The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Summary / Study Guide

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The Jilting of Granny Weatherall | Introduction

Katherine Anne Porter's story, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" was first published in transition magazine in February, 1929. The story, concerning a dying woman's memory of being left at the altar on her wedding day and her current fear of being jilted in a similar manner by God, was subsequently collected in Porter's first published book, Flowering Judas. She has said that the character of Granny Weatherall was based on her own grandmother and that the story was the first of many of her works to be inspired by her Texas roots. Porter's often fragile health may have also influenced the story. In 1918, she nearly died of influenza; funeral arrangements had been made and her obituary written. In her autobiography, Porter stated that the experience made her different from others: "I had what the Christians call the 'beatific vision,' and the Greeks called the 'happy day,' the happy vision just before death.'' Such experience may have led her to explore that moment of death in her fiction, a moment in which Granny Weatherall feels that her body is "a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up.'' Nevertheless, the story has remained popular since its publication for the complexities and ambiguities inherent in its stream-of-consciousness narrative and for its carefully drawn portrait of a Southern matriarch confronting the sum total of her life.

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