Category: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Porter’s strongest female influence while growing up was her grandmother, and several of her stories, including “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” feature a strong grandmotherly protagonist. Granny was able to face the humiliation and heartbreak of having her fiancé jilt her at the altar and still go on to lead a very successful life as wife, mother, and caregiver. Even after her later (and kinder) husband John dies, Granny pushes herself on to maintain her livelihood and family. Ultimately, Porter’s story is a testament to the remarkable strength of women, especially in the face of injustice or personal tragedy.

When George abandoned Granny at the altar sixty years ago, she was left to overcome the ordeal by herself. Even though she had felt as though “the whole bottom dropped out of the world,” she “had not fallen.” She held her head up high and carried on with her life, despite the continual pain of the memory of her jilting. Before Granny dies, she claims that “she would like to see George,” so that she can show him that she “had [her] husband just the same and [her] children and [her] house just like any other woman.” Granny prides herself on having upheld these traditional roles, but she has also gone above and beyond them. She has not been “just like any other woman,” because she has been so determined to re-build her life after George, and to prove to herself that she didn’t need him.

Granny was clearly very successful as a mother, and she regards this as a big part of her success in life. She may have been tough, but all of her children gather around her bedside as she dies, so they are obviously attached to her and respect her. Granny’s daughter Lydia drove “eighty miles for advice” when one of her own children “jumped the track,” and her son, Jimmy, still asked her for business advice even in her old age. Granny was also a midwife by trade, so not only did she care for her own children, but she also helped other mothers with their own. She also remembers how she once fenced one hundred acres of land, “digging the postholes herself and clamping the wires” with the help of only one boy. In other words, Granny has been an exceptionally strong woman in both her personal and professional life, and it seems like people respect her for this. Perhaps Porter was trying to illustrate the type of woman that she herself was hoping to emulate in the face of her second divorce (which she was still recovering from at the time), as well as the type of woman that her own grandmother was.

Though Granny is proud of her strength and determination, she also believes that God (a traditionally male figure) is ultimately responsible for these qualities. She says directly to God, “without Thee, my God, I could never have done it.” At the end of the story, however, Granny asks for a sign from God to reassure her in the face of her approaching death, but he does not give her one. Just as George, her first bridegroom, failed to be there for her on their wedding day, God, another bridegroom of sorts, fails to be there for her at her death. She is left in a situation in which, once again, she has been abandoned and has to look after herself. Yet once again she manages this. The story closes with Granny blowing “out the light” of her own life, taking matters into her own hands once she has been abandoned by God. Her steely will has not failed her, even in death.

Ultimately, Granny Weatherall is portrayed as a credit to her name: she has weathered all that life has to throw at her, and stayed resolvedly strong until the end. Even when she is abandoned by God in her dying moments, she is able to pick herself up and die with dignity, on her own terms, acting as a testament to Porter’s affirmation of the strength of women.

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall is a 1930 short story written by American author Katherine Anne Porter. While the story is set inside a bedroom, most of the action takes place inside the mind of 80-year-old Granny Weatherall as she spends her last day on her deathbed. The narrative employs a stream-of-conscious monologue as Granny recollects her long life and ponders her imminent death in her final hours. As her remaining family members gather around her bed in support, Granny Weatherall can’t help but recall the time she was jilted at the altar by her fiancé George 60 years prior. The short story was originally published as part of Porter’s short story collection, Flowering Judas, and Other Stories. In 1980, a television adaptation of the story was directed by Randa Haines, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald as Granny Weatherall.

Told in a third-person, stream-of-conscious-style narrative, the story begins in Granny Weatherall’s bedroom. On her sickbed, 80-year-old Granny Weatherall is visited by Dr. Harry, whom she thinks is immature. When Dr. Harry proclaims nothing is wrong with Granny, she dismisses him from her room. Dr. Harry retorts with condescension. Granny informs Dr. Harry that she’s suffered graver illness before he was even born. Granny closes her eyes and envisions herself in a hammock. She overhears Dr. Harry and her daughter Cornelia discussing her condition. It perturbs Granny that they are speaking about her as if she’s not in the room. Granny is also annoyed by Cornelia’s goodhearted nature, audibly declaring that she would like to spank Cornelia.

Granny ponders the tasks she must perform the following day. She thinks it’s important to keep her home tidy. Granny decides she needs to hide the letters addressed to her by George and John, her fiancé and husband. Granny also considers death, something she’s been preparing for since having a near-death experience two decades prior. Granny’s father lived until 102, attributing his longevity to daily hot-toddy cocktails. Granny requests a hot-toddy then berates Cornelia. Granny is vexed by the thought of Cornelia indulging her, and hates the fake gestures people make toward those in need. Granny also thinks of herself as a superior housekeeper and more dedicated worker than Cornelia.

Granny wishes for the old days when her children were tiny. She also imagines showing her late husband John how healthy the kids turned out. The children are now older than Johnny was when he died. Following John’s death, Granny became different. She became a caretaker and midwife forced to tend to her own acreage. She believes John would have been proud of the way she nursed her patients back to health. Granny recalls her children clinging to her side in the dark and how they moved away when she turned on the lamps. As Granny begins to thank God for his assistance, she recites the Hail Mary. Her mind then wanders to the necessity of picking all the fruit before it rots and goes to waste.

Granny senses her pillow suffocating her. She recalls the day she was supposed to wed for the first time. Her bridegroom, George, never arrived at the church. Granny struggles to differentiate the idea of hell from being stood up by George. She guards herself against her sense of “wounded vanity.” Cornelia enters, applies a cold press to Granny’s forehead and announces that everyone in the family will soon arrive. Confounded, Granny asks if a birthday party is being thrown for somebody. When Dr. Harry arrives, Granny throws a tantrum and claims she just saw the doctor mere minutes before. Cornelia assures Granny it is nighttime, to which Granny rebuts with a quip. When nobody answers her comment, Granny assumes she must not have spoken aloud. Doctor Harry injects Granny with medicine.

Granny imagines Hapsy, the daughter she wants to visit the most. Granny envisions Hapsy greeting her with a baby in her arms. Cornelia asks Granny if there is anything she can get for her, or if there is anything she would like to say. Granny responds by saying she wants to see George and tell him that she has gotten over him and has experienced a full life in his absence. She wants him to know of everything he robbed her of. However, as she has these thoughts, Granny realizes that she still has an empty feeling. A shooting pain strikes Granny’s body. She imagines she is in childbirth and must dispatch John to fetch the doctor. Granny clings to the idea that she will regain her strength once giving birth to her final child.

Corrnelia claims Father Connolly has come. Granny considers the priest, who cares more about tea and pleasantries and telling jokes than expressing concern for Granny’s soul. Granny isn’t worried about her soul, as she believes her favorite saints will usher her into heaven when she dies. She recounts her wedding day and how devastated she was by George’s rejection. She recalls the priest catching her as she fell. The priest promised to murder George, but Granny convinced him otherwise. Granny begins to think about the time she and John comforted the children during their nightmares. She also imagines Hapsy on the brink of giving birth. Granny scours the room and sees a picture of John, whose blue eyes appear black in the photo. She recalls the man who created the photo had called it a perfect portrait, but Granny told him it was not a picture of her husband. Granny spots a candle, crucifix and glow with a blue lampshade on the bedside table. The light produces a saintly halo around Dr. Harry, which Granny ridicules by saying it’s the closest the doctor will ever come to sainthood. However, nobody can understand what Granny says.

Granny envisions sitting in a vehicle beside a man she knows. Just yonder, she hears birds and trees “singing a Mass.” Granny clutches her rosary as Father Connolly recites Latin scripture in a way that she finds overemotional. Granny witnesses thunder and lightning as she thinks of George again. Her daughter Lydia arrives, but Granny thinks it’s actually Hapsy. Her son Jimmy is also present. Granny knows she’s dying. She feels shocked and unprepared. She conjures last minute advice she’d like to share with her family. Granny loudly declares that Cornelia cannot leave yet, and worries what will happen if they can’t locate Hapsy. As she lies dying, Granny awaits a final sign from God. When nothing comes, she feels as if she’s been jilted again. Granny dies sorrowfully.

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was the first of Katherine Anne Porter’s Texas stories, all drawn from persistent memories of her own impoverished and motherless childhood as well as from her memories of her sternly rigorous and religious grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter of Kyle, Texas. Ellen Weatherall is a character distinctly different from grandmother Sophia Jane Gay, who plays an initially important role in the stories that make up The Old Order (1955), but whose influence is beginning to fade in “The Grave.” As does Sophia Jane, however, Granny Weatherall represents Porter’s fascination not with the generation of her prematurely dead mother but with the earlier generation—the women who had weathered first the Civil War, then the drastically fluctuating social and economic times that followed, and finally the steady challenges to the gender expectations of their young womanhood upon which they had depended but against which practical circumstance dictated resistance. Porter, faced in 1928 with physical breakdown and no stranger herself to economic duress and self-doubts about her own role in a patriarchal society, created in Granny Weatherall a figure who would enact not only the author’s personal abhorrence of rejection, loneliness, and passivity but also her marked tendency toward creative self-narrative.

Fear of rejection colors all of Granny Weatherall’s adult life after her fiancé, George, fails to claim her at the altar and thus affirm her womanhood. Granny Weatherall’s literal response to rejection and the loneliness that threatens to follow it has been action: She marries her second choice, John; bears his children; musters her capabilities both maternal and paternal at his early death; and is in all things “dutiful and good.” Or at least she maintains the appearance of being dutiful and good, since it is with those words that she slightingly names the weaknesses of her daughter, Cornelia, weaknesses for which she at 80 is willing to spank her middle-aged child. In reality, her life has been, of necessity, a subtle challenge to the sentimental and romantic standards of her youth.

Her figurative response to rejection and loneliness has been to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. She associates her jilting with dark smoke, a personal image of the spent light of hell that returns decades later to fog her brain as she lies on what she at first refuses to acknowledge as her deathbed. Uncomprehendingly, she watches “a fog [rise] over the valley, marching across the creek like an army of ghosts”. That vision reminds her of the beauty that lay in “lighting the lamps” as her small children crowd around her to escape the nightly darkness, striking the match that would dispel their nightmares and embodying the strong light of reassurance that the younger generation, whose modern shaded lamps were “no sort of light at all, just frippery”, would mourn with her passing.

Her joy at her ability to become the illumination for her own life and the lives of her family is a pragmatic response to the social failure of the cult of true womanhood and the circumstantial failure of her dead husband to see to her needs and the needs of her children. A true woman gives her heart once and forever: If jilted, she remains rejected and unwed, or, if wed and widowed, she mourns for her remaining lifetime. Ellen Weatherall permits herself neither of these cultural prescriptions, choosing instead as a young woman to live on purposefully with John through children birthed, meals cooked, clothes sewn, and gardens made; widowed and without John, she does the work of man and woman, counseling her son on financial matters, post holing and fencing her hundred acres, or seeing to the sick and the lyings-in of other women with equal aplomb. It is not in her to “let good things rot for want of using.”

Yet faced with the imminence of her death, Granny Weatherall becomes aware of the ambiguous legacy she will leave behind her. Will her children’s memories of her be consistent with the self she has created in her lifelong effort to dispel the dark? Or will she be remembered as the mournful and bereft bride at the altar whose revealing letters to her lover and her husband-to-be lie waiting in the attic to be discovered after her death?

As Robert Brinkmeyer suggests in his reading of this Porter story, the hopeful narratives of self created through public acts are gravely at risk in the face of memory’s secret narrative. If Ellen’s children discover the letters, they will know the self she has hidden and the setbacks she has worked to overcome through the years, possibly to think less of her as a result. Fearful of the loss of her consciously created selfhood, Granny Weatherall doubts the efficacy of her favorite saints — probably those of the household and of women’s concerns — in whom she had entrusted the certainty of her heavenly reward. Instead, she pledges herself yet another time to the bridegroom, in words the ironic overlay of which she seems unaware: “Without thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail, Mary, full of grace.” Expecting God to claim and confirm her at the end of her life, and failing to receive the sign that he will do so, she responds in a manner typical of all her years: Albeit grievingly and sorrowfully, she takes charge of the light once again, blowing it out with the last of her own life’s breath.