[In the following essay, Stout examines the reticence of the central character, Miranda, and perceives it as evidence of her wisdom.]

I loved that silence which means freedom from the constant pressure of other minds and other opinions and other feelings, that freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to my own center …

—Porter, “Holiday”

Katherine Anne Porter is well known as a writer of much in little, who speaks by indirection in a style notably concise. It is no surprise, then, that her central character Miranda, who serves not only as center of consciousness but as touchstone of value as well, should also be a character of few words. Indeed, reticence is perhaps the single most characteristic trait we would associate with Miranda. Like her namesake in The Tempest,¹ Miranda marvels at the sometimes brave but always profoundly interesting new world she observes around her. But she does not often follow Shakespeare's Miranda in responding with rapturous exclamation. Instead, it is largely in silence that she ponders the follies and the wonders of this world and attempts to puzzle out their hidden meanings. It is this silence, this reticence, as much as any demonstrated astuteness in her understandings themselves, that Porter offers as evidence of Miranda's wisdom.

Miranda appears by name in four of the seven short stories or sketches that make up The Old Order and in the two short novels Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider. She is usually associated as well with the Laura of “Flowering Judas” and the implicit Laura (to borrow William Nance's term) of “Hacienda.” These are the works that I will consider here, following Miranda's growth from early childhood in The Old Order to fully formed adulthood in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The list could be considerably extended. Both Nance and Jane DeMouy, as well as others, have treated various additional works as Miranda stories, largely because of consistencies in characterization relating chiefly to her reticence or tendency toward withdrawal.² In all her appearances, whether by name or by implication, Miranda is guarded in expressing her own feelings. Perhaps the single most unguarded expression of private emotion in any of the stories is her eager, almost urgent declaration in “The Grave,” “Oh, I want to see.”³ Paradoxically enough, however, that exclamation conveys very little beyond her wish to discover the world and her own feelings about life for herself. Like the brother to whom she speaks, we are left with very little direct knowledge of what those feelings are—only guesses, inferences. To be sure, from Porter's craftsmanly construction of this quiet story of discovery and remembrance, we can infer quite a lot. Such is the nature of Porter's art. In other stories, we are given considerably greater insight into Miranda's thoughts, while her outward expression remains guarded, so that we understand a great deal more than the characters in the story.

In The Old Order we see Miranda as a child who is peculiarly observant, peculiarly thoughtful. In “The Witness,” however, the third of the seven “Old Order” stories and the first in which Miranda appears, she is identified by the narrator as “a quick flighty little girl” (p. 341). It is a surprising description, since the Miranda we come to know later scarcely seems flighty, but an instructive one. “The Witness” centers, not on Miranda, but on Uncle Jimbilly. The children, Miranda and her brother and sister, seem to be little more than incidental; their reactions to Uncle Jimbilly are scarcely even hinted. Accordingly, with great narrative tact, Porter accords this mere child of six only a passing and (as we learn in other stories) superficial judgment. Here we deal in first impressions. The child is lively and inquisitive; such qualities in a small child, inadequately understood by her elders, might well convey flightiness. Thus, the word “flighty,” though it is not the truth of Miranda, is at least related to the truth, to her inquisitiveness and intensity. While the other children are cautious in their approach to Uncle Jimbilly, Miranda questions him without hesitation. She is impulsive in going after answers. As “the little quick one” (she is called “quick” twice in one paragraph) she “wanted to know the worst” (p. 342). Her impulsiveness and inquisitiveness are confirmed in other stories, where she is again a questioner and a listener, wanting to see for herself, to learn all she can, and, always, to make up her own mind. “The Witness,” then, is a more crucial story than it appears. Not only does it establish the social milieu within which Miranda comes to awareness, but it adumbrates her inquisitive, pondering nature and teases us with a characterization of her which is not quite accurate but not altogether off target.

In both “The Circus” and “The Fig Tree,” the fourth and the sixth of the “Old Order” stories, we see the child Miranda's inability to express the emotional turmoil with which she is beset as she encounters experiences beyond her comprehension. Not unwillingness, note, but inability. Her fear both of and for the sake of the spectral circus clown, a fear that seems unreasonable to those around her, and her terror in “The Fig Tree” that she may have buried a baby chick alive, are intensely private, inchoate emotions. Not only are they unshared by those around her, but they separate her from others by causing her to behave in unaccountable and disruptive ways. In both instances the isolating emotions that grip Miranda can be traced to private discoveries and realizations about life and death. No one else in “The Circus” sees the clown as an image of death or the precariousness of life, and Miranda has no means of telling them or even of understanding herself what she sees in him. No one else in “The Fig Tree” worries over the chick's death-in-life or receives Great-Aunt Eliza's absolving lesson that she is not guilty of mistaking a live creature for a dead one and that life and death are often closely related.

Miranda is established, then, as a person isolated by her own quickness and her own inwardness. She sees more than others see, and she feels more, and what she feels cannot be stated even if she wished to. But she is also, later, a person who chooses not to express her feelings. In the final story of the group, “The Grave,” when Miranda is nine, she is not simply “agitated” but “quietly” agitated (p. 367). That is, she has learned to mask her agitation. Why?

The grouping of the “Old Order” pieces as a presumably coherent whole implies that Miranda's reticence is in part an outgrowth of the family's reaction to her wild abandon of fear in “The Circus.” There, and in “The Fig Tree,” they mocked her for being afraid and crying. They had no comprehension of her emotion, and their reactions to her outcries, either cross or condescending, gave her no reason to think a fuller explanation would be sympathetically received even if she could give one. Now, even though the discovery of the unborn rabbits is a moment of intense realization for her, she will not tell her brother what she is feeling lest he, too, mock her for not knowing about birth before. She feigns knowledge just as she feigns self-possession, conveying her agitation only by her deeply characteristic rejection of the pregnant rabbit's fur: “‘I won't have it’” (p. 367).

She will not tell anyone else, either. Her brother Paul's insistence that she not tell is easier than he can guess for her to comply with. The impact of the discovery remains hers alone. Because it does indeed remain, the sight of brightly colored candy animals in a Mexican market years later summons, by her own process of association, the earlier experience. Again the moment is both isolated and isolating. In the midst of the teeming market, she alone knows of that earlier moment and she alone realizes the “mingled sweetness and corruption,” the preciousness and the suggestion of death, of the life-images held up before her. Like the buried chick of “The Fig Tree,” they speak to her of death in life. Characteristically, she tells no one; the realization is unexpressed. Her vision of her smiling brother is only a vision. She has apparently grown apart from him, leaving him locked in her past. Even the ambiguous smile she remembers indicates an isolated, unexpressed feeling of his own. At the end of “The Grave,” Miranda is left with her own memories and realizations, which she seems neither now nor in the past ever to have communicated to anyone.

That Miranda is placed in Mexico at the end of “The Grave” (not Mexico by name, but certainly Mexico nonetheless) is one reason to identify her with both Laura of “Flowering Judas” and the unnamed protagonist of “Hacienda.” In both stories, Laura (by name or by implication) is Miranda-like in her keen observation and in her reserve. The notably intense lyrical passage in “Hacienda” which begins, “Some day I shall make a poem to kittens washing themselves in the morning” and ends, after many ringing parallel phrases, “to all thriving creatures making themselves cleanly and comely to the greater glory of life” (p. 139) is a meditation. It is thought, not spoken. Within, Laura is intensely responsive and emotional; without, she is detached, inexpressive. She hardly speaks in the whole of either story. In part this is because Porter's interest, here as elsewhere, is in what Beverly Gross terms the “perceptual reality” of her character's life.⁴ As Gross points out, it is also because of the isolating problem of having to speak in a language that is foreign to her. But there are other reasons as well.

Laura's reason for maintaining silence or near-silence is largely one of self-preservation. In both stories, she moves in an atmosphere of real danger and senses that if she says too much she will evoke some terrible vengeance. The politically powerful Braggioni who serenades her so repulsively in “Flowering Judas” is not only corrupt but “cruel to everyone” so that “nobody” has the “courage … to offend him” (pp. 90–91). In “Hacienda” the implied danger is economic more than physical. But in either case the Miranda-like character does not dare to reveal how deeply she despises those around her. At a more profound level, however, the danger she fears is loss of control. DeMouy's comment that “if a woman cannot control her body, she cannot control her life” is certainly applicable.⁵ Clearly, Laura fears sexual invasion in both “Flowering Judas” and “Hacienda.” But her fear of giving free rein to her emotions is even greater. The detachment manifested as near-silence is a kind of discipline in stoicism, which she cultivates as a bulwark against the “disaster she fears, though she cannot name it” (p. 97). Thus her reticence is a sign of a deeply pessimistic view of life. She lives in a perpetual angst, not only about what is coming, but about the possibility that when it comes she will be emotionally devastated. If she can maintain her stoical reserve, she will have something of herself left.

Thus one motivation for Laura's extreme reticence appears to be self-preservation combined with neurotic dread of the seething id. But there is another dimension to it. In a faltering and perhaps finally self-defeating way, she is trying to learn the traditionally Christian way of how, in T. S. Eliot's words, “to care and not to care.” She is trying to reconcile involvement with detachment, to be in the world and yet not of it.⁶ This paradox lies at the heart of many readers' sense that “Flowering Judas” is steeped in religious symbolism. That Laura's effort lacks balance is obvious; she learns the lesson of detachment more easily than the lesson of involvement. But evidence of her involvement is present as well, chiefly in her relation to the children at her school and to the political prisoners she visits.

Even more than the nameless “disaster” ahead or the possibility of emotional upheaval, Laura fears that she will become like those around her, the shallow movie makers and the childish, doll-like Julia of “Hacienda,” all of them utterly impervious to the real lives of the Mexican people, or the corrupt Braggioni of “Flowering Judas.” It is this aspect of her fear that relates to Porter's use of reticence as a measure of ethical value. When Braggioni tells Laura that he and she “are more alike” than she realizes, she feels “a slow chill.” Though this chill is associated, too, with her “purely physical sense of danger,” she prefers “any kind of death” to being “‘as callous, as incomplete’” as Braggioni (p. 93). Her greatest fear, then, even greater than the fear of death, is that she will be unable to hold out against the corruption around her and will lose her very self. If there is a certain self-righteous egotism about this—and this is part of the reader's ambivalence toward Laura—there is also a real humility in that she sees and acknowledges her liability to the same weaknesses that have destroyed others.

It is this respect that the two Laura stories relate most clearly to Noon Wine. The representatives of the corrupt society around Laura run on in endless talk and deal continually in exaggeration, like the big talkers of Noon Wine. Resisting their habit of lax, empty talk is a way of resisting their laxity of character. Through the “double vision” of Porter's supple narrative point of view,⁷ we see how Laura reins in her speech as a means of self-definition. Her reticence is an effort at moral, as well as physical and emotional, self-preservation.

Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, two of Porter's indisputably finest works, are the two fullest explorations of the character Miranda. If Pale Horse, Pale Rider provides our most intensive view of her as an adult, Old Mortality offers the most extensive tracing of how and why she becomes the person she is. In three emphatically separate parts, Old Mortality takes Miranda from the age of eight (one year younger than in the main action of “The Grave”), when she is deeply immersed in her family and its complex, highly romanticized past, to the age of eighteen, as she returns home for the funeral of one of the most notable avatars of that past and tries to come to grips with both her separation from the family and her continuing involvement with them. Emerging from this confrontation and the struggle to clarify her own feelings as a newly independent grown child, she will go on to endure the solitary loss and disillusionment that come in Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

In the Miranda of Old Mortality, Part I, we recognize the lively, inquisitive child of “The Witness.” Once again she is quick to pursue information but reluctant to verbalize her feelings and judgments on what she learns. For example, in a frequently quoted passage on the disparity between their father's statement that “there were never any fat women the family” and Maria and Miranda's certain knowledge of several women in the family who were fat (p. 174), we see Miranda's growing understanding of his tendency to romanticize the past. The very phrases reflect her mental groping toward such awareness: “Well, great-aunt Keziah was famous for her heft, and wasn't she in the family?” But it is a mental groping. Her citation of the great-aunt is not said aloud. She observes, she puts observations together, she reaches tentative conclusions, but she does not discuss her conclusions with anyone; she keeps them to herself. Or again, we hear the two girls' questions about Aunt Amy—a series of “Tell me again …” “Why wouldn't she …” “Was she really …”—and we hear answers (p. 176), but the girls' cogitations about what they are told and what they observe, for instance in pictures of Amy, are given without quotation marks, as unspoken thoughts.

It is not entirely clear that the girls' restraint about voicing their reactions is altogether a matter of personality. Issues of decorum may be involved as well. Their elders would very likely have found it more acceptable for children to ask questions than to voice opinions. It is understood, for instance, that they may go with their grandmother to the attic and look through family keepsakes only so long as they “were very quiet and touched nothing until it was offered” and so long as they remembered that the grandmother's tears were not to be “noticed or mentioned” (p. 175). Assertiveness on the part of little girls was surely not encouraged. But decorum would not seem to account for Miranda's refraining from telling her grandmother that she, too, “felt melancholy” after these sessions (p. 175), or for her hoping “secretly” that she would grow up to look like Amy (p. 177). In this Amy-adulating family, such an aspiration, however contrary to probability, could only be met with approval.

Part II of the story (or, in Porter's terminology, short novel)⁸ does not at first seem concerned with the Amy-olatry that dominates Part I. The narrative shifts abruptly from the keepsakes of Amy, which “seemed to have no place in the world” (p. 193), to the present situation of Maria and Miranda. The family past, it seems, is past—it was Part I; this is now—Part II. We notice, though, that parallels with the past keep turning up. The girls, now ten and fourteen, also seem to have “no place in the world.” They are banished to a convent school, “immured,” as they say, behind convent walls. And even there, in the discipline of their unworldly retreat, they are confronted with the problem which bothered them in Part I and which also forms the broadest tension between I and II, the problem of the disparity between romanticized legend and sober fact. In the melodramatic anti-Catholic fiction they enjoy reading, immurement in a convent is a lurid and direly perilous fate; in the fact of their experience, life at the convent school is simply dull. We must assume that it is to the former, the highly romanticized life, that Miranda aspires in avowing an “ambition to be a nun.” At various other times, she hopes to be a tightrope walker (imaginatively conquering her fear of the white-faced tightrope-walking clown in The Old Order), a jockey (asserting her resistance to negative comparisons with Aunt Amy's Spanish style riding), and a pilot (resisting constraint on her freedom of movement). Similarly, her momentary insistence that she wants to be a nun is a way of asserting dominion over the confinement of school, by claiming to choose what is in fact imposed on her. As the convent sisters correctly perceive, she has no vocation for so stringent a discipline as the life of a religious.

In the early pages of Part II, ten-year-old Miranda seems to be not reticent at all, but highly demonstrative, vindicating her early image as a lively, even flighty child. She falls flat on the floor in “despair” over arithmetic. She announces her vocation. She shares with Maria the romanticizing fantasy of being “immured.” She forthrightly complains to her father that he should have told her he was coming so she could enjoy looking forward to his visit. But in fact her real reticence is being manifested and indeed reinforced even here. The things she is talkative about are all relatively shallow; the things that engage her more deeply she does not discuss. Even with Maria she does not share everything, since Maria, it seems, can't keep a secret and is at any rate a more tame, or “prissy” (p. 197) child, presumably liable to be shocked by Miranda's wilder ideas. When serious discoveries are made, as they are later in Part II, Miranda thinks her own thoughts, privately. As to her histrionics, they are merely a means of adding interest to her life during periods of boredom. Furthermore, when she does indulge in open displays, she encounters lessons in restraint. Her open avowal of her idea of being a nun evokes “barely veiled” (a fine pun!) disapproval. Her complaint to her father brings a reminder of past misbehavior and punishment. Unhappiness over being punished has to be a “secret mourning” because “if one mourned too noisily, it simply meant another bad mark against deportment” (p. 195). Both through her own discoveries and through external pressures, Miranda's exuberant personality is growing more toward inwardness.

The girls' excursion to the race track, where they at last meet the legendary Uncle Gabriel, is a great watershed of discovery for Miranda, allowing her to bring into focus a cluster of uncertainties intimated to the reader throughout Parts I and II. All during this enlightening event, she preserves her characteristic reticence in dealing with her important feelings, while continuing to play the impulsive “lively” child when lesser issues are at stake.

Gabriel, the girls see, is “a shabby fat man with bloodshot blue eyes” (p. 197). Wordlessly, staring, they ask each other if this can really be the man they have heard about for years. Wordlessly, yet the questions they ask with their eyes appear in quotation marks: “‘Can that be our Uncle Gabriel? … Is that Aunt Amy's handsome romantic beau? Is that the man who wrote the poem about Aunt Amy?’” A fourth question, though, is not enclosed in quotation marks: “Oh, what did grown-up people mean when they talked, anyway?” The first three, though unspoken, are communications. The last is Miranda's private wondering about the general and very serious problem of memory, fantasy, and truth. Preoccupied by the puzzle of Uncle Gabriel's disillusioning appearance and manner, the girls fall silent until the race begins. Then again they are demonstrative, both of them “screaming and clapping their hands” and shedding “tears of joy” (pp. 198–99). But when Miranda sees the brutal fact behind the victory, that Gabriel's filly had been run when she shouldn't and now pays the price in snoring breath and “two thick red rivulets” of blood “stiffening her tender mouth and chin” (p. 199), she is revolted by the cruelty of the race and by her own complicity in it, through having cheered. Her disgust and shame, a more serious and long-lasting emotion than her victory elation, she keeps to herself, without a word.

Miranda does risk asking her father one question about her multi-faceted discovery—“‘Uncle Gabriel's a drunkard, isn't he?’”—but is told harshly, and quite typically, “‘Hush.’” At that rebuff, both girls feel “resentment” but rather than complain of their father's “obvious injustice” they merely “loosed their hands from his and moved away coldly, standing together in silence” (p. 200). Taken to meet Uncle Gabriel's wife, Miranda observes every detail of the shabby rooming house and Miss Honey's barely repressed anger. She sits in silence, making her own assessment of the situation. Back in the carriage, she pursues her earlier question about Gabriel's drinking, then abruptly bursts out with a rejection of the ambition she had never before admitted: “‘I've decided I'm not going to be a jockey, after all’” (p. 205). But she says not a word about her disturbing awareness of the hatred and degradation glimpsed in her brief view of Uncle Gabriel and Miss Honey. Once again, she speaks what is less important and holds back what is more.⁹

At the start of Part III, the eighteen-year-old Miranda encounters Cousin Eva Parrington on a train en route to Gabriel's funeral. Cousin Eva recalls Miranda as “‘a lively little girl … and very opinionated’” (p. 207). It is a somewhat ironic comment, since, if “opinionated” may be taken to mean having her own ideas, Eva can have no conception of how opinionated Miranda really is. Throughout the long conversation between the two cousins, Miranda's characteristically brief remarks are counterpointed to her considerably more elaborated thoughts, both memories and a running inner commentary on Cousin Eva and the issues she raises. Porter calls attention to the counterpointing of words and thoughts in a particular sequence that might otherwise seem rather pointless, though it also, perhaps, demonstrates how well Miranda understands this aging cousin of hers.

…“They didn't do you much good, those parties, dear Cousin Eva,” thought Miranda.

“They didn't do me much good, those parties,” said Cousin Eva aloud as if she were a mind-reader.

(p. 208)

The reader is put on notice: thinking and saying are being played off against each other. Miranda's reaction to the sequence is characteristic. Her “head swam for a moment with fear that she had herself spoken aloud.” It is a natural enough fear; one would not wish to offend so touchy and pathetic a person as Cousin Eva. But it is a fear that reminds us of Laura's cautiousness in “Flowering Judas” and “Hacienda.” For Miranda, to speak is to make oneself vulnerable.

While Miranda talks guardedly with Cousin Eva, her thoughts are busy with the things she cannot or will not say: that if she speaks meekly she may disarm this strange old lady's ferocity; that Cousin Eva looks very old for the age she must be; that she should try to make Cousin Eva feel valued by the younger generation, though something in her resists it; that the Parringtons were known for their love of money; and so on, as she compares her present impressions with her memories and the things she has been hearing all her life. At their most urgent, as if they were about to break the bonds of caution and burst into speech, her thoughts assume quotation marks: “‘Oh, must I ever be like that?’” (p. 208) and “‘My mother was nothing of the sort’” (p. 217). These strongest thoughts, however, are precisely the ones she does not even come close to expressing, though she does venture to correct certain details of Eva's version of the story—that is, of the story of Aunt Amy.

Miranda's thinking throughout the long section which recounts her conversation with Cousin Eva brings her to three very important realizations, none of which she states. First, she realizes that Cousin Eva hates Amy, dead though Amy is. Miranda is not yet sufficiently free of the myth of beautiful womanhood to understand why, but she knows it is true. Second, she realizes that Cousin Eva's personal unpleasantness, or deformity, is somehow tied up with her very real strength of character and foresees a like duality in herself. And last, she realizes that Cousin Eva, who denounces the tyranny of the family, is not only a pitiable person but a kindred spirit, a sister.¹⁰ This last realization she conveys to Cousin Eva, not in speech, but with a spontaneous kiss.

Beyond even these realizations is the larger realization unifying the entire work. That, too, is never voiced by Miranda, not because she will not or dare not say it, but because she does not yet understand it well enough herself. Here we see the direct connection between the Miranda of Old Mortality and the Miranda of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Old Mortality has been concerned throughout with the disparity between romanticized legends and plain truths. The children have been puzzled by that seeming disparity, and as they grow older they have realized, at least in part, that they can and must rely on their own perceptions as correctives of the handed-down legend. It would appear at first reading that Part III, the encounter with Cousin Eva, at last presents a coherent summary of the plain truth as opposed to the romanticized falsehood. It would seem to be a clear case of correcting the one by the other. But it is not that simple. We realize as Cousin Eva talks that her own version is also a romanticized distortion. Naturally, it differs from the version given by Miranda's father and the others. As Liberman says, she “substitutes one unacceptable myth for another.”¹¹ Cousin Eva's motive, unconscious as it is, is to magnify the unhealthiness and the destructiveness of Amy's story, while theirs was to magnify its glamour. But it is a distortion and a dramatization, all the same.

This much Miranda understands. But that is not the whole wisdom of Old Mortality. The Miranda of Part III is not yet able to reach a genuinely realistic view, because she views experience from a vantage of insufficient maturity. At eighteen years of age, she is still excessively hopeful, excessively sure of her own freedom from the distorted vision of her elders. Watching the easy friendliness of Cousin Eva and her father, after they have gotten off the train, stung by his coldness to her merely because she has asserted herself by getting married, she turns against Eva after all and walks behind them “in silence” (p. 219), wordlessly disavowing them both. Drawing into herself and her own thoughts, concealing from her heedless elders the turmoil of emotion she feels, she thinks to herself that she will be rid of them, she will leave off worrying about “the legend of the past” and instead “know the truth” about her own experience. But her ability to do so is no more certain than Eva's ability to correct Harry or Gabriel's romanticized view. Promising herself “I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself” (p. 221), Miranda is sunk in a romanticism of her own, the Byronic exaltation of the solitary rebellious spirit.¹²

It is not finally a happy romanticism; she is shut in bitterness while Eva and Harry go on chatting comfortably. But Miranda's mistake is not the last word either. The voice of an older and wiser Miranda, looking back on the eighteen-year-old's romanticism masking itself as truth, pronounces on “her arrogance, her pride” and comments that her silent promise to herself to know her own truth has been made “in her hopefulness, in her ignorance” (pp. 219, 221). It is on this note of mingled triumph and poignance that the story ends.

Old Mortality neither fully vindicates not fully repudiates Miranda's withdrawal into her own counsel. If at the end she appears bitter and alienated, while the self-deluded Eva and Harry are secure in their places and free to be “precisely themselves” with “perfect naturalness” (p. 219), there is still no denying that their vision has been false. We prefer Miranda's eagerness to know things for what they are. The fullest vision of the story, fully affirmed in that it is at one with the voice of the narrator, is that of the older Miranda, looking back on her eighteen-year-old self and pronouncing herself mistaken. But the path to that older, affirmed self lies through the eighteen-year-old deluded self. The two are the same, and Miranda's habit of keeping her own counsel is part of her essential character, affirmed as the story's positive center.

The Miranda of Pale Horse, Pale Rider brings to fullness the stoical reserve we have seen developing from her early childhood, in The Old Order and Old Mortality. Set near the end of World War I during the devastating flu epidemic of that period, the work opens with a dream of death and ends, or nearly ends, with a dream-like hallucinatory experience of near-death. What follows, Miranda's reawakening to a life that seems to her scarcely worth living, shows us the end product of all her family background and experiences, the person she is and will be. Between the two death-dreams (the latter more than a dream, and very autobiographical on Porter's part) we are given the two-day period during which Miranda pursues her work as a newspaper reporter and suffers the onslaught of the flu, then the period of her illness. Intertwined with both, she experiences what is apparently the one real love of her life. Beset by a devastating combination of dire forces—the flu epidemic, the war, the forced patriotism all around her, shortage of money, her sense that her love is doomed—she has no refuge but style, her manner or way of suffering them. She becomes, in a sense, the Hemingway hero as woman.¹³ The way she chooses, the only way she can choose, is the way of the stiff upper lip. By the same token, she does not dare to give open expression to her delight in her sweetheart, Adam, lest she tempt fate and call down the disasters that loom all around them. It is a futile caution, of course. The disasters fall anyway. The flu she has felt coming on is so serious she almost dies, and Adam does die—from flu caught while nursing her. At the end the only resource with which she faces the rest of her life is her long discipline in stoical repression.

It is because of the pervasive emphasis on style—not writing style, but style in the sense of overall manner—that Pale Horse, Pale Rider has such a quality of artifice or play. There is a great disparity between the flip poses adopted by both Adam and Miranda and the real emotions we know they feel. Their speech becomes a self-protective device or mask. As DeMouy notes, they “engage in ironic exchanges that force them to laugh—rather then cry—over the war. … They cloak their despair under a patina of slick talk. Their careless conversational patter not only hides their serious feelings, it eliminates the possibility of their voicing them.”¹⁴ The comment is perceptive and well-founded; however, Adam and Miranda's patter is not at all careless, but very careful. It is a calculated strategy that works in several ways at once. By talking about relatively trivial matters, they hope to distract themselves and each other from their anxieties. By speaking in a light, ironic tone they manage to convey their anxieties without having to drag them out in distressing obviousness, knowing they are helpless to resolve them anyway. By mocking disaster they attempt to deaden themselves so they won't suffer so much when the worst blow, whatever that may be, comes. And most important, perhaps, by maintaining their flip tone and holding themselves to crisp understatement, they distance themselves from the falsifying cant all around them.

In all of these ways, Miranda's speech in Pale Horse, Pale Rider is an outgrowth and an intensification of the patterns of guardedness established from early childhood. The things that matter most she keeps inside. She tells no one about her death dream and is very cautions—rightly so, given the political situation—about expressing her disaffection for the war effort and the entire war mentality. When she does once risk speaking to Adam about “what war does to the mind and heart” (p. 294) she comes up against a masculine chauvinism she can never share: “‘If I didn't go,’ said Adam, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘I couldn't look myself in the face’” (p. 295). At the end, she leaves unspoken her sense that she would just as soon have died. Most poignantly, when she reads the letter informing her that Adam is dead, she does not even mention the bad news but merely asks the nurse, “‘I've been here a long time, haven't I?’” (p. 316). Porter never allows us to think that Miranda does not really care about these things. Rather, we see her caring so much that she fears she cannot tolerate the intensity of her caring if she once starts to let it surge forth. It is rather like keeping the finger in the dike.

Actually, Miranda does talk to Adam more openly than we might expect, given the character of her speech as we see it in the other stories. That she does so is one of the strongest evidences we have that Adam is indeed to be taken as the one real love she has ever had. Even so, she never tells him about her family ties and the web of family traditions within which she has struggled to find herself, which we know is one of the most important elements in her life. And she tells him directly that she loves him only when she is feverish and knows she may die. Moreover, when she does set aside her reticence so far as to tell Adam her fears and concerns, she greatly underplays them.

Examples of the ironic underplaying kept up by both Miranda and Adam are abundant; we need consider only a few. At breakfast, Miranda says she feels “‘rotten’” and it can't be “‘just the weather, and the war’”—as if the war were a minor point. Adam replies that the weather is “‘perfect’”—by which we think it must be bad—and the war “‘simply too good to be true’” (p. 282). When he tells her that the average life of a sapping party in combat is “‘just nine minutes,’” she quips, “‘Make it ten and I'll come along.’” They might almost be a vaudeville team, except that their snappy patter is too grim at the core. They laugh about the ludicrousness of someone's having computed such a statistic as the sappers' nine minutes until Miranda wipes her eyes and remarks, only too lightly, “‘My, it's a funny war, isn't it? I laugh every time I think about it’” (p. 283).

Adam and Miranda are, as DeMouy puts it, “people with style who know how to take the ‘right tone.’” When Miranda becomes really ill and Adam has to cope with the unpretty chores of nursing, she must be not only miserable but embarrassed, yet they both maintain an elaborate, jocular politeness, as if her disordered bodily functions were little lapses of manners. After swallowing her pills, when she “instantly vomited them up,” presumably on her bed clothes, she says, “‘Do excuse me,’… beginning to laugh. ‘I'm so sorry’” (p. 300). Making light of the hospital nun's refusal to admit her, she says, “‘I think that's abominably rude and mean, don't you?’” When she then “sat up with a wild gesture of both arms, and began to retch again, violently,” Adam jocularly misapplies military commands, “‘Hold it, as you were’” (p. 301). It is hard to imagine conducting a bout of flu more elegantly. Later in the night Miranda gallantly suggests they “‘tell each other what we meant to do’” (p. 302).

This tightlipped irony sets Adam and Miranda apart as the admirable few among a crowd of longwinded ranters. They speak ironically but tell the truth while the propagandists and unthinking war supporters around them speak flatly but falsely. The contrast is drawn in four particularly telling instances, set in two balancing pairs. First, the two government men who pressure Miranda to buy bonds speak in prefabricated jingoistic phrases of “‘the Huns overrunning martyred Belgium’” and “‘our American boys fighting and dying in Belleau Wood’” without the least real care about the soldiers fighting and dying. Miranda, who does care, represses an urge to say what she “‘really thought,’” namely, “‘to hell with this filthy war’” and confines herself to the unvarnished realities of what she can and can't afford. Second, when she goes on an excursion to a military hospital with “loot” for the soldiers, the other girls chatter vapidly about there being “so many good-looking men … the cutest things you ever saw” and how “frightfully hard on them, the poor dears” it must be to be wounded and hospitalized when they are “all crazy to get overseas and into the trenches as quickly as possible” (pp. 275–76). Miranda, embarrassed by the “idiocy” of the whole thing, hears the “determined,” that is, forced, “clang” in their meaningless chatter, enough to “freeze the blood.” She will not pretend to a good cheer and affection she does not feel, but tells one of the girls straight out, “‘I hate it’” (p. 277). We applaud her honesty.

The second pair of contrasting instances also involves first a government propagandist, then a chattering girl. At the theater, a between-acts Liberty Bond salesman brings out the same cant phrases as the two professional patriots of the morning. Porter's presentation of this “same old musty speech” in blocks of disconnected phrases emphasizes the empty predictability of what is being said: “give till it hurts—our noble boys Over There—Big Berthas—the death of civilization—innocent babes hoisted on Boche bayonets—your child and my child” (p. 293). In contrast, Miranda and Adam comment tersely, “‘Oh, why won't he hush?’” and “‘He's getting into the home stretch.’” Miranda, seeing through the speaker's manipulative rhetoric, wishes she could demand, “Coal, oil, iron, gold, international finance, why don't you tell us about them, you little liar?” We remember that in her own journalism she will “never learn” to play the game of fakery but goes on “panning” performers when she believes they deserve it (pp. 287–89). She is a truth-teller in a world of false speakers. After the play and after Miranda finishes her review, she and Adam go to a night club where they witness the last of the four object lessons in true and false communication. While wishing she could tell Adam how fearful and in pain she is, she sees two couples at neighboring tables. One couple sits “without a word” while the girl silently cries. At the other table the girl goes on and on with a long, shabby story full of “he said” and “I said” and slang phrases like “fresh,” “hooch,” “strut my stuff.” The story breaks off in mid-sentence, so meaningless it doesn't deserve completion.

The two pairs of incidents, framing Miranda and Adam's day together, clearly distinguish them from both the carelessly chattering crowd and the manipulative falsifiers. It is this contrast that sets the stage for the scene of Miranda's illness, with its ironic, chipper gallantry. The two of them are appropriately shut off from the disordered world outside by the walls of Miranda's room, but are unable, for all their charm, to resist the forces of disease and death. We find it entirely believable that Miranda, with her habit of directness and terseness, would elicit the special friendship of her doctor and nurse. When the ambulance comes to take her away, she is still the child of “The Witness,” who “wanted to know the worst” without putting it off. That tough-mindedness commands respect and honesty in return. “‘Well, Dr. Hildesheimer,’” she says, “‘aren't we in a pretty mess?’ ‘We certainly are,’ said Dr. Hildesheimer” (p. 306).

It is clear that Miranda is in some ways a deprived and incomplete person, largely negative in her impulses. Particularly in “Flowering Judas,” the emotionally constricted Miranda-like Laura conveys a sense of sterility and stasis.¹⁵ At the same time, she provides the only value-center in the world of the story. At the end of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Miranda is still an ambiguous character. We wish that she could bring herself to confront what she feels more fully and to say what she means more directly. We sense a trace of Prufrock in the dandyism of her preparations for what appears to be a death-in-life existence. Indeed, in the final paragraph Porter underscores this Prufrockian quality with verbal echoes of Eliot's poem—the phrases “empty streets” and the concluding sentence “Now there would be time for everything” (p. 317). (“There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Miranda, too, is concerned about preparing an acceptable face; she asks for cold cream and powder and wonders if she needs eye shadow.)

Yet if Miranda is a less complete, less fully alive person than she might have been, we cannot, for all that, withhold our admiration. She and Laura are not offered as images of human perfection, but are affirmed as persons of integrity, of real character. We prefer them to anyone around them. In part, this is simply because we share their point of view; Porter's preferred narrative strategy is from inside a particular character's perceptions. But in part, too, it is precisely because they do hold themselves so aloof, because they do cry out with “the very cells of their flesh”—though not with their voices—the “one holy and talismanic word,” No (p. 97). What they resist, what they say no to, is a corrupt society that deals in falsehood. Porter has drawn both Miranda and Laura in the clearest possible counterpoise to that society. Eudora Welty, summing up Miranda's character, has called her “lovely and sentient and tragic.”¹⁶ The word “tragic,” I believe, should be given its full weight. She is a noble character, doomed, and inevitably doomed, by forces both outside herself and, to a lesser extent, within.

Welty goes on, in the same essay, to characterize Porter's work as a whole as being “not so much a stand against the romantic as such, as a repudiation of the false.” Miranda and Laura, functioning as Porter's narrative centers of awareness in every story where they appear, serve also as the voices of that repudiation of the false. Porter does not use her stories as wrappers for essays, sermons, or editorials. To the extent that her fiction offers an ethical “statement,” that statement is developed from within, in the fabric of imagery and detail and in the mind and voice of her center of consciousness. In Miranda's speech, what she says or doesn't say and how she says it or how it compares to what she thinks, we hear Porter's standard of judgment, both of everything in the story external to Miranda and of Miranda herself. In the spareness of Miranda's speech and her refusal either to mouth cant and nonsense or to spread out her ego's wounds in swollen billows of special pleading, we find the ethical measure and center of Porter's fiction.

Notes

1. Joan Givner cites a letter in which Porter traces Miranda's name to an early lover's playful reference to himself as Ariel and Porter as Miranda. Givner seems to offer the letter as refutation of critics' assumption that the name was taken from The Tempest, but it means only that the derivation was indirect. Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 170.

2. Chiefly because of the tendency toward renunciation, Nance identifies “The Leaning Tower” as an implicit Miranda story as well—even though the protagonist is male. See Nance, Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (The U. of North Carolina Press, 1963). This kind of disregard for the gender of her central, and clearly autobiographical, character has been typical of Porter criticism until very recently. One of the most influential critical texts on Porter, James William Johnson's “Another Look at Katherine Anne Porter,” Virginia Quarterly Review 36 (1960): 598–613, offers an overall mythos of Porter's work, or as Mark Schorer put it in 1962 in his Afterward to the Signet Books Pale Horse, Pale Rider, “the grand plot that, taken together, the entire body of her work enacts.” The passage, quoted by Schorer, who terms it a “brilliant analysis,” merits quotation again in full: “The child is born into a world seemingly ordered and reasonable but it is in fact chaotic, ridiculous, and doubt-ridden (‘The Old Order’). He learns at an early age that he is an atomistic creature, often unloved (‘The Downward Path’), and that the delightful spectacle of life masks fear, hatred, and bitterness (‘The Circus’). He discovers that life and love must end in death (‘The Grave,’ ‘The Fig Tree’). He must inevitably reject his heritage as lies and his family as hostile aliens (Old Mortality), but when he tries to substitute something else in their place, he is driven back by his own weakness to what he has been conditioned to (‘Marie Concepción,’ ‘Magic’). If he makes the break with the past and tries to replace the lost old love with a new, he is doomed to despair (Pale Horse, Pale Rider). If he tries to substitute another heritage for his own, he finds it full of evil (‘The Leaning Tower’); or he discovers that he has lost his power of love through denying his own tradition (‘Flowering Judas’). There is nothing for him to cling to but his desperate belief in his own courage and integrity (‘Theft’) and what little of love and certainty he has in life (‘The Cracked Looking Glass’). But life is senselessly cruel (‘He’), full of frustration and contention (‘Hope,’ ‘That Tree,’ ‘A Day's Work’); and it ends in annihilation and the extinction of all hope (‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’). Such is Miss Porter's fictional philosophy.” The problem is that in fact the protagonists of 12 out of these 17 stories are female. Are we to believe that it makes no difference in Old Mortality that Miranda is a girl and that she defines herself chiefly as against Aunt Amy, Cousin Eva, and Miss Honey? or that in “The Grave” she can perceive parallels between herself and the slain pregnant rabbit? or that the older Miranda of Pale Horse, Pale Rider cannot go away to the Army to die, like Adam, but must wait, helplessly and passively, and watch a generation of young men slaughtered? or that she can perceive the empty mockery of the old chauvinistic myths of masculine heroism which Adam, who is caught up in them, can never fully escape? Yet Johnson writes “he.” Fortunately, such a masculinization of Porter's work has been ably challenged by Jane Flanders and Jane DeMouy.

3. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 366. Subsequent references shown parenthetically.

4. Beverly Gross, “The Poetic Narrative: A Reading of ‘Flowering Judas,’” Style 2 (1968): 131.

5. Jane Krause DeMouy, Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction (The U. of Texas Press, 1983), p. 117.

6. Robert Penn Warren comments in his Introduction to Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 9, that “the most powerful tension in her work is between the emotional involvement and the detachment.”

7. Gross, “Poetic Narrative,” p. 132.

8. It is characteristic of Porter's concern for simplicity and directness in language that she deplored the use of the terms novelette and novella.

9. For a provocative interpretation of the horse-race sequence and its connection to Parts I and III of “Old Mortality,” see Jane Flanders, “Katherine Anne Porter and the Ordeal of Southern Womanhood,” Southern Literary Journal 9 (1976): 47–60.

10. The word “sister,” despite its ring of 70's feminism, is not merely retrospective reading but is justified by Eva's somewhat curious remark, “‘Tomorrow we'll be at home again’” (p. 217), as if they had grown up in the same house, as sisters.

11. M. M. Liberman, Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (Wayne State U. Press, 1971), p. 48.

12. Nance comments that Miranda is “more romantic than she realizes with her vision of unobstructed autonomy and self-sufficiency” (p. 130). Also, DeMouy points out that Miranda's marriage was “an impetuous elopement” (p. 157)—that is, rather Amy-like.

13. J. A. Ward comments in American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (Louisiana State U. Press, 1985), pp. 65–66 and 56, that Hemingway “consistently identifies speech with falsity, and encumbers his protagonists with a surrounding chorus of banal voices that urge sentiment, manliness, and responsibility.” In contrast, “when the conversation reaches a significant issue” Hemingway's center of consciousness “ceases to talk”; he has “a compulsion to be honest” that makes him “monosyllabic.” Ward could as well have written these words about Porter's center of consciousness. Indeed, her contemporaneity with the male artists discussed by Ward suggests that Porter's own moral and stylistic standards emphasizing reserve and inwardness are a part of a larger modernist pattern.

14. DeMouy, Porter's Women, p. 161.

15. Joan Givner is perhaps excessively severe, however, in commenting that “by remaining passive Laura was drawn into serving the evil ends of her suitor Braggioni” and even blaming her for somehow having caused Braggioni's deterioration “from ideality to opportunity” (pp. 217–19).

16. Eudora Welty, “The Eye of the Story,” The Yale Review 55 (1965): 265–74; rpt. Robert Penn Warren, ed., Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays.