Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne Porter\u27s Old Mortality

With these final sentences of Old Mortality (1937), Katherine Anne Porter qualifies the progress eighteen-year-old Miranda has made toward self-knowledge and sophisticated reading strategies. This long story is a bildungsroman of sorts, tracing Miranda\u27s development from childhood to young adulthood, but focusing particularly on her apprenticeship as a reader. Porter links Miranda\u27s quest for self-discovery with her attempts to determine fact from fiction in the stories her family tells about the love affairs, brief marriage, and early death of her beautiful Aunt Amy. By dismissing both her father\u27s romantic legend and her Cousin Eva\u27s feminist critique as untrue--by focusing on narrative as representing reality rather than producing reality--Miranda misses not only the truths that both versions of the story contain but also the nature of the ideologies that shape these truths. By failing to comprehend the complexity of the reading experience, Miranda undermines her own ability to see how she has unconsciously used the romance narrative to script her elopement and the feminist critique to write the erotic plot out of her life. In the end, Porter herself shies away from the feminist politics of the reading experience, by concluding Old Mortality with a typical modernist ambiguous ending that runs counter to the plot\u27s interest in creating feminist readers