Looking for Kevin: A Rereading of Rosaleen O’Toole’s Journey in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Cracked Looking-Glass”

Abstract

In a 2024 interview, Darlene Harbour Unrue was asked what she discovered when researching Porter’s life for the 2005 biography that Joan Givner’s Citation1982 one had not unearthed. She replied, “well I found some extra husbands.” The additional two, albeit short-lived, marriages Unrue uncovered brings the total to five. Wed and divorced a whopping five times—no small feat, especially for a woman born in 1890—Porter unsurprisingly casts couples in troubled unions in a good bit of her fiction. One of her “strongest condemnations of romantic love,” as Mary Titus noted, is “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” a story that has not received nearly as much critical attention as Porter’s other works.Footnote1 The highly crafted, multi-layered tale drew inspiration from rumors Porter heard when summering in Merryall Valley, Connecticut, in 1926, about a rich Irish widow “who scandalized her rural neighbors by keeping young boys as boarders” (Unrue 138). When learning of these speculations, Porter herself was living with a man 11 years her junior—Ernest Stock, an English painter and former Royal Air Force pilot.Footnote2 Their relationship ended with the season. Unrue points out in her biography that Stock was but one in a “chain of liaisons with much younger men”—Eugene Dove Pressly, later Albert Erskine, among others (138). When “The Cracked Looking-Glass” was published, Porter had experienced firsthand the difficulties of being in a relationship with a significant age gap and yet she continued putting too much stock in affairs with younger men.