In her essay “The Eye of the Story,” fellow southern writer and critic Eudora Welty observes that “most good stories are about the interior of our lives, but Katherine Anne Porter’s stories take place there; they surface only at her choosing.” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is certainly one of these interior stories, as Porter…
Tag: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Setting
Porter once wrote that her stories grew primarily out of her passion for the feelings and motivations of individual people, claiming “I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike.” For her, however, fascination with the individual did not preclude an interest in broader social and historical issues. Unique…
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Literary Devices
Early in her career, Porter came to be admired as an innovative and masterful stylist. In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” she uses experimental, modernist narrative techniques in creating a moving and believable portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed. Stream-of-Consciousness Narration One of the most striking stylistic aspects of “The Jilting of Granny…
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Themes
A portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed,’ “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is an exploration of the human mind as it struggles to come to terms with loss and mortality. Porter offers no clear resolution to these fundamental issues, but instead interweaves themes of betrayal, religion, death, and memory in a moving and…
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Characters
George George is the man who jilted Granny Weatherall, abandoning her at the altar on what was to be their wedding day when she was twenty. She eventually married another man, had a family, and convinced herself that she had put the pain of being “jilted” behind her. However, she kept letters from George in…
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Summary
The setting for “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying, though most of the action occurs in Granny’s head. Told as a stream-of-consciousness monologue, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is the story of the last day in the eighty-year-old woman’s life. In her final hours with her surviving children…