, she sips “chilled coffee” (87). The impression is of a woman who is somehow careless, and too cold, too open. She seems to have difficulty finding shelter and warmth, critical possessions.

In “Theft” Porter presents us with an unsentimental, almost grueling picture of this woman’s inability to tend to her life. Rather than mitigating her character’s desperate circumstances or rescuing her from herself, she allows her the full consequence of her choices, the realization that she will leave herself with “nothing” (87).

In sparing her characters so little, Porter writes a tale that burns in the mind as dire warnings always do.

Porter, Katherine Ann. “Theft.” Flowering Judas and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1990. 78-87