Katherine Anne Porter's The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” In Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” an old woman’s light is slowly fading out and memories from her past are phasing in and out of her head as she lives out her final moments. The times she was “jilted” are poring out of her memories, releasing themselves and allowing her the peaceful death she so desires. She has good memories: memories of her children, memories of her husband, and memories of her silly father: “Her father had lived to be one hundred and two years old and had drunk a noggin of strong hot toddy on his last birthday. He told the reporters it was his daily habit, and he owed his long life to that” (Porter). But it is the bad memories she is letting go of, the memories of her jilting. Her children surround her as she dies, floating about like balloons above her, but she does not want to go yet because she has so much she still wants to do. In the medial of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” in paragraphs twenty-seven through twenty-nine, it constitutes the struggle of the memory of her getting jilted by the man she loved. In the beginning of paragraph twenty-seven, the children of Granny Weatherall were not scared and did not have to hang on to their mother because the lamp was lit. Additionally, Anne Porter wrote, “Their eyes followed the
match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then they moved away from her.” This could be described as the light being symbolized as happiness or trust because when the lamp was lit, the children of Granny Weatherall let go of her and Granny Weatherall is thanking God for everything. Furthermore, it can be seen that Granny Weatherall is noticeably knowledgeable from the way she talks to her children in paragraph twenty-eight. She tells her kids to never waste anything and that there is always someone who can use it. She was to show them that they do not always have to have someone there for them for them to be strong such as she had been. Granny Weatherall had once “fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the postholes herself and clamping the wires with just a Negro boy to help, riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies: sitting up nights with sick horses, negroes, and children and hardly ever losing one (Porter).” Moreover, she emphasizes to “don’t let things get lost. It is bitter to lose things.” She could be remembering her own conflicts within her own life, such as the fact that she could never understand why the man she once fell in love with, jilted her at her wedding. She is still in denial of her jilting. Even though she does not want to remember George, she keeps remembering him and her getting jilted. She says, “No, I swear he never harmed me but in the that… and what if he did (Porter)?” It can be exemplified that the thoughts of Granny’s past are light.
When describing her past, she said, “But he had not come, just the same. What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come?” But her thoughts of the present are dark. For example, “For the sixty years she 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 (Porter).” The light in which she blew out at the end of the story represents her life and she will now descend into the blackness of
death. All in all, Granny Weatherall had been struggling to forget about the past about what George did to her. It shows how Granny Weatherall had been jilted and that her mother did not even help her overcome what had happened to her. Her mother told her to stand up to her being jilted and that many girls get jilted. If she had not had been jilted, she would probably not be the same strong woman she was before. Granny Weatherall had been through a difficult life, full of hardships that shaped her into a strong independent woman that had struggle of leaving the memories of the past in the past.

Work Cited Porter, Katherine. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” An Introduction to Fiction. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th Ed. Boston. 2010. 79-86. Print.