Assignment 11

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Known as a writer of great clarity, Porter achieved a style of objectivity without sacrificing sensitivity. Her stories are self-motivated, without the author's omnipresence. She has been called "a maker of darkish parables" for her treatment of individuals who are impoverished by the modern environment and also for her use of the themes of guilt, isolation, and spiritual denial. Many of her stories use the geographic locales of the South, the Southwest, and Mexico.

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (pp. 1028-35)

Regardless of her chronological age and the circumstances of her life, Granny Weatherall (note the name) always remained young at heart. Nearly eighty, Granny is physically worn out after a lifetime of serving her family. She is bedridden, just hours away from her fatal stroke and heart attack, yet emotionally she is still twenty and still betrothed to the bridegroom who will jilt her on her wedding day. As a young woman, then, she has lost her innocence. Some time later she entered into a successful marriage with another man, John, and had four children with him, but as an old woman on her deathbed, she stubbornly fantasizes the return of another bridegroom who will take her to heaven. Porter’s conflation of two kinds of bridegrooms–the secular and the divine–is the central drama of her story. Porter narrates it in the third-person from the perspective of the dying woman, brilliantly joining Granny’s stream of consciousness with descriptions of her physical sensations as she lies in her bed amid the growing crowd of people who attend her in her last hours–Doctor Harry, her loving daughter Cornelia, Father Connolly, and her other grown children, Jimmy and Lydia.

Porter was a writer more interested in a character’s state of mind than in external action. This famous story takes us inside the consciousness of the main character, and we follow the stream of observations, memories, and rationalizations as they pass through Granny’s mind. Instead of following external action from cause to effect, or from action to reaction, we follow the stream of consciousness. In most of the story we hear the main character thinking to herself; we listen to her monologue. We move on two levels: we get glimpses of the outer, or surface, reality of the sickroom as Granny lies on her deathbed in the home of her daughter Cornelia, who hovers solicitously over her mother throughout. But we also participate in the inner reality of Granny’s observations, thoughts, and feelings. As often with the stream of consciousness technique, some of the stream of thoughts and emotions seem trivial or routine. But eventually the character’s thinking circles her back to what really matters. While the line between past and present, reality and recollection, blurs in Granny’s mind, we are constantly aware that two interrelated narratives are underway: Granny’s final hours as seen by her family and friends, and Granny’s recollections during those final hours.

What emerges is the portrait of a sturdy, self-reliant southern Catholic lady who, despite her advanced age, is not quite prepared to die. There are, after all, so many things yet to take care of, so many lose ends of her long life to attend to before dying. A woman who has raised her children alone, doing both a man’s and a woman’s work, knows the value of planning and efficiency and the need for “a little margin of peace” so that “as person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly.” “Tomorrow,”she repeatedly says in the first part of the story, “tomorrow” there will be time to take care of the loose ends. But Granny knows that there will be no tomorrow. In the face of death, her mind travels over the years, seeking some answer, some key that will tuck in the edges of her life and give it order. Recollections flash through her mind, but the answer eludes her. “What was it I set out to do?” she vainly wonders, her mind providing not an answer but the image of a rising fog.

When the fog dissipates, her mind comes to rest on the crucial event of her youth: the day sixty years before when her finance, George, left her jilted at the church. After six decades that have included a husband (John, now dead), children, grandchildren, work, and struggle, her mind fastens on the jilting as somehow embodying the answer she seeks. Her recollections suggest that after the jilting she married John though she did not love him, but that over the years of her marriage, she truly came to love him. Hapsy (who had apparently died) was born out of this love and is, therefore, “the one she had truly wanted.” She desperately wishes to find George, to tell him that despite his cruel jilting of her she went on to live a happy, successful life. “Tell him,” she says, “I was given back everything he took away and more.” But Granny is suddenly aware that the loss she suffered in the jilting goes much deeper. For she immediately cries: “Oh no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back.”

As death approaches, confused thoughts and images out of the past mingle indistinguishably in Granny’s mind with events in the present. The recollection of the jilting, when “the whole bottom dropped out of the world” recurs sharply; and, as she receives the last rites, she reaffirms that her loss of George meant nothing, since “I found another whole world better.”

Now Granny yields herself to imminent death, shutting everything out of her mind and concentrating upon the diminishing point of light that is her life. A pious and good woman, she awaits the revelation of Christ that will herald her resurrection into eternal life. But the greatest pain of her life, its deepest sorrow, occurs at the very moment of her death when “for the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house.” For the second time in Granny’s well-ordered and controlled life, she suffers the unendurable pain of a jilting that robs her life of its meaning. And now we understand why Granny, who has “weathered all,” broods over the jilting in her final hours. Somehow, that previous jilting robbed her of her youth and passion, the fervor of bright expectation with which a twenty-year-old girl faced the future. And now, with her life ending after years of successful struggle, she looks back upon it with the painful if dim sense that something was irretrievably lost when she was left waiting at the church, and she turns once again to await a bridegroom who does not appear. Since Granny is a Catholic, her desire for a new bridegroom exhibits a sin of pride–if not sacrilege. It is an enormous act of hubris to assume that God is going to send you a sign that you will be received by Christ. Or that you’re immortal.

There is of course great dignity and strength in Granny, but it emerges most movingly during the final hours of her life that there is, tragically, not “always a little margin over for peace” and that one cannot, finally, “tuck in the edges orderly.”