Miranda Over The Valley Analysis

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In the story, Miranda Over the Valley by Andre Dubus, Miranda’s life falls apart along with the baby she planned to have. She deteriorates after the abortion that she did not choose to have. Also, she doesn’t feel a kind of freedom her parents told her she would. Rather we see, among other things, an inability to love and a loss of the positivity she once had in her life, which quickly turns into a more dismal attitude towards life. Miranda loses her identity of who she really is and transforms into someone completely different.
The large part of Miranda that deteriorates drastically after the abortion is her capacity to love, especially Michaelis. At first, Miranda believes that she will able to deal with being pregnant and actually having the baby with …show more content…

Miranda’s idea of love at the beginning of the story is clear when she is talking to her roommate, Holly, and they discuss actually going through with marriage and having a baby. Miranda says, “I love him…my first one. You mean the first one I made love with…that’s not what it means to me ”. Miranda explains to Holly that even though it is the first guy that she has had sex with, she loves him and it’s not because she hasn’t been with other men. Also, she says how she wants to be owned, disagreeing with Holly. But after the abortion, her love for Michaelis changes completely. For example, when Miranda was talking with Brian, she says, “I used to love him”. On top of that, she explains while in Michaelis’s apartment “she gave them her lips as she might have given coins to a beggar. She could feel nothing except that it was strange for him to cry; she did not believe she would ever cry again; not for love.” Miranda’s idea of love altogether adjusts from where she has sex with Michaelis only once and seems as if it is her destiny to spend her life with him making a family, to having loveless sex with him at the end and leaves

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