215) is proven to be true. Miranda realizes that it is time for her to find her own beauty to coincide with her own character. "She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing" (219). She rebels against her family's most prized possession; their memory of the past, whatever that memory may be. Miranda states, to herself, "I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them" (219)."Old Mortality" contains three characters of entirely different kinds, and all three defy the social order of the south and strive to maintain their personal uniqueness and identity. The reader, through the telling of the family's past, is able to see each woman's own struggle toward self-definition, and each is able to achieve it, in some part, through her own individual act of separation from family and home. Amy and Eva have already experienced their liberation from the family and from the myth of the southern belle. Amy experiences this through her death and Eva through her acceptance of her life and her attitudes towards the memories of the past. In the final lines of this story, Miranda is finally realizes that she will have to separate herself from her family in order to be able to be an individual and not stuck in the fictionalized memories from the past that her family lives through. "Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people's memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live ...
