[In the following essay, Rooke and Wallis assert that critical interest in Porter's “The Grave” has long ignored the story's dominant themes—particularly the fall of man—in favor of a series of less important symbols in the story.]

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. In addition, the last note to emerge (some five years after the initial show of interest) pursued the tendency of the criticism which had preceded it to an impossible conclusion: the story was said to end with Miranda's re-repression of an unpleasant experience within the burial place of her mind.¹ 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 (“as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left”) 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, but when the garden contains cedar and cypress trees—certainly existent in Texas, but most commonly associated with the Middle-East—our suspicions increase. 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.

Into the garden come Miranda and Paul. “Miranda,” a name employed by Porter in a series of stories, obviously recalls the Miranda of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which made the name almost a synonym for innocence; John Fowles uses it with similar implications in The Collector. “Paul” might call to mind Paul the Apostle, except that it is as yet too early in the story to be certain of his function. At least we know that he is twelve, the conventional age of masculine puberty, the age at which Christ went to teach the elders in the temple. Miranda, at nine, would just be approaching this period of knowledge. This appearance in the garden of a male child and a female of slightly lesser age might also suggest Adam and Eve in a recapitulation of the childhood of our race.

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,” and, “scratching around aimlessly and pleasurably as any young animal,” scoops up “a lump of earth” from the grave. 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 (as several commentators have observed) 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. The ritual exchange, in which each child acquires the desired and appropriate token, is further marked by covetousness on each side. Miranda is “smitten at sight of the ring and wished to have it”; she glances “without covetousness,” however, at the token which Paul, when “he had got the dove in his hand,” identifies triumphantly as a “‘screw head for a coffin!’” Miranda's attraction to the ring seems perfectly natural, for “it fitted perfectly,” but the implication is also that Miranda has yielded to an astutely calculated temptation. Satan, we remember, had relied upon Eve's vanity, and Porter will go on to develop this quality in Miranda. Paul's temptation seems directed toward his role as hunter. His interest in the dove is not yet as a token of immortality, but of death; it is important, therefore, that Paul has been identified as a hunter of doves and that in the breast of this dove there is a “deep round hollow” such as a bullet would make. He is aware, of course, that by means of this aperture the dove is affixed to the coffin, but he does not reflect that the function of this dove is to convey the spirit to its eternal home. Paul's attitude to his new possession exceeds the merely proprietorial: “‘I'll bet nobody else in the world has one like this!’” The desire for supremacy, which was to be derived from the knowledge of good and evil, which brought death into the world, and which would issue shortly in a particularly heinous murder (of Abel, or of the pregnant rabbit), is also a mark of the Fall.

Immediately following their appropriation of the ring and the dove, the children begin to feel uneasy: “‘Maybe we ought to go now,” she said, ‘maybe one of the niggers'll see us and tell somebody.’” 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.” They take up their rifles and go off to hunt, much as our first parents were obliged to do. Informing us next that “Miranda always followed at Paul's heels along the path, obeying instructions,” Porter recalls the order of departure from Eden. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). Miranda has yet to learn of woman's special penalty in childbirth, but it is apparent that she knows already something of the authority of man.

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. Before Miranda's ring-induced fantasies of adult womanhood are described, however, the author supplies a digression concerned largely with the progress of sexual differentiation. In the course of this, Porter keeps us mindful of the Fall by references to sin and Scripture and by informing us that “the motherless family was running down” in part because Miranda's father (and so the children themselves) had been disinherited or “discriminated against” by the grandmother's will. The suggestions here of matriarchy—nearly of a female God—seem related in a compensatory fashion to the insistence (interesting in a woman writer) that before the Fall there was no difference between male and female. A curious and tattered remnant of unisexuality is contained in the “old women of the kind who smoke corn-cob pipes,” who vociferously admire the departed matriarch of Miranda's family, and yet who criticize Miranda for wearing pants. Miranda's father is responsible for this aberration in the attire of his daughter; women such as those who chide Miranda, as the world progressed or fell, themselves took on the burden of policing the decorum of their sex. That Miranda still wears the same clothing as her brother is of course a reflection of her as yet unfallen state; although change is imminent, it seems “simple and natural” to her that she should dress in this way. The progress of female indoctrination is evidenced also in the case of Miranda's older sister, “the really independent and fearless one, in spite of her rather affected ways,” who rides bareback and recklessly about the countryside. Maria's “affected ways” are the function of a proud, adolescent assumption of her role as lady; because she is “the really independent and fearless one,” we are led to acknowledge the power of sexual convention which has begun to operate against her individual disposition and which will have sway also over Miranda.

The authorial insistence upon a gradually developed consciousness (whose movements seem fitful, unsynchronized, or repetitive) is apparent both in the incomplete sexualization of the two sisters and in Miranda's ability to accept (without laboring to reconcile) conflicting data from the world around her. On the one hand, Miranda's “powerful social sense” causes her to regret the dismay of the crones; and, on the other hand, she feels convinced by her father's arguments concerning the suitability of her attire. If the world of experience is chaotic, it does not appear so in a disturbing way to a child of Miranda's age. Similarly, she knows things without knowing how she knows, yet at this stage experiences no itch toward clarification. To establish this complexity of very gradual development—in the consciousness specifically of girls, more generally of children, and finally of human beings at any age—is a basic purpose of the digression. Such complexity, furthermore, is notably congruent with the authorial wheels-within-wheels strategy whereby the history of the race is recapitulated in the history of the individual.

The digression complete, Miranda sees the ring “shining with the serene purity of fine gold on her rather grubby thumb,” and her feelings are directed “against her overalls and sockless feet.” In imagination, she turns from Paul to 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.

Miranda's fantasy is dispelled when Paul shoots the rabbit, and briefly she returns to a child's pleasure in the immediate, amoral moment. An echo of her fantasy, however, is contained in the information that “Uncle Jimbilly knew how to prepare the skins so that Miranda always had fur coats for her dolls, for though she never cared much for her dolls she liked seeing them in fur coats.” Clearly, Miranda's present attraction to the idea of womanhood concerns the luxury rather than the maternity which may await her. Since everything happens by accretion in Porter's story, moreover, the ring has represented only a leap forward and not a beginning in Miranda's consciousness of herself as female.

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.

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. The analogy to her grandmother's transportation of her grandfather's corpse is clear. She has herself moved on through the journey of life toward death: she is now twenty-nine, and, “picking her path among the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a strange country,” she is obviously in exile. All the horror of her own mortality is suddenly returned to Miranda by the raw “flesh,” the wilting, funereal flowers, and the “dyed sugar sweets, in the shapes of all kinds of small creatures”—including “baby rabbits.” 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. The apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus—Miranda is also on a “path”—when “suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven” (Acts 9:3), and he learned exactly what Miranda is shown learning here from the analogous vision of her own brother Paul. Though he was sin-ridden and ignorant of his potential salvation, precisely like Saul of Tarsus, there had come a time both for Paul and for his sister when the final lesson of that Texas day was understood. 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, with its carefully mentioned screw-whorls, implying still another continuing cycle in a dynamically compressed image, 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.

Note

1. William Prater, “‘The Grave’: Form and Symbol,” Studies in Short Fiction, 6 (Spring 1969), 336–338. Prater provides a useful summary of anterior criticism of the story in a footnote on p. 337. Our debts to that criticism will be obvious, but we should add an indebtedness to fruitful classroom investigations of the story over several years.