About a decade ago, there arose a flurry of critical interest in Katherine Anne Porter's story "The Grave." This inquiry quickly subsided, apparently satisfied that "The Grave" had been adequately explained. In fact it had not, for an intense preoccupation with the predominating symbols of the short story had entailed a concomitant limiting of critical focus, so that the widest implications of the story were ignored…. Focusing upon the few most obtrusive symbols—the ring, the dove, the rabbits, and the grave—criticism has continued to neglect the story's paradigm of our most primal racial myth, that of the fall of man, which is itself the pattern of a primal experience in the life of each individual.

The opening paragraph of the story, outlining the history of the family and its cemetery, immediately draws our attention to the continuing cycles of life and death, and to the journeys of mankind both in life and potentially beyond it. The reference to grandparents, establishing the existence of children and grandchildren, evokes the cycle of generations. In close conjunction with this, the removal from place to place of the grandmother, as well as of the "oddments of relations," and the grandmother's repeated transportation of the grandfather's corpse … inevitably suggest the wandering movements of mankind on his larger journey through life toward death. The mention of eternity in the final sentence of the paragraph leaves latent the suggestion of a conclusion to the journey that carries beyond death.

In the following paragraph, the cemetery itself is more particularly described as a "pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass." It is, of course, difficult to encounter gardens in the work of any writer with a Catholic background without wondering if echoes of Eden are intended…. Since in addition the garden is "neglected," the rose bushes are "tangled," and the cedar trees are "ragged," we may well begin to suppose of this garden which became a cemetery that it represents a fallen Eden. (pp. 269-70)

The grave pits in this garden-cemetery are "all shaped alike with such purposeful accuracy" that the children dissemble awe as an appropriate response; yet the personal application of the message that death awaits all human beings has in fact eluded them. The same point is made when Miranda leaps "into the pit" that has "held her grandfather's bones."… A more chilling and a more tellingly compressed portrait of utter innocence in the face of death could scarcely be produced than appears in that eager leap into the grave of her own grandfather and in that equally oblivious weighing of a palmful of "pleasantly sweet, corrupt" smelling earth. But in the very rotting earth that summons up our mortal clay, Miranda also finds the dove, symbol … of innocence and of the Holy Ghost. Even before Miranda has fallen, and before death has become a reality to her, she discovers a token of her redemption.

At this point, significantly, she does not prize the dove. Trading it to Paul for the wedding ring (a specifically Freudian symbol of marriage and sex) which he has retrieved from another grave, she is clearly trading her innocence—so far through symbols only—for knowledge of the world and of her function as a woman. The suggestion of fertility in the "intricate flowers and leaves" carved on the ring adumbrates her awakening to this function, which at first takes the form of an interest in female luxury, but which occurs in earnest simultaneously with an awakening to sin and death when Miranda is confronted by the unborn baby rabbits. (p. 270)

Immediately following their appropriation of the ring and the dove, the children begin to feel uneasy…. The change in their condition is signalled by the arrival of self-consciousness, by the fear of being observed and reported, and by the sense of having done something forbidden. As Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, so Paul and Miranda feel "like trespassers" and know that they must leave the garden which is "no longer theirs." (p. 271)

Porter chooses this moment to define for us the difference in Miranda's and Paul's attitudes to hunting. Paul knows what he is doing when he kills; he knows the act from intention to consequence, and is already a small master in the world of experience. He is leader and teacher not only because he is male and Miranda is female, but also because he is older and more experienced than she. The realm into which Paul has fallen is marked by the fact of death—and more, by the fact of killing; it is a world in which actions have consequence, in which over and over again the apple is eaten and the eater is punished. Miranda, on the other hand, cares nothing about hitting the mark and is unaware of the consequences of shooting beyond the immediate sensory experience of "'pulling the trigger and hearing the noise.'" That is, she is innocent. Still the inhabitant of a floating Eden in which life is marvelous and without consequence, Miranda crosses over only when she has seen the rabbits. This apparent confusion about the moment of the Fall—for we have, after all, just witnessed one representation of it, and yet are invited to believe that Paul had fallen before this and Miranda only afterwards—is crucial to the story's design, according to which everything happens both repetitively and progressively, and in which events are returned to again and again until their proper meaning has finally been understood.

That the Fall has in some sense not yet occurred for Miranda is further indicated by her asking, on the way to the kill of the rabbit, if she can "'have the first snake.'" The reference here to the serpent in the Garden of Eden is especially pointed because we have been specifically told that Miranda and Paul regularly hunt rabbits and doves, not snakes. No further mention of snakes is made, and this one reference is so clearly artificially obtruded into a surface context to which it does not belong that the author must carefully inform us that Miranda asks her question "idly." If there has been any doubt that the story is concerned with the myth of the Fall, such a conclusion now seems unavoidable.

Miranda asks her question about the snake "idly" also because her interest in the hunt is slackening; it was never great, but now the ring is glittering and directing her imagination elsewhere. (pp. 271-72)

In imagination, she turns from Paul to [her older sister] Maria as her model. She wants to abandon the hunt, to return to the house, and to "dust herself with plenty of Maria's violet talcum powder … put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees." This fantasy obviously works to prepare us for Miranda's acceptance of her destiny as woman, but it is also reminiscent of the Fall. As she was covetous of the ring, so now under its spell she experiences in the background of her apparently modest fantasy "vague stirrings of desire for luxury and a grand way of living which could not take precise form in her imagination but were founded on family legend of past wealth and leisure." Racial memory, the idea of a golden past belonging not only to the history of the family but also to the history of the race, is hinted at by the imprecision of Miranda's imaginings. In support of such an equation, we have carefully been informed that "leisure" is no longer the privilege of Miranda's family and that "she had been brought up in rigorous economy." The peculiarity here is that Miranda's "vague stirrings of desire" work backwards and forwards, attaching both to the past and to her desired future as a lady. She yearns for a prelapsarian state, when as a sort of queen she might sit "under the trees" of Eden, yet her "desires" are of dominion, restless, and directed toward the future so that simultaneously they express Eve's fall through vanity. (pp. 273-74)

Miranda's consciousness takes another, giant step forward when the children discover in the womb of the dead animal "a bundle of tiny rabbits." This is a brilliantly compressed image, functioning like Yeats's "dying generations" to express at once the brevity of life and the irony that all our growth (beginning with the moment of conception) is a decline which culminates in death. Seeing these creatures whose tenure upon earth has been so dramatically foreshortened, Miranda loses her innocence in fact rather than in symbol. Whereas previously she had been untroubled by the gradual accumulation of knowledge, now Miranda is trembling at the brink of some absolute attainment: "she wanted most deeply to see and to know. Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along. The very memory of her former ignorance faded, she had always known just this." Miranda has now assumed the knowledge of good and evil; thus, she will reject the rabbit's skin. Additionally, she has taken on the knowledge of life, birth, and death as they relate specifically to herself as sinner, as woman, and as mortal being. In other words, in the analogy she perceives between human babies (such as she has been and will bear) and the dead unborn baby rabbits covered with blood, she recognizes her own mortality in all of its key aspects. Miranda's cavorting in the grave like "any young animal" has acquired a new resonance.

The discovery of the baby rabbits is also significant to Paul, though he speaks "as if he had known about everything all along." His particular concern is that Miranda, toward whom his attitude is now conspiratorial, should not cause punishment to descend upon him by revealing to their father her loss of innocence. Similarly, he attempts concealment of his sin when he hides the rabbits. The suggestion is that Paul, although his fall has anticipated Miranda's, has nevertheless persisted in the hope of concealment entertained by Adam, and that he is as yet ignorant of Christ's love as the only means of appeasing God's wrath. (p. 274)

Miranda represses the memory of the incident in the grave of her mind, as the commentators also have pointed out, only to have it resurrected by the circumstances of the Mexican marketplace…. All the horror of her own mortality is suddenly returned to Miranda…. But the "dreadful vision" fades when she recalls her brother, "standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands."

Clearly this vision of the dove is not a repression of the experience with the rabbits, not a retreat into the easier memory of that day, but an awakening to further knowledge. The "blazing sunshine" strongly suggests revelation…. And it is entirely fitting, in the context of this miniature myth of the Fall, that the dove should have come out of the grave itself. It was, after all, the loss of innocence and the assumption of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, bringing death into life, that made the dove and what it represents both necessary and possible. Without the Fall and death, there would be no need for redemption and resurrection. So the dove … suggests at once the brevity of death and the inevitability of new life. With its end in the "blazing sunshine" of such new knowledge, this is decidedly not the story of a willful self-blinding, but rather of an epiphany of the first water. (p. 275)