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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.

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 around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death. Almost against her will, her thoughts return to an incident that occurred more than sixty years earlier: She was left standing alone at the altar when her fiance George jilted her.

Porter gradually reveals the details of the jilting through Granny Weatherall's fragmented recollections. In Granny Weatherall's semi-conscious state, the past mingles with the present and people and objects take on new forms and identities. 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.'' But it is not long before she... » Complete The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Summary