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A Journey Inward : Initiation In Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories, Anne Lobdell

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Tracing the initiation motif in Katharine Anne Porter's "Miranda stories" uncovers her maturing protagonist's search for order and personal truth. Miranda's inward journey ultimately leads not to nihilism and despair, as some critics suggest, but to an honest and courageous affirmation of the independent spirit.

Porter's fiction involving Miranda and her family background reveal varying stages of this maturing that, together with parallel theories of initiation, fall into critic Mordecai Marcus' paradigm of initiation types. The "tentative" initiation stories only brush the child Miranda's awareness and deal primarily with the external world. They include "The Circus," marking an "emotional" initiation …

Pride Before Defeat, Alma Evelene Myers

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English by Alma Evelene Myers in May of 1985.

And Then The Letting Go, Kim Silveira Bowers

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The novel And Then The Letting Go involves protagonists Samantha Evans' simultaneous discoveries of her husband Don's infidelity, her own unplanned pregnancy, and the pregnancy of her unmarried, best friend Regina. These pivotal events act as emotional catalysts, ejecting Sam out of the passive restraints of her unhappy marriage into a frightening, yet exhilarating, life of active participation.

Within a nine month temporal framework, the novel explores a period of psychological gestation which results in the birth of her new Identity. Sam Evans passes from frozen passivity ("The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--") into a chilling confrontation with the "Hour …