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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 …