Hidden Meaning

   Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" is a story about the transition to adulthood and a loss of innocence. The protagonist Miranda traces this change from childhood to womanhood back to one specific day and one event. The story told by the narrator is wrapped in the history of Miranda's family, beginning with her grandmother. Miranda's grandmother moves from place to place after her husband dies. With each of these moves she uproots her dead husband's coffin to bring it with her. When she dies she wants to be buried next to him. In the description of her moving, the narrator says it is as though the grandmother moved around looking for her own burial spot. This is symbolic to the idea of a restless woman who is looking for a final place to settle down her anxiety of aging. Then the story moves on to confusion and stress that Miranda faces as she reaches her adulthood. Porter shows her confusion of yearning to be woman through various archetypes like the ring. The ring Miranda finds turns her against her tomboy clothes. She longs to go back to the farmhouse, take a bath and put on a fancy dress. The ring makes her long for luxury and a grand way of living that she has not experienced but has heard stories about as part of a legend of her family's past wealth. 

   Another element that the reader comes across in the "The Grave" is loss of innocence. It suggests the movement from innocence to knowledge, from the innocence  of the dove, to the gold ring, and to the dead mother rabbit . Miranda comes to be aware of the decay and death. Particularly in “The Grave”, Porter wanted her readers to use the process of remembering and comparing in order to understand the meaning of certain events in the story. Some years later, Miranda seemed to see her brother, again twelve years old, smiling in his eyes, turning the silver over and over in his hand. The memory “Leaps from its burial place.” And the initial vision of death, the dead rabbit which she had long ago chosen, she sees now in its true colors. That dreadful vision of death now gives way to that long ago day’s other vision of death, her unchanged brother holding the silver dove. Porter uses the various archetypes to show the depth of the story. By doing this reading along with my group I understood how literature can hold hidden meaning, and once you discover that hidden meaning then you understand the literature in a different way.      

                                                             Semarn K