How does Granny's surname, Weatherall, reflect her nature or life story in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

The name "Weatherall" implies exactly what it seems to imply. Granny seems to have, over the course of her life, "weathered all" of life's hardships and disappointments. She recalls various diseases that she has suffered through, as well as the work that she has had to complete since her husband died so young. Similar to Eudora Wetly's Phoenix Jackson, Granny Weatherall seems to fall within an archetype of elderly women whose tenacity and grit seem almost supernatural. She can take on any hardship life throws at her and take it in stride; however, the reason for this is that she has suffered a hardship and humiliation to which nothing else can compare, and everything else that she suffers seems trivial in the eternal wake of it.

When Weatherall was to be married to her first fiancé, George, he left her at the alter, "jilting" her. This destroyed Granny at a very early age and, even if she never talks about it, is an event that consumes her every thought and action. This is the one event that she is truly unable to weather, because it does kill her in the end. When Granny reaches out for divine grace during her death, she believes that God himself has jilted her as well.

How does Granny's surname, Weatherall, reflect her nature or life story in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Ellen Weatherall has truly weathered all the troubles life has thrown at her. The verb, to weather, describes the action of enduring and coming safely through some hardship or trouble. She talks about surviving "milk leg and double pneumonia" decades prior when the doctor comes to see her. She also felt death approaching when she turned sixty, so she made "farewell trips" to her kids’ and grandkids’ homes before the onset of a "long fever." She survived that too. Now, on her deathbed at eighty years-old, she recalls how young her husband, John, was when he died. She’d had to fence "in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a Negro boy to help." Granny Weatherall has been changed, certainly, by her experiences—some of them tragic—but she has weathered all the hardships and trying times. She sat "up nights with sick horses and sick Negroes and sick children" and "hardly ever lost one of them." She has been so strong, has had such perseverance and grit. She even recalls having weathered being "jilted"—left at the altar—by her first fiancé, George.

How does Granny's surname, Weatherall, reflect her nature or life story in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Granny’s last name, Weatherall, suggests that she is resilient and able to overcome obstacles and hardships in her life. She has the ability to weather whatever comes her way.  For example, when her husband, John, dies young, Granny must raise the children on her own. However, the one incident in her life that still haunts her is when she is left at the altar by her first love, George.  Although Granny went on to marry and have children, she hasn’t been able to totally get over the embarrassment of being jilted. In her dying moments, she even rejects the priest giving her last rites because it reminds her of being left alone with the priest at the altar.  The inability to forgive George causes her to be jilted once again, but this time by God at the end of her life.  She asks God to give her a sign that she will be saved, and God doesn’t give her that sign.  She dies remembering only the extreme grief she had because she could not forgive George for an incident that happened 60 years ago.  In essence, Granny weathered all the grief and sorrow the jilting caused her throughout her life and never let go of it.  This grief left her paralyzed, a theme shown in the story through the setting in the tight confines of Granny’s bedroom. She is no longer able to act or express herself well in the final throes of death even though she wants to put her affairs in order before she dies.  It’s too late, however, for Granny has wasted a lot of time drowning in the memories of what could have been.

Other characteristics that describe Granny are that she is ornery, feisty, and bossy.  She harasses the doctor and her daughter, Cornelia, for doting over her too much.  She “plagues” Cornelia and plays with her emotions and feelings.  She is also angry and seems to take it out on Cornelia the most. Cornelia is George’s daughter; and therefore, Granny blames Cornelia for some of her misery. Granny does show strength when she tries to talk herself into getting over George.  She says, “Plenty of girls get jilted.  You were jilted, weren’t you?  Then stand up for it.”  Even though in her mind she wants to get over George, Granny never does.  At the end of the story and with her last breath, she refuses to forgive George, and it is her downfall.

What does the writer reveal about Granny in the first paragraph of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Granny finds the doctor unnecessary and disrespectful, thinking, "The brat ought to be in knee breeches."  When he tells her to be "a good girl," Granny is offended: 

"That's no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she's down.  I'd have you respect your elders, young man."

Granny may be failing, but she still has standards.

What does the writer reveal about Granny in the first paragraph of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

We can infer several things about Granny Weatherall from the first paragraph. She is ill, she is old, she is a strong, no-nonsense personality, and she is delusional. We know Granny is ill because she is being attended to by her doctor. We know she is old because she knew him when he was a boy. We know she is delusional because she thinks he is still a boy, telling him to "take your schoolbooks and go." Finally, we know Granny still is spunky, strong willed, and opinionated, despite being old and sick. She thinks of Doctor Harry as a "brat," pulls her hand away from him in a definitely dismissive gesture, and informs him, "There's nothing wrong with me."

What does the first paragraph of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" reveal about Ellen Weatherall?

Ellen Weatherall is stubborn and even a little combative. "She flicked her wrist neatly" out of the doctor's fingers as he is attempting to examine her, and she "pulled the sheet up to her chin," essentially refusing to allow him to continue with his examination. She is unwilling to compromise or listen; it is Granny's way or not at all. She even thinks of the doctor as a "brat" because he is so much younger than she and, in her view, seems to think of himself too highly, "doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose!" Such a thought seems to indicate that Ellen is very old and set in her ways, unable to recognize that the doctor used to be a child but has since grown up, gotten an education, and become qualified to medically attend people. She tells him to "take [his] schoolbooks and go," again indicating how stuck her mind seems to be in the past; she is indignant and does not see that he is a qualified expert who means to help her rather than an upstart child putting on airs. In fact, she is the unreasonable one here, not he.

What does the first paragraph of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" reveal about Ellen Weatherall?

In the first paragraph, we only hear from Ellen and the doctor.  The author doesn't really tell us anything, but we can infer a great deal.  This is a story of the feisty 80-year pioneer woman who refuses to die before she tells her jilting lover what she thinks of him.  At the beginning of the story, Ellen Weatherall is in bed and the doctor is standing over her.  She tells him he is too young to be her doctor, and she also says nothing is wrong with her.  Granny is in denial.  She knows death is coming but she continues to argue that she is well.  She is too weak to wave goodbye, but she doesn’t like the doctor and Cornelia talking about her.  She is negative, argumentative, and in her own way scared of the death that is coming for her.

In the very first paragraph, what does the writer tell us about Granny Weatherall in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

This is the first paragraph of the story:

She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now. Take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

The reader can tell, just from this short paragraph, that Granny Weatherall is someone who does not want to be seen by her doctor, does she? 

We can tell that she is quite grumpy and self-righteous, as well.  Her dialogue to the doctor indicates she is mocking the doctor, calling him a schoolboy because he is young.  She does not see him as being qualified to examine her because he is so young. 

The fact that she flicks her wrist away from the doctor indicates that she is in no mood to be "handled" by the doctor.  She has what I call "attitude"!

What does the first paragraph of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" reveal about Ellen Weatherall?

In the first paragraph of the short story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," Granny Weatherall is lying in her bed being attended to by Doctor Harry. She is outspoken, sassy, and defiant. She dismisses the doctor as a "brat" who ought to be in "knee breeches." She tells him to go away and insists that there is nothing wrong with her. However, we soon learn that this behavior is a front and a cover-up for her real situation, of which she is at first in denial. She is dying.

As the story progresses and her thoughts unfold, we realize that her dismissal of her imminent death in the first paragraph comes from an inner strength that she has manifested throughout her life. She recalls a life that has been difficult and full of hard work, but she also has pleasant memories of the times she spent with her loved ones. She imagines that she is merely resting and when she feels better, she will get up and put "the whole place to rights again," but in fact the strength that she thinks she has is only a memory and an illusion. Her outbursts in the first few paragraphs are the last real outward manifestations of her strength of character.

We see, then, that in the first paragraph the writer tells us that Granny Ellen Weatherall has a strong and outspoken personality, but we also realize after reading the rest of the story that her attitude in the first paragraph is actually a cover-up for the fact that she is dying.

At what point does Granny react to her situation in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

In the story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," we find an elderly woman on her deathbed going in and out of consciousness and trying to make amends with her past. She is particularly affected by a jilting she suffered when she was young, which left her humiliated in the eyes of her family and her community. As part of the amends she tries to make in her mind, she is adamant to convince everyone, and mainly herself, that she was able to move on from that horrible moment and do well for herself.

We know that this episode in her life still gnaws at her, even as she lies on her deathbed. It is so present still that she is not quite aware of the fact that this is her last day of life, and that perhaps she should just let go of it all. She does not, and so she comes in and out of consciousness, much to the sadness of the family that surrounds her.

It is not until the end of her recollections that she seems to come to terms with the fact that death is actually occurring. This is evident in that, despite of her memories, she recognizes that it is time to go, and that whatever she did not get to fix from that moment when she was humiliated at the altar will just have to be left behind.

It is here, toward the end of the story, when Granny starts to negotiate with God for one more opportunity to make things right again:

Oh, my dear Lord, do wait a minute. I meant to do something about the Forty Acres, Jimmy doesn’t need it and Lydia will later on, with that worthless husband of hers. I meant to finish the altar cloth and send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for her dyspepsia

Then, she asks God for a sign that he may give her extra time, or another chance to live a little bit more. That sign never materializes. Here, she feels that she has been jilted again, this time by God:

Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this—I’ll never forgive it

What are Granny's circumstances in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Granny's physical circumstances are pretty plain: she's eighty years old, near death, and in bed at her daughter's house, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Her mental state is a little more ambiguous. In her more lucid moments, she clings to her independent, feisty self image. She dismisses the doctor attending her, wanting to know where he was when she survived "milk leg" years earlier (not born yet!). She objects to the care her daughter is giving her, refusing to believe that she is seriously ill.

Slowly, it becomes clear that Granny is reflecting on her long life, and in particular how George, her first love, left her at the altar. This is a kind of secret shame for Granny—it's not clear if her children know about George—and one that has come to define her life. Despite her defensive feelings about the good life she had with John, the man she does marry, and the home they kept and the children they raised, Granny is nonetheless filled with a sense of unfulfilled longing for missed opportunities, not simply for the life she might have had with George, but also for her dead daughter, Hapsy.

At one point Granny sees a vision of Hapsy, alive and holding a baby, and then Granny is Hapsy, and Hapsy has become the baby she is holding. This dream and the fact that there was "no surprise" in it shows that at the moment of death, the potentialities and realities of Granny's long life have become part of a complex whole. Her jilting is a stand in for all the things that could have, but did not, happen in her life. As she says at the end, "There is nothing more cruel."

What are Granny's circumstances in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Granny Weatherall is eighty years old and is on her deathbed in her daughter Cornelia's house. She is in and out of consciousness, losing hours here and there in sleep. When she is conscious, she can be tenacious and rude. She recalls significant moments of her life. She recalls the first time she was jilted. This is when she was left at the altar by George. (She would eventually marry a man named Johh, the father of her children.) Even at this point in her life, decades later, the jilting of being left at the altar still stings. Being on her deathbed, old and physically weak, she feels useless. She fondly recalls how her children had always needed her. She longs for those days when she was useful and the children depended upon her for so many things in their lives. So, at the end of her life, she is despondent because she has lost that feeling of being needed. She feels "jilted" again. 

She wants to see her favorite daughter, Hapsy. However, Hapsy does not come to her deathbed. She feels jilted by this as well. Repeatedly, Granny keeps trying to forget George but she can not: 

Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh there's nothing more cruel than this--I'll never forgive it. 

The jilting of being left at the altar is the primary grief in her life. The grief of dying and feeling useless reminds her of that primary grief and she unsuccessfully tries to get beyond this grief before she passes on. 

What's the matter with Granny, and where is she in "Jilting of Granny Weatherall"? 

The author does not specify a specific geographical place as the setting, but what is clear is that Granny is lying in her bed at home in this story.  Granny is dying, and again, the author does not directly state what her ailment is, but the reader does know that Granny, at "nearly eighty years old", is quite aged. Although the doctor in attendance keeps offering platitudes about Granny "being up in no time", and Granny herself keeps insisting that "there's nothing wrong with (her)", Granny is obviously seriously ill, slipping in and out of consciousness, and "while she (is) rummaging around she (finds) death in her mind".  Granny's children are very concerned; Cornelia is trying to be solicitous, and continuously cries, "oh, Mother, oh, Mother, oh, Mother", and Jimmy and Lydia arrive at Granny's bedside to see her one more time before she dies.

How would you characterize Granny Weatherall in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Of course, the stream of consciousness narrative adopted by the author gives us a real insight into Granny Weatherall's character. Clearly, if you read this story, hopefully you cannot fail to identify the humour in this story - from its very start, the character of Granny Weatherall dominates the pages and is funny and sad in turn. Even the start of the story presents us with a funny moment as Granny Weatherall shows her defiant spirit by her comment about the doctor:

She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry's pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! "Get along now, take your schoolbooks and go. There's nothing wrong with me!"

Of course, what is funny about this is that we think of doctors as being respectful figures in society - certainly figures we do not address and think of like this. The juxtaposition with the term of contempt "brat" and doctor shocks us and makes us laugh by revealing the kind of character that Granny Weatherall is. This continues throughout the story as we see the irreverent attitude revealed towards other characters such as Father Connolly.

You might like to think of how conflict reveals the character of Granny Weatherall. It is clear that the external conflict that Granny Weatherall is facing is her stubbornness and determination against the mollycoddling (as she sees it) that she is receiving from her daughter Cornelia, and others, such as Doctor Harry and Father Connolly:

Well, she could just hear Cornelia telling her husband that Mother was getting a little childish and they'd have to humour her. The thing that most annoyed her was that Cornelia thought she was deaf, dumb and blind. Little hasty glances and tiny gestures tossed around her and over her head saying, "Don't cross her, let her have her way, she's eighty years old," and she sitting there as if she lived in a thin glass cage.

Granny Weatherall is still a determined and proud woman, who is not giving in easily to death and the care that others try to foist on her.

The internal conflict is of course revealed in Granny Weatherall's memory of her jilting that still hurts her even though it was so long ago. As she struggles to come to terms with it she shows how she still remembers and is pained by the memory:

Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don't let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren't you? Then stand up to it. Here eyelids wavered and let in streamers of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her eyes.

Here we see Granny Weatherall trying to convince herself that she wasn't hurt and trying to pull herself together, but the final description reveals that the memory of her jilting still hurts enough to bring tears to her eyes. Of course, the story ends with a second "jilting" as Granny Weatherall resolves the internal conflict and accepts the fact that we are all "jilted" in death - that we die alone and that this solitude is greater than any loss we know in life. Yet the end of the story shows Granny Weatherall's strength and determination in the face of this ultimate jilting.

How would you characterize Granny Weatherall in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

I think one element about Granny Weatherall's character that comes across incredibly strongly is her independence and inner-strength. Part of the reason why she is so cantankerous in her near-death state is because suddenly she has to be dependent after years of being independent. Consider one of her memories of her life before getting old:

In her day she had kept a better house and had got more work done. She wasn't too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the children jumped the track, and Jimmy still dropped inand talked things over: "Now, Mammy, you've a good business head. I want to know what you think of this?... Old. Cornelia couldn't change the furniture around without asking. Little things, little things!

We can see then that Granny was considered capable, intelligent, and reliable; her grown children came to her for advice and she is immensely proud of her homemaking skills and her capacity for hard work. We can see then that these qualities have a massive impact on her outlook on life as she looks at life through her "lens" of independence and inner-strength, so that at the end of the story, she meets death with the same customary strength as she has shown throughout the entire story.

What does Granny's name signify in The Jilting of Granny Weatherall? How would you analyze her character?

To think about the meaning of a name, start first with the literal meaning, and then second with the associated or metaphorical meaning. To "weather" something is to make it through; the expression is usually used in relation to getting through tough times, as in "The family weathered the Great Depression." "All" means just that-- all. Everything. Together with her title, her name would mean she's an old woman who has been through everything and survived, or who will make it through everything. Since the story follows Granny as she reviews her memories, we can see that it definitely applies. She's done everything. After all, this is a woman who fenced 100 acres by herself!

Greg