A Study Of Point Of View In The Miranda Stories

Katherine Anne Porter is acclaimed as one of the finest literary stylists among modern American writers and her reputation is established on her short stories. Her fiction is characterized by a wide range of subjects, delicate plot, and a compressed style. Most of her stories are rooted in her own life and most of the protagonists in her fiction are women. In the Miranda stories, Porter adopts a reticent strategy, that is, the female voice is successfully mirrored by the reticence of Miranda's speech through an authorial narrator with a dual perspective. The hegemony of patriarchal culture is thus challenged effectively.This thesis is an attempt to prove that point of view in the Miranda stories is more like a reflection of feminist ideology than an isolated technique. Its purpose is to explore the narrative techniques in the Miranda stories with the theoretical support of Susan Lanser's feminist narratological studies. According to Lanser, point of view is both technique and ideology. The introduction of the thesis is devoted to Porter's narrative strategy which is understood to be rich in feminist ideology. The subsequent chapters present a detailed analysis of the narrative strategy, approached with the theory of feminist narratology. It is to prove that point of view in the Miranda stories is adopted as an effective technique to highlight the content of feminist ideology in three aspects, namely, status of the narrative voice, narrative contact, and narrative stance. However, Lanser fails to provide an effective method to locate the identity of the narratee in terms of narrative contact. The thesis then employs Gerald Prince's study of the narratee to analyze the relationship between the narrator and the narratee. It is concluded that the narrative strategy in the Miranda stories is a perfect combination of narrative technique as the form and feminist ideology as the content.The purpose of studying Porter's narrative strategy is to suggest that her fine writing style can not only be interpreted with the formalist approach, but also from the ideological perspective, for form is the carrier of content, and they are well blended in Porter's texts. In this light, each of Porter's works is a piece of art integrating subject, structure, language, and style.