Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Grave,” uses the symbols

Miranda at the young age of nine is as innocent as can be. She has no realization for the criticisms upon her family for the way she has been raised, wearing her “summer roughing outfit: dark blue overalls, a light blue shirt, a hired-man’s straw hat, and thick brown sandals”, (Porter 364) running around the woods hunting rabbits and doves with her twenty-two Winchester rifle. On one excursion through the woods, she and her brother stumble upon the old family cemetery and decide to explore. After rummaging through the empty graves, “she saw a silver dove no larg

As Miranda goes along with her normal activities, she encounters an experience that will change her forever almost without realizing it. The experience is “recognized in its completeness only when recalled by a similar sensual awareness,”(West 445-46) nearly twenty years later on a market street in a foreign land where nothing is familiar. Except for “the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption’s she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home...”(Porter 367) Only then did she recall the day in the cemetery and the treasure she and her brother had discovered in the open graves. Miranda learned about birth and her fate as a woman in a place that connects birth with death; “one might say that the story is about the paradoxical nature of truth: truth wears a double face---it is not simple but complex.”(Brooks 3136)

Miranda now with this newfound realization loses all interest in hunting and when her brother shoots a rabbit, “she let Paul have it without dispute,”(Porter 365) and continues walking at her slow pace until she catches up with him. As her brother skins the rabbit, “and it is discovered that the animal contained a family of unborn young buried inside it’s body, this discovery conveyed to Miranda the puzzling and ambiguous nature of death and birth.”(West 445) She desires to see the tiny rabbits lying inside their mother’s body, with “blood running over them”(Porter 366) and having seen them, she trem

Some topics in this essay:
Anne Porter’s, Miranda”445 Miranda’s, , birth death, gold ring, roughing outfit, little girl’s, silver dove, “the grave”, woman miranda,