1. Katherine Anne Porter

2. Katherine Anne Porter-A Brief Biography Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, and brought up in that state and in Louisiana. Her mother died when she was two and she was brought up by her grandmother who died when Porter was 11. Her first marriage was at sixteen, and she was married four times in life. In her life, Porter travelled extensively, lived in foreign and American cities, settled at last in a suburb of Washington, D.C. She took many jobs to earn a living: a journalist, an actress, a ghost writer, etc. She lived to be ninety years old. Porter’s literary output is small. She produced only four books of stories and one novel, Ship of Fools, which did not appear until she was over seventy. Her first book of stories Flowering Judas was published in 1930, followed by A Story of Mexico (1934), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944). The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) won her both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. Porter planned her stories meticulously, taking extensive notes, revising many times, sometimes over a period of years. Each story originated in a real important experience of her life, and drew on her deepest feelings. Her stories have been praised for their technical accomplishments in matters of style, form, and language. Her characters were depicted with clarity and detail; her figurative and symbolic language and long sentences lent the tales a poetic air.

3. Brief Introduction to “The Grave” The story is about the nine-year-old Miranda who goes on a hunting expedition for rabbits and birds, with her twelve-year-old brother Paul. In the family’s open grave, Miranda finds a dove-shaped coffin nail and Paul finds a flowered ring. They exchange the treasures and after that Miranda loses interest in hunting. Later Paul kills a rabbit which turns out to be pregnant with baby rabbits. As usual, Paul skins the rabbit but this time Miranda refuses to take the skin. They wrap the mother rabbit and her babies in the skin and bury them under the tree. Miranda agrees not to tell anybody about this as Paul asks her. But twenty years later when she is in a market of a foreign country, a tray of sugar candies that are shaped like baby animals awakens her buried memory.

4. Question 1 What does the opening paragraph suggest about life and death of mankind with the story of grandmother?

5. Answer 1 Grandmother moves from place to place, transplanting grandfather’s corpse along “as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left”; and ends up dead with her husband lying beside her “for eternity”. This suggests the wandering movements of mankind on his journey through life towards death. The word “eternity” implies after-life beyond death.

6. Question 2 In which sense is the garden a representation of a fallen Eden?

7. Answer 2 The “tangled” rose bushes and “ragged” cedar trees, as well as the “uncropped” “wild” grass in the “neglected” garden, all these images suggest that the cemetery is an representation of a fallen Eden. A male child and female child — Paul aged 12 and Miranda aged 9 — playing in the garden together might also suggest Adam and Even.

8. Question 3 How is Miranda’s utter innocence in the face of death portrayed? What details about the ring and the dove impress you most? Which one would you prefer?

9. Answer 3 Miranda leaps “into the pit” that has “held her grandfather's bones” and, “scratching around aimlessly and pleasurably, as any young animal”, scoops up “a lump of earth” from the grave with “pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell”. Miranda is utterly innocent of death, which she will have to face and learn in the latter part of the story, and which awaits all human beings. The ring is cold carved with “intricate flowers and leaves”, and the dove is silver with “spread wings and a neat fan-shaped tail”. Its breast has “a deep round hollow”, the inside of which is “cut in little whirls”. The ring is a wedding ring, and the dove is actually a screw head for a coffin.

10. Question 4 What is the difference between Paul and Miranda in the matter of hunting? Do you think Miranda’s more innocent?

11. Answer 4 Paul is very earnest and serious in hunting. He would “smash his hat and yell with fury” when he has missed his aim. Miranda in fact has “no sense of hunting at all”. She likes shooting simply because she enjoys “pulling the trigger and hearing the noise”. Miranda is obviously more innocent and she does not care about hitting the mark and she is not aware of the consequences of shooting, which is death.

12. Question 5 What changes happen to Miranda when she puts on the flowered ring on her “grubby thumb”? What does the ring symbolize?

13. Answer 5 The ring arouses in her a desire for luxury, and for a female role she wants to fulfill — she wants to “dust herself with plenty of her sister’s violet talcum powder…put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees”. The gold ring carved with intricate flowers is a symbol of matrimony and womanhood; the traditional role a female is supposed to play in the upper society. The exchange shows Miranda’s trading her childhood innocence for the knowledge that the gold wedding ring represents — female sexuality and fertility.

14. Question 6 How does Miranda feel at the sight of the baby rabbits? What secret is revealed to her?

15. Answer 6 Miranda feels “excited” and “quietly and terribly agitated”. The sight of the baby rabbits sheds light on sex and birth, the secret of life and fertility, which, she has a certain vague knowledge all along without being acutely conscious.

16. Question 7 What does Miranda see twenty years later in a foreign market? What vision does she have? How do you understand this ending?

17. Answer 7 In the market, she saw “dyed-sugar sweets, shaped like all kinds of small creatures”. But this dreadful vision faded when she recalls her brother “standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands”.

18. General Question 1 If the story can be divided into two parts, what are they about?

19. Answer 1 The first part is about Miranda’s childhood experience, her discovery of birth and death as a result of the two incidents, playing around in the grave and witnessing a dead rabbit. The second part of the story happens almost twenty years later when Miranda is an adult woman walking in a foreign market. The repressed memories of the past childhood experience suddenly burst out to overwhelm her.

20. General Question 2 In which sense is this story about growing up, and going through initiation into the mysteries of adult life?

21. Answer 2 With the wedding ring awakening her latent femininity and the dead rabbit shedding light on life and death, Miranda is quickly losing her childhood ignorance, innocence to the adult knowledge about sex, and realize her destiny as a woman. She learns these things suddenly, unexpectedly, in circumstances that connect birth and death, with the secret of birth revealed in the place of death. This knowledge is not sweet, but bitter. Like the forbidden fruit in the biblical story, this knowledge brings both enlightenment and pain. That is the price to pay for growing up.

22. General Question 3 How would you interpret the title of the story? According to William Prater, “(w)e see the ‘grave’ of the title not to be one in the empty family cemetery nor the grave of the rabbits but the ‘burial place’ of her mind in which she represses an unpleasant but meaningful experience.” Do you agree with such an interpretation? Please explain.

23. Answer 3 This interpretation is valid, for it explains how Miranda’s memories — her sudden initiation to the adult world of sex, life, and death which she feels hard to cope with as a girl — are repressed for many years until she grows up and revisits them in a foreign country. There are other interpretations, one of which stresses the resurrection connotation of the image of dove, Paul’s name resonating with Paul the apostle following Jesus, and see the ending “standing again in the blazing sunshine, …turning the silver dove over and over in his hands” in terms of heavily religious message, i.e., the resurrection of life, life beyond death, beyond grave. Various interpretations of the title and the ending of the story render it even more mysterious and powerful.

24. A Website of Katherine Anne Porter http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/top ic/471112/Katherine-Anne-Porter