SOURCE: “The Achievement of the Miranda Stories,” in Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism, Louisiana State University Press, 1993, pp. 146–81.

[In the following essay, Brinkmeyer traces Porter's growing interest in familial identity and Southern heritage and determines its effect on her fiction.]

Katherine Anne Porter's developing interest in memory and the southern tradition signaled a profound fascination with her upbringing and family, immediate and ancestral. Her relationship with her family, particularly with her father, had been and would always remain ambivalent and strained, with her feelings fluctuating wildly, from outright scorn to nostalgic affection. Even during the late teens and early twenties when Porter was portraying herself as a fashionable rebel who had freed herself from and turned her back on her family, she nonetheless frequently sent endearing letters back home. In a Christmas letter dated December 21, 1916, to her father, she wrote, referring to her life in Dallas: “And then, Youngun, you know all this would be dust and ashes in my mouth if it wasn't for knowing that my Darling Old Dad and Sissers and my one goat of a bruvver are all getting along so fat and fine, making money and keeping well. If it wasn't for that I would want to die” (McKeldin). More gushing was a letter to her sister Gay, written from Mexico on December 31, 1920, and apparently meant for her entire family. “Since I saw you,” she wrote, “I have been working too hard, and living too hard, to make any sort of record of it …, but I love all of you, I do love all of you terribly, and you are the very background and foundation of my life, which I cannot get away from, and which I would not get away from—if I lost any part of it, I would lose too much!” (McKeldin). At the other extreme, she frequently bitterly attacked members of her family and their treatment of her during her childhood, even during periods, particularly the thirties and forties, when she was elsewhere waxing nostalgic about the old ways of the sunny South and her upbringing. In a letter dated October 11, 1933, addressed to “Gay and the rest: specially Dad,” she lashed out: “As for being a family to me, when were you ever? I should have been dead in a ditch years ago if I had depended on my family to exhibit any of the old-timey characteristics” (McKeldin). To her nephew Paul Porter, she wrote on November 8, 1951, some of her harshest words on her family: “Do you know, what is the most unhappy thing in my life? That I do not have one single good or gay or sweet memory connected with my family; it has just been one single long unbroken line of painfulness in one way or another” (McKeldin).

Despite this ongoing ambivalence about and fluctuating feelings toward her family, Porter by the late twenties was examining both her origins and the family's with a seriousness that she had not shown previously. Even if she had written to Gay in 1920 that the family was “the very background and foundation of my life,” she was then and for years afterward living completely otherwise. In her fiction of the early twenties she showed little if any interest in exploring her familial identity and heritage. But in the late twenties, Porter's writing and interests shifted dramatically, and judging from this new gaze southward toward home, she had come to see that exploring and reworking her memories of her upbringing by the light of her modern artistic consciousness, bringing what she now understood as her “southernness” and modernity into continuous interplay, were central to her imaginative vision. This new focus on familial origins led to the creation of much of Porter's best work, including those stories about Miranda, a semiautobiographical character whose struggles with identity and vision mirror Porter's own.

Outside of the fiction itself, perhaps the most telling evidence of Porter's newfound interest in her origins and their relationship to her role as modern artist is her almost consuming passion for genealogy, a passion that began in the mid- to late twenties and continued for the rest of her life. As Joan Givner has established, Porter spent much time and energy seeking to reconstruct her family tree and to discover the exploits of her ancestors.¹ If not always reliable in her efforts, she was always enthusiastic. Early on she turned to her father for help. In a letter to him dated February 16, 1928, she explained her concern for the family's past: “I suppose my interest has some connection with my being so far away from my base, as it were, it is probably an obscure symptom of homesickness” (McKeldin). Porter's enthusiasm rapidly intensified, so that before long she was poring over genealogical guides and sourcebooks. Her efforts were now much more than a “symptom of homesickness”: they were an integral part of her imaginative vision. In a letter dated January 21, 1933, written after her father had sent at her request a long letter of family lore, Porter enthusiastically wrote back asking him for more. “Couldn't you just take your time and tell what you remember of your childhood,” she asked, “where you were born, what life was like, how we came to go to Louisiana and Texas—I remember something about a sugar mill in Louisiana, what you remember of conditions during and after the war, all the things that no one remembers now; it would be interesting.” Interesting does not quite express her desire for family stories. Although she told her father that if what he wrote “were full enough, I might even edit it a little if it needed it and get it published somewhere,” there is little doubt that what she had most in mind for his narrative was her own work. After commenting that she had “very little patience with people who try to live on their ancestors, and southerners here wear me out talking about their families,” she added: “But I do have a little private interest of my own in family history,” a private interest, she made clear, that she wanted to make an integral part of her fiction. “It would help me, too,” she wrote, speaking of her father's commentary, “in a novel I mean to write after this one is finished” (L, 89, 88, 89).

The novel in progress Porter mentioned to her father would remain unfinished. Tentatively entitled “Historical Present,” she had planned it to be linked stories focusing on various individuals in Mexico, broken up into two sections, one on men, the other on women. The novel that Porter was then considering and soon would be working on was equally ambitious in scope: calling it Many Redeemers, Porter planned it to follow the fortunes of several generations of an American family (clearly based on Porter's own), ending up with the present time. In some undated notes on her plans for the novel, Porter outlined its three books. Book 1, entitled “Introduction to Death: The Beginning” (elsewhere Porter usually referred to this section as “Legend and Memory”) was to follow “the rise and break-up of an American family up to the Great War, or a little before … say 1910.” Book 2, “Midway of This Mortal Life,” was to focus on one or more of the chief characters from Book 1, including Miranda, up through around 1930. Book 3, “Beginning Again: The End,” was to examine “the present scene, the sick and crumbling society with some of the cures offered by diverse Saviours. The various roads by which the characters separate and go to their several ends” (McKeldin).

Many Redeemers also remained unfinished, although a number of the stories Porter originally planned to incorporate into the novel, including The Old Order sequence, Old Mortality, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, were eventually published separately. Even unfinished, Many Redeemers remains significant, for its plan suggests the evolution of Porter's mature artistic vision: Porter now understood that the depths of memory were the source of her imaginative consciousness and that artistic creation demanded bringing memories and personal legends into interplay with her modernist imagination. Out of this interplay both the memories and the imagination were reshaped and redefined, understood now in a context expanded in depth and limits. Porter attempted in her fiction not strict autobiography but what might be called fictional autobiography, works that were true not to fact but to her understanding of experience—that is, true by the expanded understanding she had achieved in her efforts at evaluating her life. In a June 9, 1935, letter to Caroline Gordon, Porter commented that in writing “Legend and Memory” she wanted to keep faithful not to historical fact but to her consciousness. “I am not looking up any facts, nor consulting with any one, nor going back to check my sources—nothing,” she wrote. “I depend precisely on what I know in my blood, and in my memory, and on something that is deeper than knowledge” (L, 127) At some point later during her work on “Legend and Memory,” Porter apparently changed her method somewhat, deciding to bring fact and legend into dynamic interaction. In some undated notes (in her later marginal annotation Porter suggests that the notes probably were from a letter to Henry Allen Moe in 1937) Porter wrote: “The first part of my novel is called Legend and Memory, using these two legitimate sources of poetry and fiction. But I want badly to compare these legends, these memories, with the documentary evidence as I can lay hold on. Neither the truth nor the legend need suffer by this; the one throws new light on the other, and the artist needs both” (McKeldin). This interplay of fact and legend mirrors the dynamic between memory and imagination that Porter saw at the heart of the creative process.

Much of Porter's fiction and nonfiction from the thirties and forties derives from her profound reappraisal of her upbringing and family. Especially fascinating to those attempting to understand Porter's artistic consciousness are her sympathetic portrayals of her elders, particularly of her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, whose name Porter, born Callie Russell, took as a young adult. Her frequent focus on her grandmother, I believe, provides an insightful means for grasping Porter's efforts to define herself as artist both by and against her family and the southern heritage that she had self-consciously embraced. Two works, her essay “Portrait: Old South” and her story sequence The Old Order, are particularly noteworthy.

The very title of “Portrait: Old South,” an essay praising Porter's paternal grandparents, particularly her grandmother, indicates Porter's choice to rewrite her Texas roots as Deep South tradition. After first establishing her own southern credentials—“I am the grandchild of a lost War, and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation,” the essay begins (CE, 160)—Porter speaks of the strength and fortitude that her elders exhibited during the hard times of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She then tells several yarns drawn from family lore and connects herself closely to her elders by saying that they “all remained nobly unreconstructed to their last moments, and my feet rest firmly on this rock of their strength to this day.” Her mind, she says, brims with stories of her elders, and the few stories that she has told in the essay are “the merest surface ripples over limitless deeps of bitter memory” (CE, 161).

After describing her grandparents' lavish wedding and reception, Porter proceeds to the heart of the essay, the celebration of her grandmother. Porter depicts her grandmother as a strong-willed woman who knew exactly what she believed in and who never altered that belief, despite misfortune and hardship that shook the foundations of the life about her. Hers was the life, according to Porter, of the landed aristocracy, a formal life based on a rigid code of conduct and order passed on from one generation to the next. Everything had its place, and everyone had duties to perform and standards to live up to. In its strictness and completeness, the grandmother's code was not easily transgressed. Her grandmother's firm response to her grandchildren's quarrels embodied everything she believed in: “It was ‘vulgar,’ she said, and for her, that word connoted a peculiarly detestable form of immorality, that is to say, bad manners. Inappropriate conduct was bad manners, bad manners were bad morals, and bad morals led to bad manners, and there you were, ringed with fire, and no way out” (CE, 164). When the family fortunes ebbed and life became difficult, her grandmother remained rock-solid, maintaining her ideals throughout all. “Though we had no money, and no prospects of any, and were land-poor in the most typical way, we never really faced this fact as long as our grandmother lived because she would not hear of such a thing,” Porter writes. “We had been a good old family of solid wealth and property in Kentucky, Louisiana and Virginia, and we remained that in Texas, even though due to a temporary decline for the most honorable reasons, appearances were entirely to the contrary.” To the grandmother's eyes, the family's misfortunes, despite the fact that they dragged on and that she never lived to see them turn better, were merely “temporary, an unnatural interruption to her normal fate, which required simply firmness, a good deal of will-power and energy and the proper aims to re-establish finally once more” (CE, 163). Nonetheless, the severity of the times “tapped the bottomless reserves of her character.” Her unbending resolve, courage, and rage for order led Porter to conclude that she was “truly heroic” (CE, 162), towering above the rest of the family as well as the general run of humanity. Porter ends the essay: “She left the lingering perfume and the airy shimmer of grace about her memory” (CE, 165).

The parallels between Porter's depiction of her grandmother and her views of the artist are striking. On one level, her grandmother was an artist in her own right: according to Porter's interpretation she saw her role as head of the family as a vocation and felt it her duty to forge a dignified family life that radiated decorum and order. The chaotic nature of life, with all its trials and tribulations, was her chief antagonist, as it was for the artist. She was worthy of the task: “Her bountiful hospitality represented only one of her victories of intelligence and feeling over the stubborn difficulties of life” (CE, 163). Like an artist, she based her efforts on diligence, discipline, and high standards, and she was closely in touch with memory and tradition. Although she did not actively probe her memory to achieve an understanding of life and its mysteries (as Porter believed the modern artist must do), this was because she lived as most moderns do not, in direct contact with her past and her heritage. Lewis P. Simpson has observed that “in the traditionalist society, memory is yet in the flesh and in the blood.”² It is not, as it was for many modern southern writers, a deliberate and self-conscious means to resist the dehumanization of contemporary life. Porter's grandmother, in other words, was already in direct contact with her memory without having to make a deliberate choice to be.

Yet, particularly as seen in The Old Order, Porter saw potential dangers in her grandmother's approach to life, dangers that, by our understanding of the grandmother, also threatened the modern artist. Porter clearly based Sophia Jane, the grandmother in this story sequence, on her own grandmother, and the portrayals of her reveal much about Porter's ideas of memory and art. Like Porter's grandmother in “Portrait: Old South,” Sophia Jane possesses strength and fortitude, driven by a consuming rage for order. In “The Source,” for instance, as soon as she arrives for a visit at her country house, she immediately begins overseeing the complete overhaul of the grounds, outbuildings, and main house. Nothing escapes her eye. At the main house, “the big secretaries were opened and shabby old sets of Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Dr. Johnson's dictionary, the volumes of Pope and Milton and Dante and Shakespeare were dusted off and closed up carefully again. Curtains came down in dingy heaps and went up again stiff and sweet-smelling; rugs were heaved forth in dusty confusion and returned flat and gay with flowers once more; the kitchen was no longer dingy and desolate but a place of heavenly order where it was tempting to linger” (CS, 324). After her stay, with order restored, she returns home where “at once she set to work restoring to order the place which no doubt had gone somewhat astray in her absence” (CS, 325). Her demands for order, based on unchanging tradition, are strict and inclusive. As with Porter's grandmother in “Portrait: Old South,” she lives in intimate contact with her memory, basing everything she does on its dictates.

But Sophia Jane's life is out of balance, primarily because memories utterly dominate her perspective, overruling all other concerns and values. Her situation reverses that typically found in Porter's early stories, where characters attempt to repress their deep selves of memory: Sophia Jane instead gives herself entirely to the demands of memory and represses all challenges to what she sees as its realm of completeness and finality. With Aunt Nannie, her black maid and companion, Sophia Jane spends much of her time talking about the past, extolling bygone days and devaluing all else. “They talked about the past, really—always about the past,” the narrative consciousness writes. “Even the future seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not seem an extension of their past, but a repetition of it.” While not blind to the changing attitudes and patterns of life about them—indeed they are very much aware that the pressures of time and modernity are transforming the South—Sophia Jane and Aunt Nannie steadfastly refuse to confront these changes and to adopt a realistic view of the times. “They would agree that nothing remained of life as they had known it, the world was changing swiftly,” the narrator writes, “but by the mysterious logic of hope they insisted that each change was probably the last; or if not, a series of changes might bring them, blessedly, back full-circle to the old ways they had known” (CS, 327).

As we have already noted, Porter saw herself, as she did Thomas Hardy, as an Inquirer, a person who forever challenged and pressured accepted traditions with questions and doubts. Under the grip of their commitment to memory and tradition, however, Sophia Jane and Aunt Nannie smother all of their questions and uneasiness to live by duty rather than inquiry. The narrator characterizes their musings:

Who knows why they loved their past? It had been bitter for them both, they had questioned the burdensome rule they lived by every day of their lives, but without rebellion and without expecting an answer. This unbroken thread of inquiry in their minds contained no doubt as to the utter rightness and justice of basic laws of human existence, founded as they were on God's plan; but they wondered perpetually, with only a hint now and then to each other of the uneasiness of their hearts; how so much suffering and confusion could have been built up and maintained on such a foundation. The grandmother's role was authority, she knew that; it was her duty to portion out activities, to urge or restrain where necessary, to teach morals, manners, and religion, to punish and reward her own household according to a fixed code. Her own doubts and hesitations she concealed, also, she reminded herself, as a matter of duty. Old Nannie had no ideas at all as to her place in the world. It had been assigned to her before birth, and for her daily rule she had all her life obeyed the authority nearest to her.

(CS, 327–28)

In her dutiful commitment to her memories and the tradition they embody—there is no dialogue between her memory and her present self—Sophia Jane cuts herself off from the possibility of fulfillment and completion, both as a person and, as we have also characterized her, as an artist. Her willfulness on the one hand gives her great strength and power, as we can see in her heroic efforts to raise her grandchildren and her successes at running a farm amid personal and economic adversity. Her grandchildren note her strength: “She was the only reality to them in a world that seemed otherwise without fixed authority or refuge” (CS, 324). On the other hand, her power borders on tyranny. In the iron grip of memory, she strives to impose her will upon others just as her inner self imposes itself upon her. She demands loyalty and obedience, and with the seat of all value resting firmly upon herself, she rejects any divergent opinion or perspective. Driven by this consuming confidence in her own self-sufficiency, Sophia Jane, the narrator writes, “developed a character truly portentous under the discipline of trying to change the characters of others.” Her husband, along with probably everyone else in the household, came to fear “her deadly willfulness, her certainty that her ways were not only right but beyond criticism, that her feelings were important, even in the lightest matter, and must not be tempered with or treated casually” (CS, 335).

Porter's grandmother, as represented in the fiction and nonfiction, thus finally emerges as a complex and ambiguous character. Porter on one level clearly emulated her, and in the following description from “Portrait: Old South” she clearly characterizes herself as much as her ancestor: “Grandmother was by nature lavish, she loved leisure and calm, she loved luxury, she loved dress and adornment, she loved to sit and talk with friends or listen to music; she did not in the least like pinching or saving and mending and making things do, and she had no patience with the kind of slackness that tried to say second-best was best, or half good enough” (CE, 162). The life of dignity and decorum pointed to the order and stability that, in a world gone awry, Porter sought to achieve with her art. Yet Porter at the same time resisted her grandmother, seeing her “deadly willfulness” as a representation of the danger of a life tyrannized by the past, of a monologic rather than a dialogic existence. Instead of opening herself to all experience, including the multiple voices in her memory and not merely the single voice of authoritative tradition, the grandmother entombs herself from the ever-changing diversity of life and embraces instead a single-minded vision of fixed order and value. For Porter such single-mindedness invited destruction for both the individual and the artist. Writers given to such limited thinking, Porter believed, usually wrote fiction either blatantly propagandist or sickeningly nostalgic (or some dreadful combination of the two). The grandmother's heavy-handed raising of the children suggests the former, whereas her and Nannie's sewing suggest the latter. Nannie and Sophia Jane delight in sewing patchworks from cut “scraps of the family finery, hoarded for fifty years.” This is a fitting metaphor for the artist's delving into memory to reinvent and reshape a larger pattern of meaning. But whereas Porter saw the artist's efforts as a process of challenge and interplay that ultimately enlarged consciousness, for Nannie and Sophia Jane their sewing is merely a means to apotheosize the past, strengthening its grip on their thinking. Fittingly, their patchworks, outlined “with a running briar stitch in clear lemon-colored floss,” serve no function in the household. “They had contrived enough bed and couch covers, table spreads, dressing table scarfs, to have furnished forth several households,” the narrator writes. “Each piece as it was finished was lined with yellow silk, folded, and laid away in a chest, never again to see the light of day” (CS, 326).

Porter's conflicting feelings toward her grandmother shed light on her own struggles with incorporating her memories into the development of her identity and art. In fact, so central is her grandmother to Porter's thinking—it is no coincidence that Porter entitles the opening work of The Old Order a sketch of Sophia Jane, “The Source” and that she begins “Portrait: Old South” with the declaration, “I am the grandchild of a lost War”—that I believe Porter came to see her grandmother as the embodiment of the predominant voice of her own hidden self of memory. As such, her grandmother stands as a disturbing double whose presence demands both recognition and interaction. She represents in her complexity both the potential for meaningful creation and growth and the possibility of falling prey to a destructive tyranny of the past. To advance as a person and as an artist, Porter believed she had to incorporate her grandmother and her grandmother's ways into her own life—to maintain an ongoing and open-ended dialogue with her—without becoming entirely like her and thereby closing herself off from the other voices of the world and of her past.

This persistent dialogue with her grandmother and the southern tradition that she represents in many regards marks the development of Porter's mature fiction. As we have seen, Porter's commitment to dialogic encounters with memory, particularly those involving her imaginative revisions of her upbringing, emerged only after a number of years of personal and artistic struggle. In the thirties, however, having established a conception of the artistic imagination that remained essentially consistent for the rest of her career, Porter began to reassess her intellectual and imaginative development with her stories about Miranda. Although anything but strict autobiography, these stories explore the growth and development of a woman from childhood to adulthood whose struggles with imagination and consciousness (if not always the outer circumstances that initiate these inner struggles) strongly resemble Porter's own. Porter's observation about the strength of Eleanor Clark's autobiographical vision in Rome and a Villa at the same time expresses what Porter herself was striving for with the Miranda stories: “This whole book is the distillation of a deep personal experience; it is autobiography in the truest sense, in terms of what outward impact set the inner life in motion toward its true relation to the world: the search for what is truly one's own, and the ability to recognize it when found, and to be faithful in love of it” (CE, 80). In examining Miranda's “inner life in motion,” I want to explore three works—The Old Order, Old Mortality, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider—and I will arrange my discussion roughly around Miranda's chronology (rather than the chronology of publication). I will begin my examination with the story sequence The Old Order and also will end there, with a look at “The Grave,” the story that fittingly concludes the entire Miranda cycle.

Much of The Old Order focuses on Miranda's childhood and early development, particularly her efforts to order her understanding of reality into a coherent narrative framework. Her attempts at achieving coherence largely involve coming to terms with the stories people have told her, a task calling for the ongoing testing of the stories against her own experiences and against stories that conflict in their presentation of the past and the present. As the title of the story sequence indicates, Miranda's primary task is figuring out what to make of the South's “old order” as embodied in her family and its conception of itself and, most crucially, of the world created by her grandmother. The grandmother's understanding of things, as we have already noted, is rigid and confining, defined by unchanging patterns of southern tradition. There is very little room for individual resistance to her ways, as Miranda quickly discovers: “‘This way and no other!’ Grandmother always said when she was laying down the law about all kinds of things. ‘It must be done this way, and no other’” (CS, 354). To Miranda and her siblings such rigidity both comforts and limits, providing their lives with structure, but structure that cannot be challenged, at least openly.

Porter underscores Miranda's need for a narrative structure to describe the multiplicity of her experiences in “The Circus.” Here the young Miranda, as Edward Schwartz has pointed out, does not understand the conventions that underlie the activities at the circus. Like George Posey in Allen Tate's The Fathers, a man who receives “the shock of the world at the end of his nerves,” Miranda on this first trip to the circus suffers frightening torment in not having a mediating structure to help her understand what she sees.³ Initially the surroundings fascinate Miranda—the narrator comments that “she could not look hard enough at everything”—but her fascination quickly turns to bewilderment and then even to panic. Lacking the guiding hand of her grandmother and the consistent routine of life at home, Miranda understands little of what is going on around her, since the circus operates by conventions that turn her everyday world topsy-turvy. Nobody offers her any meaningful or sympathetic help. Typical is Dicey's response to Miranda's asking why a pack of boys squat underneath the bleachers leering upward: “You jus mind yo' own business and stop throwin' yo' legs around that way. Don't you pay any mind. Plenty o' monkeys right here in the show widout you studyin dat kind” (CS, 344).

Even more disturbing are the circus acts, which appear to Miranda as frantic onrushes of sights and sounds. Their audacious flauntings of the norms of everyday activities mock the rigid decorum by which Miranda until now has unquestioningly lived. (Not insignificantly, her grandmother had apparently understood this threat and had resisted Miranda's attending the circus. She finally allowed her to go because the outing was occasioned by a family reunion, an activity embodying the solidarity of the family and Miranda's place within it.) Even the brass band sends Miranda close to hysteria: “An enormous brass band seemed to explode right at Miranda's ear. She jumped, quivered, thrilled blindly and almost forgot to breathe as sound and color and smell rushed together and poured through her skin and hair and beat in her head and hands and feet and pit of her stomach. ‘Oh,’ she called out in her panic, closing her eyes and seizing Dicey's hand hard. The flaring lights burned through her lids, a roar of laughter like rage drowned out the steady raging of the drums and horns.” When she opens her eyes, she sees a clown on a tightrope tantalizing the crowd. Everyone else knows what to make of his derring-do, and the onlookers roar with delight. Miranda, though, is terrified by the high-wire act, frightened even by the clown's costume. Having never seen a clown before, she sees not a comic entertainer but “a creature in a blousy white overall with ruffles at the neck and ankles,” its made-up face not silly but terrifying, a “bone-white skull and chalk-white face, with tufted eyebrows far apart in the middle of his forehead, the lids in a black sharp angle, a long scarlet mouth stretching back into sunken cheeks, turned up at the corners in a perpetual bitter grimace of pain, astonishment, not smiling” (CS, 344). When the clown stumbles on the wire, apparently purposefully as part of the act, Miranda shrieks “with real pain.” After the clown blows kisses as he dangles on the wire held up only by his ankle, Miranda covers her face and shrieks out even harder, “the tears pouring over her cheeks and chin” (CS, 345). Adding to her terror is the ugly grimace a dwarf gives her as she and Dicey leave the circus early. Miranda realizes by his look (his grimace mirrors Miranda's distorted face) that the dwarf is not, as she had suspected, a misshapen animal whose ugliness is entirely discrete from her but a human being who suffers as she does. Miranda sees the dwarf as a fitting image of the horror and ugliness that human existence, including her own, can acquire and of the cruelty that can unexpectedly explode from people—all of which until this night was essentially unknown to Miranda, a girl more accustomed to seeing people at their civilized best, behaving by the rules of her grandmother.

At home after the circus Miranda hears the other children speak about the acts she had missed. For them the circus was all delight. Their versions of the death-defying acts glow in a magic aura because, unlike Miranda, they understand the circus as a world governed by its own rules and conventions. What happens at the circus has little to do with their own everyday lives. It is the stuff of dreams, and they describe the acts accordingly: “More clowns, funnier than the first one even … beautiful ladies with bright yellow hair, wearing white silk tights with red satin sashes had performed on white trapezes; they also had hung by their toes, but how gracefully, like flying birds! Huge white horses had lolloped around and round the ring with men and women dancing on their backs! One man had swung by his teeth from the top of the tent and another had put his head in a lion's mouth. Ah, what she had not missed!” (CS, 346). Upon going to bed, Miranda tries to transform her vision of the circus into that held by the others, but her frightening memories shatter her efforts: “She tried, as if she were really remembering them, to think of the beautiful wild beings in white satin and spangles and red sashes who danced and frolicked on the trapezes; of the sweet little furry ponies and the lovely pet monkeys in their comical clothes. She fell asleep, and her invented memories gave way before her real ones, the bitter terrified face of the man in blowsy white falling to his death—ah, the cruel joke!—and the terrible grimace of the unsmiling dwarf. She screamed in her sleep and sat up crying for deliverance from her torments” (CS, 347).

Without being able either to place the circus in the world she has up until now known and constructed or to understand the conventions that undergird it, Miranda sees the circus as embodying forces of misrule and disorder that throw her and her grandmother's orderly life into utter disarray. For Porter, such horrifying disorder underlay all existence and had to be acknowledged, but to confront the chaos without the mediating structures provided by the rituals of family, community, and religion was to risk being overwhelmed by despair and terror. If, returning to Lacy Buchan's observation in Allen Tate's The Fathers, “civilization [is] the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone,” then Miranda sees at the circus that the abyss is never far from consciousness, there to be faced, often unexpectedly, in all its horror.⁴

“The Circus” not only suggests the need for frameworks by which to structure experience but also underscores a damaging flaw in the grandmother's systematic ordering: her vision of self and reality too easily glosses over the terror underlying experience with saccharine nostalgia, what the narrator of “The Last Leaf” characterizes as “an out-of-date sentimental way of thinking” (CS, 349). Other stories from The Old Order also point to this flaw. In “The Witness,” for instance, Uncle Jimbilly, a former slave, tells stories describing the horrors of slavery that cut against the family's tales glorifying plantation life on which Miranda and her siblings had been brought up. He tells the children:

Dey used to take ‘em out and tie ‘em down and whup ‘em, wid gret big leather strops inch thick long as yo' ahm, wid round holes bored in ‘em so's evey time dey hit ‘em de hide and de meat done come off dey bones in little round chunks. And wen dey had whupped ‘em wid de strop till dey backs was all raw and bloody, dey spread dry cawnshucks on dey backs and set ‘em afire and pahched ‘em, and den dey poured vinega all ovah ‘em … Yassuh. And den, the ve'y nex day dey'd got to git back to work in the fiels or dey'd do the same thing right ovah agin. Yassah. Dat was it. If dey didn't git back to work dey got it all right ovah agin.

(CS, 341)

As the title of the sketch suggests, Uncle Jimbilly stands as a disturbing witness whose testimony refutes much of the grandmother's rosier recollections of the past. Not surprisingly, Miranda (six years old in the story) and her older brother (eight) and sister (ten) stand mystified by Uncle Jimbilly's stories, not knowing how to integrate his version of slavery into their previous understanding of it. “They knew, of course, that once upon a time Negroes had been slaves; but they had all been freed long ago and were now only servants,” the narrator says of the children's fairy tale-like conception of the antebellum past. For all his crazy rantings and empty threats, Uncle Jimbilly nonetheless delivers a telling rebuke to the family's glorified past, nudging the children out of their innocence. As they listen to his terrifying tales, the three children find themselves displaced from their former ease and confidence into embarrassment and guilt, feelings entirely new within the context of their family heritage.

If Uncle Jimbilly disrupts the children's understanding of their family's history, of its narratives of “happy darkies” during the time of slavery, Aunt Nannie in “The Last Leaf” undermines their present-day security in the benevolence of black-white relations and indeed of the stability of familial bonds. Aunt Nannie may be, as the title of the story suggests, the final leaf of her generation to fall, but she also may be, in another reading of “Leaf,” the concluding page of the grandmother's narrative. As the last page of the grandmother's story, Aunt Nannie suggests not the narrative's closure and completeness but its dissolution and disorder: her moving out of the family house into a house of her own refutes the stereotypical role she, along with other blacks, was forced to play in the grandmother's (and the South's) narrative, thereby subverting its portrayal of family order and interracial harmony. In her new home Aunt Nannie sheds the persona of trustworthy servant for that of a strong and independent African. Although Nannie remains neat and precise in her ways, the narrator comments that she “was no more the faithful old servant Nannie, a freed slave: she was an aged Bantu woman of independent means, sitting on the steps, breathing the free air. She began wearing a blue bandana wrapped around her head, and at the age of eighty-five she took to smoking a corncob pipe. The black iris of the deep, withdrawn old eyes turned a chocolate brown and seemed to spread over the whole surface of the eyeball. As her sight failed, the eyelids crinkled and drew in, so that her face was like an eyeless mask” (CS, 349). Once the wearer of a mask of servility, Nannie now embraces her lost heritage, her new identity signified by the transformation of her features into those of an African tribal mask. Nannie's metamorphosis only hastens the dissolution of the family order that she and the grandmother had once held together so well. “Almost immediately after she went,” the narrator comments, “everything slackened, lost tone, went off edge” (CS, 350).

Besides glossing over complex and problematic issues of race, the grandmother's organized system rigidly opposes, in its emphasis on stability through tradition and social ritual, freethinking intellectual pursuits. The grandmother's anti-intellectualism (and more generally, the South's) is one of her firmest bulwarks against the inroads of modernism that threaten to subvert the established order. As the family's legends and organization, undergirded by nostalgia and closed-mindedness, come under pressure by the testimonies of Uncle Jimbilly and Aunt Nannie, so too does its anti-intellectualism, usually called into question by the demystifying presence of an outsider. The limits of the grandmother's vision and the pressures exerted upon it by “modern” thinking—such as that of scientific investigation—are central in “The Fig Tree.” In this story Miranda stands between her grandmother's obsession for establishing a coherent community, characterized by her command always to act under her orders (“This way and no other!” [CS, 354]) and her great-aunt Eliza's obvious disinterest in standards of social behavior and her compulsion instead for structuring life according to scientific observation. If Sophia Jane always focuses her attention on the family and its codes, making sure as best she can that everyone acts by what she sees as the appropriate standards, Eliza always has her eyes at either the microscope or the telescope, seeking to discover how things are put together and work. Miranda, not surprisingly, stands transfixed by Eliza, for she has never seen anyone so openly disregard the family's codes of conduct. At the family farm Miranda abandons her customary interests in barnyard animals because she finds Eliza so captivating. The narrator comments that “Great-Aunt Eliza's ways and habits kept Miranda following her about, gazing, or sitting across the dining-table, gazing, for when Great-Aunt Eliza was not on the roof before her telescope, always just before daylight or just after dark, she was walking about with a microscope and a burning glass, peering closely at something she saw on a tree trunk, something she found in the grass; now and then she collected fragments that looked like dried leaves or bits of bark, brought them in the house, spread them out on a sheet of white paper, and sat there poring, as still as if she were saying her prayers” (CS, 360). Sophia Jane has her religion of tradition and community; Eliza has hers of science and intellectual inquiry.

Significantly, Eliza's system, rather than Sophia Jane's, solves Miranda's crisis, her fear that she has mistakenly buried a chick alive. Following her grandmother's strictures about the burial of dead animals, Miranda had given the chick a proper burial “in a little grave with flowers on top and a smooth stone at the head” (CS, 354). The “weep-weep” Miranda had heard after the burial and had believed to be the chick's cries, Eliza later makes clear, are merely the calls of tree frogs. Eliza's revelation sends Miranda into a “fog of bliss” (CS, 362), and she takes hold of her great-aunt's hand, an action signifying her allegiance to this strong-minded woman whose knowledge helps her to understand the world as she never had before. Her hand-in-hand embrace suggests her freeing, at least for the moment, from her grandmother's grip.

Miranda's apparent newfound freedom, however, may in fact be merely continued servility, with only the tyrants changing. Sophia Jane and Eliza, indeed, share some striking and disturbing similarities, as Miranda notices during one of their frequent arguments. Miranda intently watches the foes at battle, intrigued less by Sophia Jane's and Eliza's words than by their manner, at once authoritarian and childish. She sees, the narrator writes, “two old women, who were proud of being grandmothers, who spoke to children always as if they knew best about everything and children knew nothing, and they told children all day long to come here, go there, do this, do not do that, and they were always right and children never were except when they did anything they were told right away without a word. And here they were bickering like two little girls at school, or even the way Miranda and her sister Maria bickered and nagged and picked on each other and said things on purpose to hurt each other's feelings.” She backs away, feeling “sad and strange and a little frightened” (CS, 359). Eliza's obsession with science, mirroring that of the grandmother's with tradition, the narrator makes clear, is in some ways as rigid and distorting in its single-mindedness. In “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy discusses how the wonder of the concrete presence of existence can be entirely lost to those who strive to explain everything away by scientific theory. “Instead of the marvels of the universe being made available to the public, the universe is disposed of by theory,” Percy writes. “The loss of sovereignty takes this form: As a result of the science of botany, trees are not made available to every man. On the contrary. The tree loses its proper density and mystery as a concrete existent and, as merely another specimen of a species, becomes itself nugatory.”⁵ Eliza so suffers: for her the world is more an equation to be solved than an environment to be lived in. The dining room table, for instance, becomes a laboratory instead of a place for repast and conversation. She gets her greatest joy not from eating but from picking her food apart to determine its structural characteristics. The narrator comments that customarily at meals “she would dissect a scrap of potato peeling or anything else she might be eating, and sit there, bowed over, saying ‘Hum,’ from time to time” (CS, 360). More tellingly, in her obsessive quest for facts, Eliza remains almost entirely oblivious to the feelings and concerns of others, living in a world essentially unto herself. Amid Miranda's overwhelming joy at the story's end, when she revels in her awareness that she has not buried the chick alive and grasps her great-aunt's hand, Eliza maintains her cool scientific detachment, acting more like an academic lecturer than a close family relation: “‘Just think,’ said Great-Aunt Eliza, in her most scientific voice, ‘when tree frogs shed their skins, they pull them over their heads like little shirts, and they eat them. Can you imagine? They have the prettiest little shapes you ever saw—I'll show you one some time under the microscope’” (CS, 361–62).

Sophia Jane and Eliza represent opposing approaches to organizing one's life, depicting the tension between traditionalism and modernism with which Miranda must come to terms as she grows up. At the end of “The Fig Tree,” Eliza has shown Miranda an entirely new way of understanding things: Miranda sees that despite her grandmother's admonitions, there is a way other than her grandmother's “this way.” She stands awed by her awareness that reality can be structured, and narrated, in ways she has never seen before, and a new world of possibility looms before her, a realization about the here and now not unlike what she discovered about the heavens when she looked for the first time at the moon through Eliza's telescope: “Oh, it's like another world” (CS, 361). Eliza's modernism is indeed for Miranda “like another world,” and at the story's conclusion Miranda appears anxious to explore this new world as fully as possible with Eliza as her guide. Miranda's fulfillment, however, lies not in simple discipleship with Eliza, for as we have already noted, Eliza has limitations every bit as problematic as Sophia Jane's. Although Miranda's allegiance to Eliza no doubt will introduce more freedom into her life, such freedom, as seen in Eliza, creates new problems and struggles. Put in the context of the other Miranda stories, particularly Old Mortality, Miranda must learn to draw from the opposing ways of her grandmother and her great-aunt, rejecting neither but embracing both, integrating into her growing consciousness a dialogue between them that pressures and illuminates both figures and their outlooks—a difficult endeavor, but one of rich rewards.

In Old Mortality, Miranda again faces the dilemma of coming to grips with the predominant traditionalism of her family and the modernism of one of the family's “rebels,” in this case Cousin Eva. Miranda's problem focuses primarily on the question of how to interpret the life of Aunt Amy, a woman who died young and whose life, depending upon who is telling the story, was filled with either mystery and glamour (the family's version) or with deceit and sexual obsession and repression (Cousin Eva's view). On one level, the structure of Old Mortality follows Miranda's move away from her family's traditionalism, embodied here in its idealization of Amy, to her own independent view of things, a move that at the same time also represents a repudiation of Eva's modernism, portrayed in her psychoanalytic reading of Amy. This stepping free into a new world of interpretations, however, comes with its own dangers, temptations, and distortions.

Much of Part 1 of Old Mortality deals with the story of Amy as told by Miranda's family and the power that it—and other family stories—have over Miranda and her sister, Maria. Most of Miranda's elders share a strong love for their family legends and enthusiastically celebrate them in deeply felt tales. “They loved to tell stories, romantic and poetic, or comic with a romantic humor,” the narrator writes. “They did not gild the outward circumstance, it was the feeling that mattered” (CS, 175). For both Miranda and Maria, the feeling evoked by the stories seizes their attention and enchants their imaginations. They have little use, in contrast, for the mementos and keepsakes of Amy and bygone days. Unlike the family stories, these items carry little mystery or wonder. “Photographs, portraits by inept painters who meant earnestly to flatter, and the festival garments folded away in dried herbs and camphor were disappointing when the little girls tried to fit them to the living beings created in their minds by the breathing words of their elders,” the narrator comments at one point. At another she writes that Miranda and Maria, in looking at the old photographs of their family, “found it impossible to sympathize with those young persons, sitting rather stiffly before the camera, hopelessly out of fashion; but they were drawn and held by the mysterious love of the living, who remembered and cherished these dead. The visible remains were nothing; they were dust, perishable as the flesh; the features stamped on paper and metal were nothing, but their living memory enchanted the little girls” (CS, 175, 176).

Both Miranda and Maria associate the wondrous aura of the family legends with the romance of the theater and literature they so much adore. “Their Aunt Amy belonged to the world of poetry,” the narrator characterizes their thinking. “The romance of Uncle Gabriel's long, unrewarded love for her, her early death, was such a story as one found in old books: unworldly books, but true, such as Vita Nuova, the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the Wedding Song of Spenser; and poems by Edgar Allan Poe” (CS, 178). Hearing their elders speak gloriously not only about ancestors but about previously seen stars of stage and performance (Jenny Lind, Bernhardt, and Rubenstein, for instance) brings the girls to see beyond the mundane, opening them to an awareness of “a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next; such episodes confirmed for the little girls the nobility of human feeling, the divinity of man's vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death, the depths of the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy” (CS, 179). That the stories they hear from their family are about people who really lived and whose presence deeply touched the lives of those who now tell their stories particularly enchants Miranda, as she imagines the mysteries that someday she hopes will enliven her everyday existence, an existence characterized by “dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations” (CS, 178). So taken is Miranda by Amy's story that she faithfully envisions a life for herself every bit as glamorous as her aunt's. Over Maria's objections that she and Miranda will never be strikingly beautiful, Miranda nonetheless “secretly believed that she would one day suddenly receive beauty, as by inheritance, riches laid suddenly in her hands through no deserts of her own. She believed for quite a while that she would one day be like Aunt Amy, not as she appeared in the photograph, but as she was remembered by those who had seen her” (CS, 177). Miranda's wishes are apparently not unlike those of Amy herself, who strove to shape her life into one of a romantic narrative. After her ride to Mexico following her brother's duel, Amy returned gravely ill but overjoyed, to her parents' horror. Amy laughs happily at their distress, explaining: “Mammy, it was splendid, the most delightful trip I ever had. And if I am to be the heroine of this novel, why shouldn't I make the most of it?” (CS, 189).

Despite their love of the family legends and their willingness to believe in them, Miranda and Maria eventually come to discover discrepancies between the world in which they live and that of the family narratives. These discrepancies undercut the stories' credibility and power, a situation analogous to the girls' problems in fitting the physical mementos, aspects of the real world, into the family's imaginative narratives. The most obvious example of the family lore's unreliability is their father's steadfast assertion that all of the family's women “in every generation without exception, [were] as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs.” Even the girls know that their great-aunt Keziah was so large and bulky that she “quite squeezed herself through doors, and … when seated, was one solid pyramidal monument from floor to neck” (CS, 174). Further evidence comes when Maria asks her father about a reference to Amy as a “singing angel” in the poem Gabriel had inscribed on her tombstone. To Maria's question if Amy did in fact sing, her father responds curtly: “Now what has that to do with it? It's a poem” (CS, 181). Miranda's and Maria's frustration with resolving the tension between reality and romance mirrors Amy's, for her unhappiness lay in the undermining of her romantic vision by the everyday demands of routine life and by the resistance of her friends and family to measure up to the roles she had created for them in the narrative by which she wanted to live. “Mammy, I'm sick of this world,” she confided to her mother after her father remonstrated with her about her daring dress and her later flirtation at the dance that led to her brother's duel. “I don't like anything in it. It's so dull” (CS, 188).

Equally disturbing is Miranda and Maria's growing awareness that while the family stories might enlarge their everyday world with an added dimension of romance and intrigue, they can also, in their overriding emphasis on the past, in effect destroy the present and the future. This is the destructive power wielded by Sophia Jane and Nannie in The Old Order when they hold roost over the family with their authoritarian rules and their endless storytelling. Miranda particularly notices that no matter how thrilling a musical or stage performance the family sees “there was always a voice recalling other and greater occasions” (CS, 179). Although Miranda enjoys hearing about stars and shows from the past, she also realizes that by her elders' standards whatever happens in the present never measures up to what has happened in the past. The present is always a dim shadow of a more glorious past, not a particularly comforting thought for a young girl about to embark on her life. Typical of her budding resentment toward the past's stranglehold on the present is her response to an old gentleman who downplays a performance of Paderewski in light of his earlier hearings of Rubenstein. The narrator reports that the gentleman “could not but feel that Rubenstein had reached the final height of musical interpretation, and, for him, Paderewski had been something of an anticlimax.” The gentleman dominates the postperformance discussion, talking along while “holding up one hand, patting the air as if he were calling for silence.” Everyone but Miranda listens to the man without disfavor. Her response smacks of bitterness: “They had never heard Rubenstein; they had, one hour since, heard Paderewski, and why should anyone need to recall the past? Miranda, dragged away, half understanding the old gentleman, hated him” (CS, 179).

In Part 2, Miranda and Maria, a few years older and a bit wiser, confront even more obviously both the distortions of the family legends and the crushing potential of the past, when worshiped unreservedly, to thwart personal growth by devaluing the present. Now at a convent school in New Orleans, the girls still read avidly, particularly romances, but they no longer automatically see the narratives as relevant to their own lives. The story begins with immediate evidence of their more discriminating visions. Like Part 1, Part 2 opens with legendary history—here of the evil goings-on within the cells and dungeons of Catholic convents, as described in the pulp novels Miranda and Maria have been reading. But the girls are more aware of the distortions and exaggerations, more cognizant of the gulf separating the world of the imaginative narratives from that of everyday life. “It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try,” the narrator writes, speaking of the girls' reading about convent life and their own experience in one. “They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them” (CS, 194).

Despite their greater discrimination and more realistic appraisal of happenings about them, Miranda and Maria still feel the power of the legend of Aunt Amy, though much of that power dissipates when they meet Uncle Gabriel at the racetrack. Gabriel is anything but the dashing figure the girls had imagined. From afar he appears as “a vast bulging man with a red face and immense tan ragged mustaches fading into gray,” and close up he is even more disappointing, described as “a shabby fat man with bloodshot blue eyes, sad beaten eyes, and a big melancholy laugh, like a groan.” Miranda and Maria stand stunned, wondering to themselves if that could really be their Uncle Gabriel: “‘Is that Aunt Amy's handsome romantic beau? Is that the man who wrote the poem about our Aunt Amy?’ Oh, what did grown-up people mean when they talked, anyway?” (CS, 197). Also dashed are Miranda's romantic conceptions of horse racing. After Miss Lucy, Uncle Gabriel's horse, wins her race, Miranda sees that the mare has paid dearly for her effort: she suffers from a nosebleed and struggles for breath with eyes wild and knees trembling. Horrified by the horse's distress, Miranda reinterprets the race in an entirely new light: “So instantly and completely did her heart reject that victory, she did not know when it happened, but she hated it and she was ashamed that she had screamed and shed tears for joy when Miss Lucy, with her bloodied nose and bursting heart had gone past the judge's stand a neck ahead. She felt empty and sick and held to her father's hand so hard that he shook her off a little impatiently and said, ‘What is the matter with you? Don't be so fidgety’” (CS, 199).

During their visit to Uncle Gabriel's home, Miranda and Maria see how the past utterly consumes the present when a person lives entirely by his or her memories. They see that Gabriel's zest for life died along with his first wife. Gabriel wallows in long-lost dreams of happiness with Amy, dreams that overshadow all else. An extreme version of the elders in Part 1 who had focused their lives almost entirely on their memories, Gabriel continually measures what happens to him in light of his memories of his days with Amy, recalling her with almost every breath: he names his racehorse after Amy's mare, he introduces Miranda and Maria as Amy's nieces and Harry as Amy's brother, and he asks his wife, Honey, whether she thinks his nieces bear a striking resemblance to Amy. Earlier at the racetrack Gabriel noted that none of his horses had ever come up to their namesake, Amy's original Miss Lucy, and so too in Gabriel's mind does everything else in his life pale beside his days with Amy. His heavy drinking underscores his unhappiness and self-pity.

In Part 3, Miranda, now eighteen, has rejected her elders and their ways. Against her father's wishes she has eloped and left the convent school. As bold a step as that was, Miranda nonetheless is not entirely free from her family and its legends, as the very situation of the opening scene of the section, her returning home for Uncle Gabriel's funeral, indicates. On the train she meets one of her relatives, Eva, and as they talk Amy's legend once again comes under close scrutiny, a scrutiny that catalyzes Miranda's continuance of her quest for complete freedom and the power to narrate her own life.

Eva is a thoroughgoing modernist who has striven to free herself from her upbringing and her family. A leader in the women's suffrage movement, Eva evaluates life with cold Freudian cynicism, and she targets the family (both her own and families in general) for vicious attack. At one point, after angrily telling Miranda about the humiliation she had suffered at the family's hands because of her weak chin, she concludes by saying that “the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth. It is the root of all human wrongs.” Much to Miranda's surprise Eva launches into a bitter tirade about Amy that debunks her legendary stature. Claiming that her interpretation is “the other side of the story” (CS, 217), Eva asserts that Amy was no romantic heroine but simply one of the many spoiled young women of her social set who were consumed by only one thing—sex. “It was just sex,” Eva explains. “Their minds dwelt on nothing else. They didn't call it that, it was all smothered under pretty names, but that's all it was, sex” (CS, 216). Eva goes on to say that even though Amy was more spirited than her friends, she nevertheless “was simply sex-ridden, like the rest. She behaved as if she hadn't a rival on earth, and she pretended not to know what marriage was about, but I know better. None of them had, and they didn't want to have, anything else to think about, and they didn't really know anything about that, so they simply festered inside—they festered” (CS, 216). Even more disturbing are Eva's suspicions that Amy's relations with another man were the cause of her hastily arranged marriage to Gabriel and that she may have committed suicide in the face of unhappiness and scandal.

Although Eva perceives the family's stories of Amy as falsely romantic and hers as objectively balanced, Miranda thinks otherwise. After Eva speaks of the demented socialities, Miranda imagines “a long procession of living corpses, festering women stepping gaily towards the charnel house, their corruption concealed under laces and flowers, their dead faces lifted smiling.” She then concludes about Eva's argument: “Of course it was not like that. This is no more true than what I was told before, it's every bit as romantic” (CS, 216). Not only every bit as romantic as the family's, Eva's obsession with the past is also every bit as consuming. For all of her efforts to assert her independence and to free herself from the past, Eva is chained to her childhood by her Freudian vision. Her outburst about Amy reveals as much about the psychic damage inflicted upon her by the family as it does about the damage she inflicts upon herself as an adult utterly fixated upon the past. Whatever the truth of Eva's characterization of Amy and Amy's friends, her description of them, in an irony she herself does not see, is actually a portrait of herself—a festering, sex-obsessed woman. Miranda notes, depressingly, that a warped personality undergirds Eva's strength: “Why was a strong character so deforming? Miranda felt she truly wanted to be strong, but how could she face it, seeing what it did to one?” (CS, 215).

Back at home, after being snubbed by her father who still has not forgiven her for her elopement, Miranda sees with eye-opening clarity the generational gulf separating her from Eva and her father. Despite their differences, Eva and Harry quickly fall into friendly talk, utterly ignoring Miranda. The narrator describes them as two people “who knew each other well, who were comfortable with each other, being contemporaries on equal terms, who occupied by right their place in this world, at the time of life to which they had arrived by paths familiar to them both” (CS, 219). Common memories bond Eva and Harry together (even if at other times they put these memories into different contexts and to different uses), and they delight in “going over old memories and finding new points of interest in them” (CS, 220). Over the roar of the car's engine, Miranda cannot hear the stories Eva and her father tell, but ablaze with her sense of difference, she does not care, for she vows from this day forward to be the author of her own stories. “She knew too many stories like them,” the narrator writes of Miranda as she watches Eva and her father chat, “she wanted something new of her own. The language was familiar to them, but not to her, not any more” (CS, 220). Miranda vows, “in her arrogance, her pride” (CS, 219) to go her own way, depending upon no one but herself for guidance and support. Her vow gives way to bitter resentment over what she sees as her elders' domination: “She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing. ‘I hate them both,’ her inner and secret mind said plainly, ‘I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them’” (CS, 219).

Miranda's fierce rage for independence quickly extends itself: she will seek to liberate herself not only from her elders but also from her entire family, even those of her own generation. She will not return to her husband. She wants to be free of all ties to others, ties that she now sees not as enriching but as confining. “She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred,” the narrator reports her thinking. “She knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said ‘No’ to her” (CS, 220). Hers will be a quest for truth that she will structure and narrate exclusively on the basis of her own feelings and experiences:

What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had never been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all the things I must find out? and where shall I begin to look for it? Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people's memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happened to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

(CS, 221)

Miranda's hopefulness is obvious here, but what of her ignorance? Her ignorance lies primarily in her naïveté: although she claims that she will not be romantic about herself, that is exactly what she is. She conceives herself as a solitary quester for truth, in effect the romantic artist. Naïve, too, is Miranda's thinking that she can free herself from her family merely by not remembering them. Memory does not work so simply, and the members of her family, no matter how much she consciously resists them, will always be active participants in her inner life. Moreover, Miranda naïvely believes that the narrative she wishes to construct can be entirely distinct from and unaffected by that of her family, that she can simply erase from her consciousness all traces of meaning and interpretation from others and begin with a clean page.⁶ Miranda's angry rebellion against her family may be necessary to loosen its tight control of her thinking, but it is merely an initial step toward a fulfillment that lies far ahead. To reach her goal, Miranda must use and draw from her past, engaging rather than repressing her memories.

In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Miranda struggles to live the ultimate freedom that she had vowed to achieve at the end of Old Mortality. It is no easy struggle, and ultimately Miranda falls prey, ironically, to the same disorder from which she has been fleeing: the usurpation of the present and future by an all-consuming memory focused on the past. Now six years older and a newspaper reporter, Miranda finds her independence under assault from a variety of forces. For one, other people apply strong pressure on her to conform to society's standards. Miranda's visit from the agents selling liberty bonds typifies this pressure. Disregarding her complaints of poverty, one of the agents tells Miranda that she can pay weekly like most other people are doing, and he warns her that she has much to lose by not signing up for the program. “You're the only one in this whole newspaper office that hasn't come in,” he lies to her. “And every firm in this city has come in one hundred percent. Over at the Daily Clarion nobody had to be asked twice” (CS, 274). Amid the agents' badgering, Miranda can only think about what she would like to say to them: “Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war? Suppose I asked that little thug, What's the matter with you, why aren't you rotting in Belleau Wood? I wish you were” (CS, 273). Here suffering in her speechlessness, Miranda later suffers for speaking her mind. After her negative review of his acting, an indignant entertainer verbally assaults her at the newspaper office. He attempts to discredit her by suggesting that her opinions deviate wildly from the mainstream, and he waves before him a number of tear sheets praising him. Although Miranda stands up to this man, his attack takes its toll, one of the many pressures that, taken together, Miranda finally finds overwhelming. “There's too much of everything in this world just now,” she tells a friend after the entertainer has left. “I'd like to sit down here on the curb, Chuck, and die, and never again see—I wish I could lose my memory and my own name” (CS, 289).

That the oblivion Miranda here calls for entails the loss of memory points to memory itself as a pressure that haunts Miranda's bid for freedom. Despite her efforts to simplify her life by focusing on the present moment and the hopeful future, Miranda discovers the past difficult to escape. As Miranda lies gravely ill, the narrator comments that with her mind withdrawn into itself under the onslaught of bodily pain, she lives with a single-mindedness absent from her everyday life: “There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them” (CS, 304). Potentially healthy in its interplay and dialogue, this dynamic tension between past and present in Miranda's everyday life is instead troublesome and disruptive, depleting rather than enriching. Not surprisingly, she typically resists memory's intrusion and downplays its significance. When Adam asks her to tell him about her past, she responds: “There's nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came. So now it's nothing much.” To his query about whether she had ever been happy, she responds: “I don't know. I just lived and never thought about it.” She then adds, as much to turn the conversation away from herself as to highlight her past, that she remembers things she liked and hoped for. She does not elaborate, however, except obliquely in a later question to Adam that speaks of immediate sensations anyone could experience rather than of specific events from her past. “Don't you love being alive?” Miranda asks. “Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?” (CS, 302).

Adam is yet another pressure weighing upon Miranda. Clearly Miranda has conflicting feelings toward her lover: a part of her yearns for a relationship of stability and commitment, whereas another part knows the impossibility of such love. At a nightclub Miranda notices with envy a couple who sit together in a world entirely unto themselves, a world Miranda would like to construct with Adam. “Something was done and settled between them, at least,” the narrator reports her thinking of the couple. “It was enviable, enviable, that they could sit quietly together and have the same expression on their faces while they looked into the hell they shared, no matter what kind of hell, it was theirs, they were together” (CS, 296). At the same time, Miranda knows, with Adam's impending departure to the front and her growing sense of her own illness, that such a world is naïvely and romantically conceived, destined to crumble before the demands of reality. Thus, while she savors her and Adam's dreams of romance, Miranda also envisions a grim future for the two of them, represented by the tawdriness of the nightclub. “Life is completely crazy anyway,” the narrator reports her thinking, “so what does it matter? This is what we have, Adam and I, this is all we're going to get, this is the way it is with us. She wanted to say, ‘Adam, come out of your dream and listen to me. I have pains in my chest and my head and my heart and they're real. I am in pain all over, and you are in such danger as I can't bear to think about, and why can we not save each other?’” (CS, 296). As memory and hope pull her taut, so too do the conflicting pulls of cynicism and romanticism. According to the narrator, every move toward Adam is also a move away from him: “There was only the wish to see him and the fear, the present threat, of not seeing him again; for every step they took towards each other seemed perilous, drawing them apart instead of together, as a swimmer in spite of his most determined strokes is yet drawn slowly backward by the tide. ‘I don't want to love,’ she would think in spite of herself, ‘not Adam, there is no time and we are not ready for it and yet this is all we have’” (CS, 292).

The pressures upon Miranda culminate with her illness, which is so severe that her world collapses entirely into the inner reaches of self. In her delirium, she experiences the bliss of oblivion, in effect ironically achieving her goal of complete independence, free from the demands and impositions of other people. Shorn now of the everyday pressures and tensions that had wracked her spirit, Miranda retracts into a mere particle of self-preservation:

Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end.

(CS, 310–11)

In the midst of her bliss, with a glorious vision of sunlight, meadow, and sea opening before her, Miranda sees a large company of people, everybody from her past, all of whom stand wondrously beautiful. “Their faces were transfigured,” the narrator writes, “each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows.” The figures, “alone but not solitary,” encircle Miranda, who now experiences the joy of being utterly unto herself and yet part of a larger group that puts no demands on her: “Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning” (CS, 311).

Miranda's ecstatic oblivion is short-lived, however. Shots of medication pull her back into her body, her joyful vision vanishing before the “terrible compelling pain” that races through her veins and “the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus” that fills her nostrils (CS, 321). Miranda awakes transformed, utterly dominated in thought and vision by her near-death experience. She now views and judges everything in light of that experience, forging a perspective derived entirely from her memories. In this she ironically acts precisely as the elders of her family had done—precisely as she has pledged to avoid acting. Adding to the irony is the fact that Miranda's idealized version of eternal mornings and beautiful people mirrors the romanticized past that her family had celebrated. As nothing contemporary had ever measured up to the glories of the past for Miranda's elders, the same is now true for Miranda. The world appears dull and dingy, even in broad daylight, since by her new vision “there was no light, there might never be light again, compared as it must always be with the light she had seen beside the blue sea that lay so tranquilly along the shore of her paradise” (CS, 314). She recoils from both her own body and the world about her. “The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?” the narrator reports Miranda thinking. “Is it possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? she asked herself. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now a soiled gray” (CS, 313). To ease her despair she frequently closes her eyes to remember her ecstasy, but each time she opens them, she is shocked once again, seeing “with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and beings meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves alive!” (CS, 314).

So dominated is Miranda by her near-death experience that in effect she becomes entirely alienated from the present world, viewing it “with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there and yet is helpless, unable to leave it at his will” (CS, 313). Her alienation brings her the freedom that she has long sought, but at a terrifying cost—the utter devaluation of life, including her own, before her memory of oblivion. Not unlike the drug addict whose need consumes all else, Miranda is blinded to life's wonder in the here and now by her visionary experience. Rather than bringing her near-death experience into active interplay with both her present self and her other memories (such as her love for Adam), she elevates it to an unchallengeable standard by which all else is judged. The effects are devastating. Her heart, once “tender” and “capable of love,” is “hardened” and “indifferent” (CS, 315), and she now sees life devoid of meaning with everyone—except herself—deceived by a vast conspiracy into believing that there is nothing better than to be alive. At the end of the story she banishes thoughts of Adam from her consciousness because she knows that recognizing her deep feelings for him, even though he now lies dead and buried, will undermine the cold indifference with which she now faces the world. For Miranda love has become “bitter desire,” and life's rich heterogeneity has become drab sameness. The narrator says of Miranda's thoughts, “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything” (CS, 317). Miranda has time for everything because everything has become nothing.

In the epiphany at the end of “The Grave,” Miranda recovers much of the wonder and mystery of life that she had lost at the conclusion of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Now about twenty-nine, Miranda has her visionary insight while strolling through a marketplace in a foreign country (apparently Mexico). When a market vendor holds before her a tray of sweets shaped like tiny animals, Miranda suddenly sees again a long-forgotten experience she had with her brother, Paul, twenty years before. Miranda's experiences that day had deeply disturbed her, giving her a brief and forbidding glimpse into what the future held for her as a woman, but in her revived memory of the occasion, she transforms the events into a celebration of self and memory.

On that disturbing day with Paul, Miranda's displacement from the world of childhood began when, after slipping onto her thumb a ring discovered in one of the family's graves, she immediately found herself inexplicably turning against her tomboyish ways and toward the customs of southern womanhood embodied in the family legends. “She wanted to go back to the farmhouse,” the narrator reports her thinking, “take a good cold bath, dust herself with plenty of Maria's violet talcum powder—provided Maria was not present to object of course—put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees. … These things were not all she wanted, of course; she had 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 leisure” (CS, 365). Further displacing her was the sight of unborn rabbits in the womb of the pregnant rabbit Paul had shot and cut open. What had once only been vague intuitions of sexual birth now became disturbingly real manifestations of blood and death:

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. No one had ever told her anything outright, she had been rather unobservant of the animal life around her because she was so accustomed to animals. They seemed simply disorderly and unaccountably rude in their habits, but altogether natural and not very interesting. Her brother had spoken as if he had known about everything all along. He may have seen all this before. He had never said a word to her, but she knew now a part at least of what he knew. She understood a little of the secret, formless intuitions in her own mind and body, which had been clearing up, taking form, so gradually and steadily she had not realized that she was learning what she had to know.

(CS, 366–67)

Miranda's initial fascination with the rabbits quickly faded under the pressure of this disturbing realization. Whereas she had first seen the unborn rabbits as “wonderful little creatures” and had felt “pity and astonishment and a kind of shocked delight,” she now saw a “bloody heap” and stood “quietly and terribly agitated” (CS, 366, 367). So disturbing were Miranda's thoughts about what she had seen and felt that after a few days of “confused unhappiness” (CS, 367) she let her memories of the day's events sink quietly into her consciousness where they became lost amidst the vast accumulation of other impressions.

Twenty years later, when the vendor holds the tray of sweets before her and she smells “the mingled sweetness and corruption” of the marketplace, Miranda's memory of the day, until then merely a vague recollection of a hunt for treasure amid opened graves, suddenly “leap[s] from its burial place before her mind's eye” to emerge “plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened” (CS, 367). Initially, her vision strikes her with the anguish she had felt when the events had occurred twenty years before, but as her mind quickly contextualizes the events, striving to understand their significance in light of what she has experienced and learned in the intervening years, her disquiet gives way to wonder: “The dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, 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” (CS, 367–68).

Miranda's vision of Paul celebrates the victory of the individual, and of the artist, to forge wholeness, order, and beauty from the secrets of memory. Memory, as the vision underscores, deepens experience, challenging a person to a larger understanding of self and world. Rather than in Miranda's brooding alienation at the close of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, independence and growth for Porter lie in Miranda's wholeness at the end of “The Grave,” achieved by engaging the inner reaches of memory with the self's multitudinous experiences in the world. From this dialogic interplay of memory and self, an ongoing process of reconstruction and reformulation (suggested in Miranda's final vision of Paul “turning the silver dove over and over in his hands”), a person gains insight and constructs meaning. The wholeness of self here mirrors the wholeness of art, with adventures transformed into experience, chaos into coherence. “That is what the artist does,” Porter wrote on December 30, 1942, to her nephew Paul: “He sees, he is the witness, the one who remembers, and finally works out the pattern and the meaning for himself, and gives form to his memories” (L, 260). That working out is Miranda's achievement at the end of “The Grave,” the triumphant close of the Miranda cycle.

Notes

1. Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, Chapter 1.

2. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History, 241.

3. Schwartz, “The Fictions of Memory,” 205; Tate, The Fathers, rev. ed., in Tate, “The Fathers” and Other Fiction, 185.

4. Tate, The Fathers, rev. ed., in Tate, “The Fathers” and Other Fiction, 186.

5. Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” in Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York, 1975), 63.

6. In this quest to unground meaning, as George Cheatham has shown, Miranda resembles the modernist who seeks “to deny the past's impingement on the present, to deny all confirming priorities.” See Cheatham, “Death and Repetition in Porter's Miranda Stories,” American Literature, LXI (1989), 610–24.