“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” :“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” Notes/ideas to ponder…


KATHERINE ANNE PORTER“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.” :KATHERINE ANNE PORTER“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.” Born: May 15, 1890 Indian Creek, TexasDied: September 18, 1980 Silver Spring, Maryland From early childhood Porter had been writing stories, an activity she described as the passion of her life. During the 1920s she traveled often to Mexico, wrote articles about the country, and studied art.


KATHERINE ANNE PORTER“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.” :KATHERINE ANNE PORTER“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.” Porter's first volume of stories, Flowering Judas (1930), impressed critics; she wrote and published many short stories and one novel during her life In the late 1940's and early 1950's, Porter taught at Stanford and the University of Michigan Porter donated her writings to the University of Maryland, which currently houses a collection of Porter’s writings and belongings.


Note the title… :Note the title… The story describes the process of Granny’s death, but the title is not “the dying of GW” but “the jilting of GW.” It is the jilting that is the most significant event in GW’s life (and the focus of the story)


Note the title… :Note the title… The title describes the enormous hurt and humiliation that has secretly festered in her mind and heart for sixty years.


Note the Name :Note the Name Readers meet the protagonist in the title as “Granny Weatherall.” Then readers discover that “Granny’s” first name is Ellen. “Granny” is her role? she is the matriarch of her family. Granny is a non-sexual role/name.


Weathering All :Weathering All Weatherall? she has “weathered all” – being jilted at the altar, becoming a young widow, the death of Hapsy, maintaining the farm, illness, raising children etc… She “weathers” adversity by maintaining order in her physical surroundings


Weathering All :Weathering All Granny considers "all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made'' and declares herself satisfied. She imagines asking her late husband, "Well, I didn't do so badly, did I?"


Setting :Setting The physical setting = the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying Most of the action occurs in Granny's mind In her final hours with her surviving children around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death. Her thoughts return to an incident that occurred more than sixty years earlier: George’s jilting of her at the altar.


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration Note the unusual narrative perspective? Though the story is written in the 3rd person POV, it seems more like a 1st person narrative. First came to be widely used in the early 20th century Used as a means to share a character’s thoughts without using 1st person narration


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration The writer presents the uninterrupted flow of a character's thoughts, impressions, and feelings directly, without the conventional devices of dialogue and description. Appears to be random and free-flowing, but is actually carefully planned to make an impression


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration The story is told through stream-of-consciousness: Granny's thoughts are presented in a spontaneous fashion, as if readers had access to her thoughts at the moment each one occurs to her. Porter conveys what it is like to be an eighty-year-old woman whose mind tends to wander by enabling readers to experience some of the same confusion Granny feels.


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration The story is told through stream-of-consciousness: Since Granny sometimes mistakes one daughter for another, for example, the characters in the story sometimes dissolve and become other characters. Because Granny's awareness slips back and forth between her present reality and her remembered past, events in the story are presented as they occur to Granny rather than chronologically.


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration In Granny Weatherall's semi-conscious state, the past mingles with the present and people and objects take on new forms and identities.


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration After the doctor leaves her alone, Granny Weatherall takes stock of her life, taking pleasure in the thought “that a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck the edges in orderly.”


Stream-of-Consciousness Narration :Stream-of-Consciousness Narration But it is not long before she finds "death in her mind and it felt clammy and unfamiliar.” Then…the memory of the day when she was jilted interrupts Granny Weatherall's reflections.


Major life Events :Major life Events What Granny Remembers…


Major Life Events :Major Life Events Granny’s life is marked by 3 major events at 20-year intervals: At age 20, she is jilted by George at the altar. At age 40, she gives birth to her youngest child, Hapsy. She also suffers from major illness (thrombosis and pneumonia) following the birth. At age 60, she prepares to die and visits her relatives to say goodbye. She “made her will and came down with a long fever,” but does not die for another 20 years.


Age 60: Farewell Tour :Age 60: Farewell Tour Early in the story, the suggestion is made that Granny considers herself to be already at peace with her mortality. Some twenty years earlier she had made "farewell trips" to see all her loved ones: “She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." Granny’s need to maintain control is evident in her tidy planning of the end of her life


Age 40: Hapsy’s Birth :Age 40: Hapsy’s Birth Hapsy is the youngest and apparently the favorite of Granny Weatherall's daughters—"the one she had truly wanted.“ Granny asks for Hapsy five times during the story, but Hapsy never comes to her mother's deathbed. Most likely, Hapsy has already died, possibly in childbirth. In her delirious state of mind. Granny mistakes her other daughters, Cornelia and Lydia, for Hapsy.


Age 40: Hapsy’s Birth :Age 40: Hapsy’s Birth At one point, Granny seems to confuse even herself with Hapsy, as a memory of Hapsy holding a baby comes back to her: Granny "seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting." Some critics have interpreted this memory of Hapsy as the sign of salvation that Granny seems to be looking for throughout the story.


Age 20: The Jilting :Age 20: The Jilting As she rests against her pillow she is transported back to the day when "she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man" who never arrived. The memory of that day "when the cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted” is so powerful that sixty years later she relives the moment. Although “for sixty years she had prayed against remembering him,” she decides now as her children hover around her that she wants to settle things with George, the truant bridegroom.


The Jilting :The Jilting What she wants is to even their accounts, to tell him "I got my husband just the same and my children and my house just like any other woman." Her memory recalls when "the whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away.“ (Sounds a bit like death…)


The Jilting :The Jilting Granny equates the jilting with hell: “that was hell” and “losing her soul in the deep pit of hell” She describes the “whirl of dark smoke that rose and covered” her life The jilting caused Granny to turn off her emotions; to focus upon living a life that appeared orderly in order to mask her bitterness and broken heart Losing the ability to forgive and open her heart to love is not living the life that God wants for her


The Jilting :The Jilting After the jilting, John steps in and marries Granny. John says, “I’ll kill him” in response to what George does to her Granny marries a man (John) she settles for after being jilted On her deathbed, she revisits the jilting, not her marriage to John or John’s death Granny remains bitter and hides her emotions


The Jilting :The Jilting Granny separates from her emotional self, choosing a life of hard work and exemplary appearance to the outside world Her lack of closeness with her daughters could be a result of her inability to open her heart Granny saved George’s letters, but doesn’t want anyone to know—she refers to her feelings for George as silly and foolish


The Jilting :The Jilting Deep in Granny’s heart, there is the evergreen memory of George's rejection. She has not been able to share this deep hurt with her loved ones, and it has cut off a central and tender part of herself from all others. Emotions are sacred, and, once violated, the scars may remain for a lifetime.


Granny’s Death :Granny’s Death What happens when Granny dies? What is meant by "Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house“ ? Is she “jilted” by God, who is not there for her when she dies?


Granny’s Death :Granny’s Death Could her inability to forgive have condemned her? Does her attempt to control her own death leave her with nothing?


Style: Metaphor & Simile :Style: Metaphor & Simile Dr. Harry's hand is “a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead” and he “floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed.” Granny “floated around in her skin,” and when her eyes closed involuntarily, “it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed.” “Her eyelids wavered and let in streamers of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her eyes.”


Style: Metaphor & Simile :Style: Metaphor & Simile Her hallucinatory vision of Hapsy with the baby “melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy shadow.”


Style: Metaphor & Simile :Style: Metaphor & Simile As death approaches “she saw Dr. Harry with a rosy nimbus about him,” and Cornelia's voice “staggered and bumped like a cart in a bad road.” It “made short turns and tilted over and crashed.” The earlier floating images are replaced by images of falling. “Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end of it.”


Style: Metaphor & Simile :Style: Metaphor & Simile As Granny “lay curled down within herself” she grew one with the surrounding darkness that “would curl around the light and swallow it up.” The light from the bedside lamp “flickered and winked like an eye.” The final sentence describes her death: “She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light.”


Resolution? :Resolution? The final image in the story—of Granny blowing out a candle—evokes the notion that her life is coming to an end. Yet, there is no sense of closure to Granny's life, no sense that the conflicts raised in her memories have been resolved. The final realization in the story is that "there was no bottom to death, she couldn't come to the end of it.”


“Because I could not stop for deathHe kindly stopped for me…”--Emily Dickinson :“Because I could not stop for deathHe kindly stopped for me…”--Emily Dickinson End of Presentation.