The Grave (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“The Grave” was first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1935, but it did not receive much critical attention until it was published again in 1944 as part of a collection of stories, The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. In this collection, “The Grave” was grouped with a smaller collection of short stories focusing on the character of Miranda, called “The Old Order.”

Early reviews of The Leaning Tower and Other Stories were mainly positive, hailing Porter as a careful stylist and an important contributor to the genre of the American short story. In The Saturday Review, Howard Mumford Jones admired the stories’ “smooth literary texture” and the “exquisite rightness” of her style. However, he also criticizes her for an “approach [that] sometimes reminds one of a cat stalking its prey with unnecessary caution,” suggesting that her roundabout storytelling methods decrease the stories’ dramatic power. Similarly, Joseph Warren Beach, while admiring Porter as a “truth-teller” who was “refreshingly free from self-consciousness,” cautioned that the “deceptive quietness in her tone . . . may lead us to do less than justice to her writing.” Writing for the Kenyon Review, Marguerite Young claimed that “Miss Porter’s great service to the short story has been . . . that in her hands it acquires a new stature and significance.”

Later critics would most frequently discuss symbolism in her work, finding “The Grave” in particular a story amenable to a formalist approach — a critical approach that emphasizes studying the story as a discrete whole, apart from considerations of the author’s biography or her other works. Such critics therefore considered “The Grave” without considering the context of “The Old Order” or any of the other stories in which Miranda was a central charac-ter. The ring and the dove found in the graves, the rabbits, and the grave itself have each been explained by a variety of different interpretations. William Prater interprets Miranda’s exchange of the dove for the ring as “symbolizing her unconscious willingness to trade her childhood innocence for the knowledge that the gold wedding ring represents,” adding that the grave represents “the ‘burial place’ of her mind in which she represses an unpleasant but meaningful experience.” In response to scholars’ attempts to fix meanings for the various symbols in the story, Dale Kramer suggests that the symbolism of “The Grave” works on both intellectual and subliminal levels. His reading of the story thus emphasizes the unconscious, and he argues, like others, that the form and symbolism of the story indicate Miranda’s psychological repression of “the fuller implications of sexual knowledge” contained in the vision of the unborn rabbits.

Some critics suggested that despite Porter’s alleged atheism (alleged because some say Porter was Catholic), the symbolism of “The Grave” was predominantly Christian, and subsequently offered Christian interpretations of the story. In a defense of his formalist methodology, George Cheatham dismisses the importance of Porter’s own beliefs to argue that the story should stand on its own. In that context, Cheatham proposes that the dove “unquestionably symbolizes the resurrection of man’s immortal soul through the power of the Holy Spirit.” In a later essay, Cheatham adds to this reading of the symbolism of the grave, arguing that “Miranda rejects all inherited structures of meaning — the past, the mythic, and the sacred (all suggested by the silver dove) — for the freedom of existence unmediated by structure — for the present, the personal, and the profane (all suggested by the rabbit).” Constance Rooke and Bruce Wallis also interpret “The Grave” in terms of Christian symbolism, claiming that “criticism [of the story] has continued to neglect the story’s paradigm of our most primal racial myth, that of the fall of man, which is itself the pattern of a primal experience in the life of each individual.” They see Miranda’s grandmother’s garden as the fallen Garden of Eden, a reading they buttress with Miranda’s mention of the snake, Miranda’s and Paul’s names, the neglect of the trees and rose bushes, and more. Thus they do not read Miranda’s later vision of the rabbits, quickly replaced by a vision of Paul, as a symptom of repressing sexual knowledge, but rather as a sign of her knowledge of the possibility of redemption and resurrection. “With its end in the ’blazing sunshine’ of such new knowledge, this is decidedly not the story of a willful self-blinding, but rather of an epiphany of the first water.”

More recent essays have taken a turn away from the formalist practice of basing an interpretation only on the story itself, and have looked at “The Grave” in terms of the other “Miranda” stories, emphasizing the theme of truth. At the same time, recent criticism has also focused on gender issues. Janis P. Stout looks at the Miranda stories together, finding Miranda, like Porter, to be a “truth-teller in a world of false speakers.” Kaye Gibbons looks at how Miranda’s sense of truth develops throughout the stories, seeing “The Grave” as a kind of conclusion. In it, she argues, Miranda learns to stop digging beneath the surface for the truth and allow it to come to her instead. Judith Kegan Gardiner asks how Porter’s writing in “The Grave” might reflect a “female esthetic,” arguing that the story illustrates “wider possibilities for the female artist than initially seem to be available to the [story’s] hero.”