I think that the horse theme in Old Mortality is interesting. It seems to be an underlying theme that connects many of the characters. There is a lot of mention of riding, jockeying, hunting, running away via horse, and so forth. It seems to connect Amy and Miranda a little too, because Miranda at one point wanted to be a jockey.
The place that I guess I was most repulsed by was the scene where Harry takes the girls to the track and they meet Gabriel. All at once their fantasized views of him were washed away and he was revealed for what he was. But what grossed me out was his obsession with Amy. I don't want to knock true love, but they were only married for 6 weeks and he is riding "her" horses - horses names after hers. And he's killing them by doing it! I don't know what to think of that part, because he obviously thinks that by riding her horses to death honors his dead wife. I don't blame Miranda for not wanting to be a jockey anymore after seeing such a sad scene...
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The theme of horses in Old Mortality is very interesting. In a way, I think they are symbolic. I'm not quite sure what they symbolize, I feel like what they symbolize is a generalized abstraction. I do see horses as representing both life and death within the story. We see Amy ride to the border for three days despite her failing health and it seems to bring life to her. A life that overpowers death. Also, I see horses as symbolizing mortality, or in other words, death.
The odd thing about horses in "Old Mortality", I thought, was how prominently they also feature in "Noon Wine" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" - the two short novels/long stories that "Old Mortality" is collected in this. How can we compare Miss Lucy in OM to the tired Old Jim in NW? To the Miss Lucy in Miranda's dream in PHPR?
I'm struggling to come up with a unifying theme for these three works. OM and PHPR are easier to link without NW in the picture - they are, after all, both Miranda stories, and though we can't be sure that it's the same Miranda, it's probably a reasonable guess. (Reference to Miranda's past in PHPR are almost nonexistent, and so it's difficult to map her existence onto the Miranda from OM - at least for me.) Could the three only have been completed around the same time?
Maybe an inspection of horses can undercover a theme that unifies these stories.
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