[In the following essay, French offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Porter's “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”]

In the introduction to his collection of critical essays on Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren quotes Porter's journal from the year 1936: “‘Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story’.” Warren himself goes on to say, “There are thousands of hard facts. We know only a few” (Warren 2). When Porter wrote “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” in 1929, she took a “few facts,” clothed them in memories, and arranged them around a central idea. Therefore, those few facts in this coherent work of literary art must be of great thematic importance and must be read with regard to a central idea. Previous critical analyses of the Weatherall story have generally focused on its various details, its “facts,” without seeing how they all complement each other in support of a central idea. By using a stream-of-consciousness mode of narration—filled with rambling and confused thoughts and feelings—Porter is able to create a fascinating and meaningful constellation of significant details from Granny's long life, details which support each other in pointing to what is the central theme of the story: the deathbed condition of Granny's soul—traditionally thought of as “damnation”—is the logical result of the way she has lived the sixty years of her adult life.

The significant events in Granny's life can be summed up as follows. At about age twenty, Ellen was left standing at the altar when George, her bridegroom-to-be, did not come to the church on the day set for their wedding. Ellen then married John Weatherall, and they had three or four children: Cornelia, Lydia, Jimmy, and, probably, Hapsy. Soon after the birth of their children, John died and left Ellen to raise the children and to manage their farm by herself. By the age of eighty, and in the present time of the story, she is on her deathbed in the house of her oldest and most dutiful daughter, Cornelia. Just as Granny dies, she looks for some indication that God is going to take her soul for its reward in Paradise:

Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up. God give a sign!

For the second time there was no sign. 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. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light.

(Porter 57)

In order to preserve the artistic integrity of the story, the ending of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” must be read and understood in a way that links it thematically to the earlier details of Granny's life. And since the story turns on the thematic significance of the ending, the question is, Why is there no sign from God when Granny dies?

THE PROBLEM OF ATHEISTIC INTERPRETATIONS

A few critics assume that there is no god and that therefore Granny is bound to be grievously disappointed when she dies. James William Johnson's essay, entitled “Another Look at Katherine Anne Porter,” implies this atheistic interpretation: “‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ shows a dying old woman, stood up by the God she had supposed to exist, just as she had been jilted by an earthly finance' [sic] and forced to live a life of disappointment and compensation” (89–90). Johnson also speaks of “the Everlasting Nay,” the “thing ‘most cruel of all,’ which in its enormity transcends all other sorrows—the obliteration of hope” (94). Johnson, however, does not make a thematic connection between the two jiltings; for him, the one does not lead to the other.

Edward G. Schwartz takes a similar but vaguer atheistic stance regarding the possibility of people being able to achieve spiritual salvation: “The dying grandmother in ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ achieves a final awful illumination through her last confused reveries” (italics added, 75). It does not seem likely that Schwartz's “final awful illumination” refers to Granny's realization that memories of George are still painful. She has been continually aware of the pain for sixty years. Nor does it seem that the word “illumination” could refer to her realization that God is simply not going to reward her for a life's job well done. What Schwartz probably means by “a final awful illumination” is that, after a life filled with psychological suffering and hard work, Granny realizes that there is no god to reward her for having weathered all. For Granny, such an illumination would, of course, be “final” and “awful.”

A third critic, William Nance, also takes the atheistic approach as he explains Ellen's failure both with George and with god on the basis of a childish romanticism: “The Divine Bridegroom, like the earthly one, proves to have been a romantic dream, but Granny's courage will do her no good after this delusion” (44).

Joann P. Cobb, in an essay entitled “Pascal's Wager and Two Modern Losers,” interprets the bleak ending, like Hendrick and Nance, atheistically. She feels the context of the story asserts: “God is not” (100). But this bald assertion is never supported by details from the story.

However, such atheistic readings of the story's ending are irrelevant to the thematically important details of the story. If the reader assumes the non-existence of a transcendent God in a transcendent heaven, then the entire pathos of the story rests on the irony created by that extra-textual assumption. However, the story has significant pathos long before its last few lines. None of these details leading up to the end indicates that Ellen's life will have been in vain simply because there is no transcendent God to reward a life of virtue. Why then is Granny jilted by God? Why is Granny's soul condemned to “hell”?

THE PROBLEM OF SALVATION THROUGH FAITH, GOOD WORKS, AND MIDDLE-CLASS VIRTUES

Darlene Harbour Unrue's answer to the question regarding the fate of Granny's soul focuses on Ellen's vain efforts to save herself through the systems and patterns of religion:

Porter's darkest discourse on ineffectual religion occurs in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Granny's religion could be any other religion, but Catholicism served Porter's theme best because of its refined and elaborate structure. Structure is inherently important to Granny, who has spent her life looking for truth through systems and patterns, and it is the failure of systematic religion that is terrifyingly dramatized in her dying hour. … In the final instance, the bridegroom is unmistakably Christ—and she has not found the meaning focused through His life that her religion has promised and which she expected to have before she died.

(italics added, 63)

Unrue's use of the words “truth” and “meaning” have scant relevance to the story as crafted by Porter. Although Granny is outwardly a Roman Catholic, she has her own way of trying to deal with her spiritual problems. Her interactions with Doctor Harry, Father Connolly, and others show that she hardly knows what sin is. The main concern of her adult life has been to heal her broken heart, to get past the pain of George's having jilted her. She is irritable with the priest because he wants to speak with her:

He could speak as much as he pleased. It was like him to drop in and inquire about her soul as if it were a teething baby. … He always had a funny story … usually about an Irishman who made his little mistakes and confessed them, and the point lay in some absurd thing he would blurt out in the confessional showing his struggles between native piety and original sin. Granny felt easy about her soul. … She had her secret comfortable understanding with few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her.

(Porter 55)

With this understanding in place, this agreement with the saints, Granny has spent the sixty years of her adult life focusing on the practical problems of daily life. She has become an expert in solving those problems; and in her own eyes she does not make “little mistakes” which need to be confessed. No doubt she is always right in such practical matters. Her middle-class, self-righteous morality can be summed up in her comment to Doctor Harry: “I pay my own bills, and I don't throw my money away on nonsense” (51). But, of course, such a position, despite its obvious satisfactions, has little to do with the spiritual condition of Granny's soul. And despite the obvious pleasures and satisfactions that Granny refers to on her deathbed, the story still ends on a note of utter spiritual darkness. This darkness, Unrue says, is the “ultimate agony that is created when one pins one's faith on formal systems or on an external order that is not natural to one's spirit” (101). This idea has merit, but wording it this way does not help the reader see its relationship to the story as Porter tells it. The reason for Granny's damnation must be sought elsewhere and not in her failure to find “truth” and “meaning” in the systems and patterns of religion and of everyday living that she sets up in her life. The question “Why spiritual damnation?” still remains.

For most readers, Granny appears to have a strong faith both in her religion and in her God: she feels “easy about her soul.” When she is thinking about her children and about her hard life, she says something to herself that also implies a great reliance on her religious faith: “God, for all my life I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail Mary, full of grace” (Porter 53). At another time, as Granny lies there on her bed, thoughts of death come into her mind, and she thinks confidently: “She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again. Let it take care of itself now” (Porter 52). And when Cornelia tells her that Father Connolly has come to see her, Granny says, “I went to Holy Communion only last week. Tell him I'm not so sinful as all that” (Porter 55).

The reader is also informed that Granny's life has been filled with good works:

Granny wished the old days were back again with the children young and everything to be done over. It had been a hard pull, but not too much for her. When she thought of all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made—well, the children showed it.

(Porter 53)

In general, Granny feels good about her role as mother and about her success with her children; she would like for John to see them and know that “she didn't do so badly” in raising them by herself (Porter 53). Her good works extended beyond her immediate family. She remembers “riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies … sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes [sic] and sick children and hardly ever losing one” (Porter 53). We also know that she was working on an altar cloth for her church and that she had meant to “send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for her dyspepsia” (Porter 56).

No doubt, for Granny, during her adult years, cleanliness—as well as orderliness—was next to godliness:

It was good to have everything clean and folded away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen … the pantry shelves laid out with rows of jelly glasses on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, allspice: and the bronze clock with the lion on top nicely dusted off. The dust that lion could collect in twenty-four hours!

(Porter 53)

George Hendrick, in his book Katherine Anne Porter, sees the dusty lion as a reference to James's “The Beast in the Jungle”: “that is, the disorder which she [Granny], like Sophia Jane, constantly had to fight” (91). However, the thematic significance of the dusty lion has less to do with fighting ordinary household dust and disorder than with fighting the disorder that built up in Granny's soul when she was not busy doing something: “Don't let things get lost. It's bitter to lose things. Now, don't let me get to thinking, not when I'm tired …” (Porter 53). One can call Granny's busy-ness “constructive avoidance”; she wanted to avoid the painful thoughts of George. Dusting the bronze lion every day was obviously not an important task in running the farm efficiently or raising the children well. (The dust-free lion functions in a manner similar to the always-wet top of the kitchen table in Eudora Welty's story “Livvie.” Livvie's life is so empty that she has nothing better to do than wipe off the kitchen table one more time.) Such compulsive behavior as lion-dusting has become such a deep-seated part of Granny's way of life that, even while she lies there on her deathbed, she looks around at Cornelia's house and says to herself: “No matter if Cornelia was determined to be everywhere at once, there were a great many things left undone on this place. She would start tomorrow and do them” (Porter 53). All of this—Granny's concern for her children, for her hired help, for her farm animals, and for the farm itself; her concern for orderliness and cleanliness; and her concern for others—indicates that Granny sees herself as having been a responsible person who knew what her duty was and did it.

Most important, however, was her sense of duty to herself as a woman. This was the central motivating force in her life: her sacred, God-given duty as a woman was to marry a man, have children, and raise them well in a well-kept house. The reader can believe her when she says to herself on her deathbed: “… I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even” (italics added, Porter 55). Granny is convinced that she has performed these “God-given” duties as well as anybody could have expected her to do so, given the extenuating circumstances of her life. Clearly, she has had to work hard at living the good life, and it is no wonder that as death approaches and she sees no sign from God, she says, “Oh, no, there's nothing more cruel than this—I'll never forgive it” (Porter 57). She feels that God or His saints have not lived up to their end of the bargain, have not done their part of the “secret comfortable understanding.”

THE PROBLEM OF GRANNY'S CHILDREN AND HAPSY

The story indicates that Ellen and John had three or four children. John Edward Hardy in his book on Porter makes two mistakes in his discussion of Granny's children: he assumes that Ellen named one of her offspring George, but he goes on to make a more blatant error. He says that Granny is “proud that her son George (named, oddly enough, for the truant bridegroom) still runs to her, his eighty-year-old mother, for financial advice” (95). What the text actually says is this: “She [Granny] 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 in and talked things over: ‘Now, Mammy, you've got a good business head, I want to know what you think of this? …’” (Porter 53). George Hendrick even implies that the Weatheralls had five children: “She had married John later, borne his children, and named the first one George; but the last child, the one she wanted to have by George, she called Hapsy—quite obviously a diminutive of Happiness” (91). Both Hardy and Hendrick are basing their opinions solely on a misreading of the following passage from the text which describes Granny's confused thoughts as she lies on her bed in Cornelia's house:

“Mother, how do you feel now?” [asked Cornelia] and a stinging wetness on her forehead [sic]. But I don't like having my face washed in cold water!

Hapsy? George? Lydia? Jimmy? No, Cornelia, and her features were swollen and full of little puddles. “They're coming, darling, they'll all be here soon” [said Cornelia]. Go wash your face, child, you look funny.

(italics added, Porter 54)

Hendrick's and Hardy's readings are improbable because they do not consider two important points. First of all, Ellen was deeply wounded by George's having jilted her; and, second, George is still very much on her eighty-year-old mind. Ellen, very soon after the jilting, decided to forge ahead in her life, decided to do all she could to put the pain of her rejection behind her and go on with her woman's life, which included marrying a man, having children by him, and raising them in a well-kept house. Surely she would not have consciously chosen to name her first child after the man who had so recently jilted her; she would not have chosen to have that child's name as a constant reminder of what she calls hell: “… the thought of him [George] was a smoky cloud from hell …” (Porter 54). The second point missing in these two readings is more closely related to the story's main theme. George's name is listed with her children's names because he still, after sixty years, occupies an inordinately large space in Granny's troubled psyche. Most of her dying thoughts whirl around him and around the path her life took because of him. Moreover, she probably mixes George's name in with the names of her own children because, in her mind's eye, she remembers George as a young man twenty years or so of age, a mere child in relation to herself. She thinks of her husband John in this way as well: “She used to think of him [John] as a man, but now all the children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if she saw him now” (Porter 53).

The problem of Hapsy is central to an understanding of the story's main theme. In discussing Granny's final jilting by God, critic Barbara Laman disagrees with David and Madeline Barnes, who feel that the “secret sin” of Granny is that Hapsy is George's child, a child conceived out of wedlock (279). Laman rightly concludes that Hapsy is Ellen's last child. But Laman seems to misunderstand Granny's statement about her last child: “When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she truly wanted. Everything came in good time. Nothing left out, left over” (Porter 55). The ambiguities surrounding the image of Hapsy are many, but Porter surely wanted that image to come across ambiguously to the reader just as it comes across ambiguously to Granny herself. For Granny, the image of Hapsy “melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy shadow” (Porter 54), and later we are told that Granny “can't see her plain” (Porter 55). Laman construes Ellen's command to John to “get the doctor now, Hapsy's time has come” to mean that Hapsy herself had a child and both Hapsy and the child died (280). Laman supports this view by referring to what to her seems “strikingly like an out-of-body experience” (280): Granny's seeing both Hapsy and her child. Such a reading of this passage ignores its context, which is as follows:

It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting.

(Porter 54)

This entire passage and the one that refers to the last child as being the one Ellen really wanted point to something much broader and deeper than what Laman sees. One such deeper reading is by Charles Allen, who symbolically identifies Hapsy with George (226). Marriage with George would have created Hapsy for Ellen. But Allen's reading is still too limited. Hapsy is that which Ellen has been striving for, with limited success, all of her life. As the name implies, Hapsy is “happiness,” a deep and abiding spiritual happiness of soul, a wholeness of self, a holiness of soul. Granny may have achieved this happiness, this Hapsy, briefly with John before he died, but only after dutifully giving birth to Cornelia, Jimmy, and Lydia. Whether Hapsy was an actual child born of a union between Ellen and John is not necessarily relevant to the story's theme. She may have been born, she may have been still-born, she may have died shortly after birth, or she may be entirely the figment of Granny's imagination, the result of Ellen's passionate and holy desire to have a child born out of love—a love child. For it was a love child that she truly wanted, a child born out of her deep and true love for a man. Instead, she had Cornelia and the others, all children born out of a sense of her duty to herself, out of a sense of her God-given duty as a woman to have children. Cornelia, especially, was a “duty-child,” not a “love-child.” And for Ellen, Cornelia's birth did not bring her the joy that it should have. Even on her deathbed Granny still feels some resentment over this. Moreover, she sees that Cornelia has grown up to be just like her, a person who lives life according to the requirements of duty. At some deep level, at the level of her soul, Granny is aware that the good life is not achieved in this way: “Cornelia was dutiful; that was the trouble with her. Dutiful and good: So ‘good and dutiful,’ said Granny, ‘that I'd like to spank her.’ She saw herself spanking Cornelia and making a fine job of it” (Porter 51).

William L. Nance, in his book Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection, deals with this wish to spank Cornelia in a way that connects it to Granny's public personality but not to the story's theme, which is primarily concerned with the state of Granny's soul. Ignoring Granny's clear and emphatic reference to Cornelia's qualities of dutifulness and goodness, qualities that disturb Granny at some deep level of her psyche, Nance sees Cornelia's loud whisperings as the sole source of Granny's irritation. He quotes the passage, including the parts about whispering, and then comments in the following rather general way: “Even in relationships which are obviously intended as loving, irritations and antagonisms are always portrayed [in all Miss Porter's work] much more strongly and convincingly than love” (43).

THE PROBLEM OF GRANNY'S PSYCHE AND HER MODE OF LIVING

William Nance's reading ties in rather loosely with his general approach to the story, which is to see Granny as a woman with a “puritanical fear of sex instilled into her by her religious and moral tradition,” a fear which Nance calls “a major source of strength” (42). Combined with this fear, according to Nance, is a “juvenile fixation on romance which is in turn nourished by that basic characteristic of the alpha heroine—rejection of men” (43). Such an interpretation ignores the central pathos of the story; there is nothing in Ellen's life even hinting at a fear of sex, although other of Porter's heroines have such a fear (See Brinkmeyer's discussion of Laura in “Flowering Judas” 71 ff). Furthermore, the story reveals only one, or maybe two, details which might possibly be construed as hatred of males on Granny's part: (1) her reference to Lydia's “worthless” husband, who is “worthless,” in Granny's eyes, probably because he is not as efficient a farm manager as Granny is, and (2) her condescending behavior toward the young doctor and the young priest who minister to Granny during her last days. Such details can easily be seen as Granny's way of dealing with anyone she considers incompetent (such as Cornelia) or unnecessary or youthfully ignorant. She is a hard-nosed, stubborn, and opinionated know-it-all, who has had expert experience in practical living. And she does not suffer romantic fools. However, Nance says that Ellen's “first apparent love has been simply a romantic dream, never in any danger of becoming real. The jilting provides a perfect ‘escape’ from the marriage and an ideal excuse for hating men—and for refusing to let her eventual marriage [with John] affect her intimately” (43). This reading of the story, however, cannot account for her marriage to John on the so-called “rebound,” nor does it consider the psychological pain Granny has been trying to overcome during the sixty years since the jilting. Furthermore, Nance seems to be so caught up in the concept of romanticism that he also uses it to explain, perhaps atheistically, the dismal ending of the story: God is merely “a romantic dream” (44).

HELL AND THE PROBLEM OF PLANNING AND STAYING ON TRACK

Ever since her jilting at the altar, and maybe even before, Ellen lived according to a “plan of life” that she could “spread out” and “tuck in the edges orderly” (Porter 52), a plan that was intimately involved with her secret bargain to secure her salvation. Although her jilting by George “derailed” her for a brief time, she soon got back “on track.” She became an expert in living “on track.” And on her deathbed she recalls, “She wasn't too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the children jumped the track” (italics added, Porter 52). However, it is this “on-track” living, this sticking to her plan of life, that is the cause of Ellen's spiritual problem. She has lived according to the dictates of her head and not her heart. On the day of her jilting by George, John, Ellen's other suitor, was there to catch her when she was about to faint: “His hand had caught her under the breast, she had not fallen …” (Porter 55). The verb “fallen” is indicative of how Ellen thinks about what has just happened to her. She has fallen off track. But John is there, as a kind of “back-up,” a second-best choice, to catch her and keep her from falling completely out of her plan of life, a plan which, after George's failure to appear at the wedding, took on the more specific terms of a “secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints” to clear a straight road to happiness for her, a straight road to God. The unarticulated plan, the understanding, is that Ellen will get back on track by accepting John's proposal of marriage; that is, she will go ahead with what she thinks is her God-given duty: to marry a man, have children by him, and raise those children properly in a well-kept house. And, in turn, God, or the few favorite saints, will make her soul whole, will make her happy, will help her forget George, will “save” her from “hell.” Escaping from this hell has been Granny's greatest concern throughout the sixty years of her adult life:

There was the day, the day, but a swirl of dark smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows. That was hell, she knew hell when she saw it. For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head. …

(Porter 54)

Darlene Unrue feels that this passage implies that Ellen was successful in repressing the memory of George during the sixty years between the actual jilting and the time on her deathbed: “… and for sixty years Granny Weatherall has repressed the thought of the missing bride-groom … but now at her dying the smoke is threatening to surface. The light seems to hurt her eyes, just as the old grief wounds her anew” (100). Unrue speaks of light here because of her overriding concern with patterns and systems throughout the story, here patterns of light and dark. But it is certainly odd to speak of light in terms of a smoky cloud from hell. Moreover, it is impossible to speak of repression when we are told that for sixty years Granny has prayed against remembering George; something that is repressed is not stored in one's conscious memory, and Ellen would have remembered the whole incident of the jilting each time she prayed to forget it.

Joann P. Cobb also misstates the case regarding Granny's “hell”: “This ‘hell’ that she knows intimately seems necessarily to be the classic one of despair—loss of hope, belief, and trust in anything or anyone” (99). Such an interpretation completely disregards Granny's statement: “God, for all my life I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it” (Porter 53). Granny obviously has hope, belief, and trust. Cobb herself goes on to say, “In her passion for order, she has planned everything, and at age eighty she is worried about neither body nor soul” (100). Again the implication is that Granny trusts in her plan, in her “secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints to clear a straight road to God for her” (Porter 55).

Nance thinks this “hell” is her hatred of George: “The entire story turns upon the fact that, at the moment of her death, the scene which Granny recalls in all its pain and detail is that of her jilting, an event which for sixty years she has ‘prayed against remembering’ because the hatred it arouses is ‘hell’” (44). Two details from the story speak against hatred. When John threatens to kill George for having jilted her, Ellen says, “Don't lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God” (55). And when wondering what a woman does when she is jilted, Granny says to herself: “No, I swear he [George] never harmed me but in that. He never harmed me but in that … and what if he did?” (54). Also, viewing her “hell” as hatred of George does not fit with the idea that deep within her psyche Granny still feels George to be her rightful husband, an idea which will be illustrated later.

Barbara Laman, coming down on a different side of Nance's romanticism, rather likes the position taken by Merrill Skaggs, who calls Granny the

female Romantic [whose] soul … dies unconquered. … Recognizing the endless betrayals of god, lovers and a universe that can randomly “snuff out a dream,” she can choose her own last moment, when she is ready for it, and can thus in her own time and in her own way, acting on her own pulse, embrace the dark.

(12–13)

But Laman feels that Skaggs does not go far enough in elevating Granny “to the position of feminist paragon [because he fails] to recognize that [Granny's] blowing out the light is but a last-minute effort to gain autonomy over her own destiny, and that it comes as a result of her refusal to be humiliated once again” (Laman 280).

Both Laman and Skaggs, in their efforts to read something positive into the ending of the story, fail to see how all the details of the story work together to create a theme of spiritual and psychic damnation. Granny's angrily blowing out the light of her life in a characteristic effort to stay in charge of her life and death will not save her soul. Her damnation has little or nothing to do with the God that Granny seems to believe in and the kind of religious belief she has concocted for herself. The story shows that Ellen, in choosing to go ahead and marry John and have children by him, displayed a flagrant lack of faith. She did not let love, or God, lead her; she did not let God, or love, determine the path of her life. Instead, she tried to take charge of her own life and did not leave it up to love, did not leave it up to God. She tried to force love into her life, but it did not come, or at least it did not come for any length of time. Love, the one crucial thing that would have validated her marriage to John, was missing except perhaps for that short time when she did, finally, begin to really love John and when a true love child may have been conceived: “When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted. Everything came in good time” (55). The young mother Ellen says that everything came in good time, yet the eighty-year-old Granny, lying on her deathbed, still seems confused about who her real and true husband is. As she lies there on her deathbed and looks at John's picture on the dresser in her room, she feels that the eyes are “very black when they should have been blue. You [Mr. Photographer] never saw him [blue-eyed George (?)], so how do you know how he looked? But the man [who had enlarged and tinted the picture] insisted the copy was perfect, it was very rich and handsome. For a picture, yes, but it's not my husband” (Porter 56). The attentive reader understands that deep in old Granny's psyche, in her soul, George is her husband, her soul-mate, a man to whom she was bonded by a love that is still unextinguished. Completely missing the thematic relevance of this detail because of her overriding concern with “systems and patterns,” Unrue explains the black eyes in terms of the increasing domination of black toward the end of the story: “Black is beginning to dominate” (100).

Another detail of the story speaks to the idea that George still occupies an inordinately large space in Granny's psyche: her love letters to George and to John, still up in the attic, still not thrown away after sixty years.

The box in the attic with all those letters tied up, well, she'd have to go through that tomorrow. All those letters—George's letters and John's letters and her letters to them both—lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy. Yes, that would be tomorrow's business. No use letting them know how silly she had been once.

(Porter 52)

John Edward Hardy, paying little attention to the passages of text dealing with the painful memories of George and his letters in Granny's attic, comes to the astounding conclusion that Ellen did not really want George. With reference to the bleak ending of Granny's life, Hardy says, “In a sense he [the Christ of Matthew 25: 1–13] denies her his presence for the same reason that George did—which is that He knows she does not really want Him. She wants no one, and nothing, that she cannot completely control” (95). Surely this cannot be true. If it were, then John would have worked as a husband just as well as George would have, and she would have thrown out all their letters long ago. She would have had no trouble forgetting George, and memories of the jilting would not have continued to be painful down through the sixty years of her adulthood.

Nance expresses Granny's general attitude toward life effectively when he says, “Her last thoughts reflect a life of heroic and compulsive effort to build a rampart of order against the radical disorder of her frustrated heart” (45), but the main thrust of his analysis does not deal with this idea as a central theme in Porter's story. He implies that Granny simply did not have enough time to put her life in order: “She has desired order, time to ‘spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly’…, but death catches her with loose ends [such as the love letters] still to be tied up” (44–45).

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., in his 1993 analysis of Porter's artistic development, is also concerned with Ellen's efforts to bring order into her life, but he says she was involved in an artistic effort to apply a narrative orderliness to her life. He sees Granny (and Mr. Thompson in Noon Wine) as “failed artists struggling to create coherent narratives of their lives by repressing and manipulating memory” (135). Using a biographical approach to help him interpret Porter's fiction of the late twenties, Brinkmeyer says:

Not surprisingly, the central conflicts of many of the protagonists in this fiction focus on the same struggles Porter herself was undergoing at the time, most particularly the tension between the knowledge of self derived from one's memories and the knowledge of self constructed by one's conscious mind, often accomplished by the repression and deliberate distortion of memories.

(134)

In speaking about Granny's sorting out of her old love letters, Brinkmeyer says that in “her narrative … there will be time to erase and to revise. … In seeking to control the narrative of her life … she will discard all the letters that suggest her to be anything other than the heroine she wants to portray herself as being. Granny Weatherall has structured her life story to make it wondrously rewarding and fulfilling” (135).

Hardy, Nance, and Brinkmeyer all use theoretical approaches that cause them either to distort the text itself or to ignore significant parts of it. Granny's not having thrown away George's letters is not just one of what Nance calls those “loose ends still to be tied up,” nor is her wanting to throw away those letters but not ever getting around to it evidence of the tension between Granny's memories of her past life, on the one hand, and her efforts to create a contradictory life, on the other, as is Brinkmeyer's view. It is thematically significant that Granny, the person who kept her kitchen in perfect order, the person who every twenty-four hours dusted the clock with the lion on it, the person who felt like rolling up her sleeves and putting everything to rights again in Cornelia's house (Porter 53), the person who in “her day had kept a better house and had got more work done” (Porter 52)—it is thematically significant that this person so concerned with orderliness has not yet thrown out George's sixty-year-old love letters. These letters still in the attic are symbolic: George is so imbedded in Ellen's psyche that all the compulsive behavior of her adult years cannot clean him out. And although Granny has had her “husband just the same” and her children and her house “like any other woman,” a “good house too and a good husband” that she loved and “fine children out of him” (Porter 55), better than she hoped for even, she realizes, on her deathbed, that these things are not all that she should have had: “Tell him [George] I was given back everything he took away and more. 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 …” (Porter 55).

Although Hendrick quotes this very passage (91), he does not make any statement as to what was not given back. Unrue, however, does comment, “That which was not given back was her faith, but instead of living out her days in bitter resignation she suppresses the trauma and searches for meaning in orderly rows, one of which is a path to God, or truth” (100). Unrue says that George did not give Ellen back her faith; but what is more likely is that the something not given back was a piece of Granny's heart, a piece of her soul, a piece of her very self. This idea is supportive of the story's general theme. After her jilting by George, Ellen never had Hapsy, never had peace of mind, never experienced a wholeness of self. No doubt that was why she filled her life with “works,” doing things to fill the void in her soul. All the orderliness, all the busy-ness, was an attempt to keep her from remembering George and “against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell” (Porter 54). She says, “Don't let things get lost. It's bitter to lose things. Now, don't let me get to thinking, not when I'm tired and taking a little nap before supper …” (Porter 53). When eighty-year-old Granny gets to thinking, she thinks about George and about having been jilted by him, and she is in psychic anguish, even after sixty years. Therefore, it is clear that her soul is in no condition to experience wholeness, in no condition to experience God.

In spite of the story's pessimistic ending, William Nance takes a rather positive look at Granny's life:

The emphasis in Granny's characterization is upon her strength—the positive structure she has built up on a negative basis. This and the moderate degree of human warmth she reveals, mainly in her humor, make her an attractive character and hers a successful story. The final revelation of her hidden emptiness only emphasizes her achievement, and she keeps her hard earned domination to the end, when she blows out her own light.

(45–46)

This admiration is unwarranted, given the subtext of the story and of Granny's life. It is true that most readers have a general sympathy for those who bear up well under adversity, and humor sometimes does add to a person's attractiveness. Granny deserves a certain respect. No doubt her neighbors respected her strength, her ability to go ahead with her life after John's death, raising the children and managing the farm. But the neighbors see only the outside of Granny's life, what Nance calls “the positive structure.” However, the careful reader sees much more than that and is compelled to view Granny's life as a failure on the level of the psyche, the level of the soul. The ending of the story is in no way arbitrary. Viewing it in a positive manner validates the superficial aspects of Granny's life and ignores the reality of Granny's heart, her soul.

Perhaps, like Granny, readers such as Nance are tempted to feel that, given the trials and tribulations Ellen has weathered, given all the effort she has put into living the good life, there is “nothing more cruel than this,” nothing more cruel than being jilted by happiness, jilted by God. But Ellen did not follow her heart, did not follow love, did not allow herself to be led by God—all of which in Porter's world are the same thing. Therefore, what we see here is a woman who, having come to the end of her life, realizes, in great bitterness and resentment, that she has never lived. It is not by chance that Henry David Thoreau's words come to mind at the end of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Thoreau wrote that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (1535). A life of quiet desperation is exactly the kind of life the reader is made to see in Porter's story. The visible outer life is not validated by the invisible inner one; and Granny, lying on her deathbed and hoping for a deus ex machina, ends up blaming a distant god for not showing up to make everything right.

Works Cited

Allen, C. A. “Katherine Anne Porter: Psychology as Art.” Southwest Review 41 (1956): 223–30.

Barnes, D. R., and M. T. Barnes. “The Secret Sin of Granny Weatherall.” Renascence 21 (1969): 162–65.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea House, 1986.

Brinkmeyer, Jr., Robert H. Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

Cobb, Joann P. “Pascal's Wager and Two Modern Losers.” Bloom 97–106.

Demouy, J. K. Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: Texas UP, 1983.

Hardy, John Edward. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Ungar, 1973.

Hartley, L., and G. Core, eds. Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. Athens: Georgia UP, 1969.

Hendrick, George. Katherine Anne Porter. Chicago: Twayne, 1965.

Johnson, James William. “Another Look at Katherine Anne Porter.” Hartley and Core, 93–96.

Laman, Barbara. “Porter's ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.’” The Explicator 48, n4 (Summer 1990): 279–281.

Nance, W. L. Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1964.

Porter, Katherine Anne. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. Ed. X. J. Kennedy. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 51–57.

Schwartz, Edward G. “The Fictions of Memory.” Hartley and Core, 67–82.

Skaggs, Merrill. “Submission and Fidelity, Assertion and Surprise: Two ‘Southern Woman’ Films.” The Southern Quarterly 24 (1986): 5–13.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. R. Gottesman et al. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 1979. vol. I. 1531–1739.

Unrue, D. H. Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction. Athens: Georgia UP, 1985.

Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979.