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Katie: A Character Barely Coming to Terms with A Solid Home

Katie, the five-year-old in her family's tomb, is one of the most complex characters in Mexican playwright Elena Garro's 1957 short piece A Solid Home (Un Hogar Solido). Katie seems torn between longing for the living world she left so young and being confident that her future "solid home" is the mixing of her elements into other forms – Garro's theory of the afterlife. Although scholar James Mandrell states flatly, "Garro makes obvious the impossibility of escape from the determinants of existence in the time that is history" (233), Katie struggles against her history and future home. Garro may have had similar concerns. In 1937, she went with her new husband, Octavio Paz, to the Spanish Revolution, then returned to Mexico, moved to Berkeley, then San Francisco, New York City, Paris, and Tokyo before returning to Mexico, where the government forced her to undergo naturalization (Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "Elena" 773). Following all these moves, while talking to her cousin at a bar in Mexico City, Garro noted, "What I need is a solid home" (qtd. in Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "A Solid" 774). After so few solid homes, Garro wrote a play exploring that topic for her famous husband in a mere half hour (Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "A Solid" 774). Like Garro, Katie had perhaps more homes than she wanted. Katie's contradictory, childlike character is both sadly angry about missing life by dying young and cynically amused by realities about death that she has learned.

Katie's childlike ways are evident when she reminds her sister, Jessie, that "Lady Diptheria brought me" (Garro 778). Katie's fantastical name for the disease that killed her before she could go to school reminds us that she is merely five. But she is also the contemporary, the sister, of Mama Jessie, who died at eighty. Immediately Katie becomes a character with contradictions. Jessie's daughter Gertrude formally addresses her as "Aunt Katherine" (Garro 777). But she then scolds little Katie for taking a femur and using it as a trumpet. Early in the play, Katie seems mostly childlike and mischievous, a girl who calls a femur "my little sugar bugle" (777).

As the play goes on, however, Katie reveals her sad and angry side. Having died so young, Katie feels cheated and asks her sister, pointedly, "And was the school of the Misses Simson nice?" (Garro 778). Jessie lived and went to school; Katie did not. Similarly, Katie is angry about being lied to on the day of her burial. She points out that "When they brought me, [Don Hilary] said, 'A little angel flew away!' And it wasn't true. I was here below, alone and very frightened" (Garro 779). Katie is willing to be fantastical and sweet about Lady Diptheria and her "fingers of cotton [that] . . . wouldn't let me breathe" (778), but she tells the painful truth about what it was like to be buried young and alone. Her cousin Vincent, killed in battle under Benito Juárez, admits that when he arrived, presumably about twenty years later, "Katie [was] crying: 'I want to see my mama!' " (Garro 779). While other characters wax poetic about the sounds, textures, and colors of their former homes, sad little Katie does not. Katie's reply to Jessie's description of how she wept when Katie died shows both anger and knowledge that death inevitably takes us from our old home:

Dummy! Didn't you know that you were going to come to play with

me here? That day, St. Michael sat down beside me and wrote it with

his sword of fire on the roof of my house. I didn't know how to read

. . . and I read it. (Garro 778)

Without having gone to school, Katie clearly understands that everyone dies. But, even surrounded, inevitably, by her family members, Katie is still angry that her death was so early. When the others list what they want to be on the day they "enter into the celestial order" (780), Katie first says she wants to be "the index finger of God the Father!" (780). She wants to be active, live, give the orders herself for once. The others suppress her with a unison "Child!" (780). Jessie also rejects Katie's next idea:

KATIE. And I want to be a window that looks at the world!

MAMA JESSIE. There'll no longer be a world, Katie, because we'll be

. . . after the Final Judgment. (781)

Katie begins weeping at this news and protests that she has been cheated: "There'll no longer be a world. And when am I going to see it? I didn't see anything" (Garro 779). Katie has gained wisdom in death, but she's also an angry and disappointed little girl.

Although she mentions "the celestial order," Garro seems most confident that the "solid home" we have after death is that our elements, once released from our bodies, are incorporated into other forms. Drama critic Jimmy Fowler notes that Garro's proposition is challenging: "Maybe scarier . . . than the notion that there's nothing after death is the idea that life will continue without our precious identity, that we're just fodder for the great cycle" (Fowler 3). Being reduced to free-floating elements is a frightening thought for Lydia, the new arrival in the crypt, but Katie is amused telling Lydia the hard facts. Indeed, she laughs and torments Lydia by telling Jessie, still reeling from being a blind fish, "You were also very frightened when you were the worm that came in and out of your mouth" (Garro 780). Teasing like a child, Katie makes a cynical speech worthy of an old lady who is well-acquainted with, but perhaps still not happy about, what happens after death. She voices competing angry and accepting thoughts about death and the possibility of finding a solid home.

Works Cited

Fowler, Jimmy. "Undead Heads: Teatro Dallas Sounds Profound When It's Howling

at the Moon." dallasobserver.com. 15 October 1998. Dallas Observer. 15 July 2004

<http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/1998-10-15/stage.html>.

Garro, Elena. A Solid Home (Un Hogar Solido). The Longman Anthology of Drama

and Theater: A Global Perspective. Compact ed. Eds. Michael L. Greenwald,

Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 776-781.

Greenwald, Michael L., Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. "Elena Garro." The

Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater: A Global Perspective. Compact ed.

Eds. Michael. L. Greenwald, Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. New York:

Addison-Wesley, 2002. 773-774.

---. "A Solid Home." The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater: A Global

Perspective. Compact ed. Eds. Michael L. Greenwald, Roger Schultz, and Roberto

D. Pomo. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 774-775.

Mandrell, James. "The Prophet Voice in Garro, Morante, and Allende." Comparative

Literature Summer 1990: 227-246. ProQuest Research Library. Raynor Memorial

Library, Marquette Univ. 15 July 2004 <http://proquest.umi.com/>.

MY title not punc., bolded or underlined--but the play's title is punctuated--italics. I have a title about my thesis opinion. No beating around the bush-- gets right into this play & thesis with author, year, country. Note: "playwright." Form long dashes with 2 hyphens (fused as you type). Named source gets a little credentials before his quote. Name in sentence, not in ( ). Words "history" & "future home" lead out of quote & form transition. Years and cities not a quote--paraphrased facts, but still cite the source. Source authors have 2 entries on Works Cited list, so use a bit of title in the ( ) to distinguish the two. I read Garro's words in a source not by her--use the "qtd. in" format after sentence names her as speaker/ writer. Use authors' last names. Apostrophe for possession. Thesis ends 1st ¶-- strong opinion requiring proof.

A hint of this ¶'s topic--child-like character. Context for quotes--who's talking, to whom, about what? Garro wrote her play, not Greenwald & pals. No punctuation before parentheses if it's a period or comma. Pause to analyze--refers to thesis "contradictions." End ¶ with a summing-up of ITS topic (no hook to next ¶) & hint of thesis.

¶ topic--sad, angry. "Having" must be followed by someone who could "having" or dangling modifier. Period after ( ), of course, but ? goes inside. Semi-colon separates 2 sentences. Katie quotes Don H.--need single quotation marks inside the big quote. Square [ ] brackets show word(s) added for clarity. Three dots show word(s) left out for directness. Another quote inside a quote--use singles. Words "sad little Katie" keep ¶ topic going. Lead-in tells who is talking, to whom, & what we should notice--anger and knowledge. Quote of more than 3 lines indented, no quote marks,

& period before ( )--only time.

Lead out of quote's information by "repeating"/translating a bit. Don't lead out with just "This"--briefly summarize what "This" was. Period after next ( ), but exclamation mark inside. A pause for character analysis. Quotes all from same source, just use page #. Colon before quote introduced by complete sentence, not just a "says." Four dots if the next thing after left-out words had been a new sentence. Paragraph ends linking its info--K's anger & sadness--with my paper's thesis. Next ¶'s topic--the solid home concept and K's reaction. Commas and periods go before final quotation marks, whether it makes sense or not. A named source gets credentials. Colon before a quote introduced by a complete sentence. No commas inside parentheses unless using a bit of title, as in my intro. ¶. "It's" means "It is." "Its" means "belongs to it." Conclude with paper's point, echoing quotes & facts used to prove it, but not listing all again. Notice no big words, almost no passive voice, no "It can be seen that," overly-complicated sentences, or padding. Lots of specifics. No new page needed for Works Cited. List is double-spaced and alphabetized by the first word-- and that first word(s) is what goes into the parentheses inside the paper--usually author(s) last name(s). Fowler--a source from the Internet. See MU's "Build a Citation" site for how to cite Web Info. Garro wrote her own play. Here's our anthology, from which I used two little essays that Garro did NOT write--the editors did. Greenwald, Schultz, and Pomo have 2 entries here, so a bit of title will need to distinguish each essay in the paper's parentheses. Notice ALL entries for the anthology end w/ 1st and last page #s of the essay or play. Mandrell--source found using ProQuest. Always a period at citation end.