.......Katherine Anne Porter's “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is a short story told partly with a narrative technique known as stream of consciousness, a term coined by American psychologist William James (1842-1910). With this technique, an author portrays a character’s continuing “stream” of thoughts as they occur, regardless of whether they make sense or whether the next thought in a sequence relates to the previous thought.
.......The story is told in third-person point of view by a narrator who frequently reveals the thoughts of Granny Weatherall in language that Granny would use if she were speaking. Because Granny is disoriented, these thoughts focus on present perceptions one moment and on old memories the next. Her perceptions and recollections favor her positive view of herself. 

Year of Publication

.......“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was first published in February 1929 in transition (uncapitalized), an English-language literary journal printed in Paris. The publication featured experimental writing. A year later, the story was published in a collection of Porter's stories entitled Flowering Judas and Other Stories.
.
Setting

.......The action takes place in a bedroom in the home of Granny Weatherall's daughter Cornelia. Granny, about eighty, is lying face up in the bed. She is dying of an undisclosed illness. The time is probably the late 1920s. Flashbacks, however, date as far back as the late 1860s, when Granny's fiancé abandoned her on the day they were to be married. 

Characters

Ellen (Granny) Weatherall: Feisty woman of about eighty who ruminates about events in her life as she lies dying in the home of her daughter Cornelia. Because of her illness, she is lucid one moment and disoriented the next. A painful memory, one she had repressed for sixty years, surfaces and haunts her at the hour of her death. It is the memory of the day—sixty years before—when her fiancé, George, jilted her. After she later married a man named John, she gave birth to four children. John died young but Granny carried on, rearing the children, working her farmland and orchard, and caring for animals.
Cornelia: Daughter of Granny. While her mother is on her deathbed, Cornelia takes care of her.
George: Man who abandoned Granny on the day he was to marry her.
John: Deceased husband of Granny. 
Doctor Harry: Granny's physician. 
Hapsy: Daughter of Granny and, the narration says, the only child Granny "really wanted." The story implies that she has preceded her mother in death.
Jimmy: Son of Granny.
Lydia: Daughter of Granny. 
Lydia's Husband: Man whom Granny considers "worthless."
Nurse: Person who accompanies the doctor on a nighttime visit to Granny's bedside.
Father Connolly: Roman Catholic priest who comes to give Granny the church's last rites. 
Sister Borgia: Nun whom Granny wants to send six bottles of wine for indigestion.
Father of Granny: Man who lived to age 102. He attributed his longevity to his practice of drinking a hot toddy every day.
..

Plot Summary
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2010

.......Doctor Harry feels Granny Weatherall's pulse, but she pushes him away, saying, “Get along now. Take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.” He then feels her forehead and tells her to be sure to remain in bed.
.......When he goes out, Granny closes her eyes but reopens them when she hears Cornelia and the doctor whispering.
.......“She was never like this, never like this!” 
.......Cornelia's kindness and attentiveness annoy Granny, and she pictures herself spanking her daughter. Granny drowses, thinking she had had a long day. There was always something to be done. She reviews the chores for the next day (perhaps her way of putting her life in order before dying), including folding laundry, putting the pantry in order, dusting the bronze clock. And then, the narrator says, there was the business of the letters in the attic: “George’s letters and John’s letters and her letters to them both—lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy.”
.......When she was sixty, Granny began preparing for death by visiting her children and grandchildren, thinking it would be the last they would see of her. She made out her will, then got sick. But when she recovered, she decided to live on for a long time. Her father had made it to a hundred and two, claiming that a noggin of strong toddy each day accounted for his longevity.
.......She thought again of Cornelia, of how she would say, “Don’t cross her, let her have her way, she’s eighty years old.” Granny had a mind to pack up and go back to her own home so she wouldn't have to put up with such nonsense.  As far as being old is concerned, Granny notes to herself that Lydia still drives eighty miles to ask for advice on handling her children, and Jimmy comes over to get her opinion on business matters. She wishes see could see her late husband, John, to point out what a good job she did raising the children. All the children are older than John now. But after all the work she had done—even digging post holes for fences—he probably wouldn't recognize her.
.......“John would be looking for a young woman with a peaked Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan,” she thinks. "Digging post holes changed a woman. Riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies was another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children and hardly ever losing one.” 
.......Granny recalls other memories. About calling the children in when a fog was creeping over the orchard, then lighting the lamps in the house so they didn't have to be afraid anymore. About having them pick all the fruit so nothing went to waste. 
.......Then she remembers the day she was jilted. For sixty years, the narrator says, she had prayed against remembering George and now the memory of him occupied her as she was trying to rest. The narrator reports what she is thinking: “Wounded vanity, Ellen. . . .  Don’t let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you.” 
.......Cornelia comes in and tells her mother that the doctor has arrived to look in on her. 
.......“He left just five minutes ago,” Granny says.
.......But Cornelia informs her he had last checked her in the morning. It is now night. A nurse has come in also. When Cornelia says the doctor is going to give her a hypodermic, Granny says she's been seeing sugar ants in her bed. 
.......Her daughter Hapsy appears before her and says, “I thought you’d never come” (suggesting that Hapsy has already died and has been waiting for her mother in the afterworld). “You haven’t changed a bit!” 
.......Granny wants someone to find George. The narrator reveals her thoughts:

.......Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know 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 had hoped for even. Tell him 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. . . . 

.......In the title, jilting can refer not only to the jilting of Granny by George but also to Granny's belief that God has jilted her. The name Weatherall suggests that Granny believes she has weathered all the adversities of life.

. .
Themes

Responding to Loss With Perseverance

.......The overall theme of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is how one woman, Ellen Weatherall, responds to loss by persevering. First, her fiance, George, abandoned her. Consequently, she lost not only her future husband but also a good measure of her self-esteem. Eventually, she married a man named John and bore him four children. But John died young, leaving her to finish rearing the children. Then one of the children—Hapsy, her favorite—died, too, after bearing a child of her own. Granny's losses make their mark on her, as the following passage indicates. In a flashback, Granny is speaking to her children. Note the boldfaced letters in red that relate to the theme.

I want you to pick all the fruit this year and see nothing is wasted. There’s always someone who can use it. Don’t let good things rot for want of using. You waste life when you waste good food. Don’t let things get lost. It’s bitter to lose things. 

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. There they were, made out of her, and they couldn’t get away from that. Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I didn’t do so badly, did I?

The pillow rose about her shoulders and pressed against her heart and the memory was being squeezed out of 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 when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute. 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.

Repression

.......Instead of facing and dealing with the memory of George's jilting of her, Granny represses it. For sixty years, she keeps it locked in a deep recess in her soul. To what extent her repression of this memory impairs the quality of her life is uncertain. In her deathbed reflections, she seems to suggest that she was better off without George: "What if he did run away and leave me to face the priest by myself? I found another a whole world better. I wouldn’t have exchanged my husband for anybody except St. Michael himself. . . . " 
.......But why does she keep his letters to her? Why does the memory of him haunt her at the end of her life? 

Following in Christ's Footsteps

.......Granny has many faults, not the least of which is criticizing others. Nevertheless, in her own way, she tries to follow in Christ's footsteps. Consider, for example, that Granny underwent a humiliating public rejection when George jilted her and that she suffered through many trials, including "riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies" and "sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children." The suffering and rejection endured by Granny call to mind this Bible quotation: "[T]he Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the ancients and by the high priests" (Mark 8: 31).
.......Granny's perseverance and her faith in God enabled her to come through her difficulties, as she notes: "God, for all my life, I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it." On her deathbed, she has a notion that she will even overcome her fatal illness: "She was strong, in three days she would be as well as ever. Better." This passage echoes the following Bible passages: 

And . . . after three days [He will] rise again. (Mark 8:31)
Jesus . . . said to them: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. (John 2:19) 
The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. (Luke 24:7)

Granny's Attitude Toward Cornelia, Hapsy

.......In her deathbed reflections, Granny resents Cornelia's doting presence. Consider the following passage:

It was like Cornelia to whisper around doors. She always kept things secret in such a public way. She was always being tactful and kind. 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.

[Granny] could just hear Cornelia telling her husband that Mother was getting a little childish and they’d have to humor 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 here 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. Sometimes granny almost made up her mind to pack up and move back to her own house where nobody could remind her every minute that she was old. Wait, wait, Cornelia, till your own children whisper behind your back!

Climax and the Questions It Raises

.......The climax occurs when Granny cannot perceive the presence of God as she lapses toward death. Among the possible reasons Granny believes God is "jilting" her are the following:

• George's abandonment of her so damaged her self-esteem that she now believes she is not worthy of heaven. Although Granny asserts in her musings that she has weathered the hurt George caused, clearly the jilting has had a long-term effect. "For sixty years," the narrator says, "she had prayed against remembering him." Her prayers are an acknowledgment that the memory of George has remained firmly lodged in her mind. 
• She committed a sin that she believes has jeopardized her salvation. For example, it is possible that she became pregnant with George's baby, then hurriedly married John after the jilting to avoid the stigma of bearing a child out of wedlock. Having sexual relations outside marriage is a grave sin in Roman Catholicism. Of course, she no doubt would have confessed her sin and performed penance, but she could have experienced lingering guilt. It may be, too, that she wronged John by allowing him to believe that all of the children were his. 
• Her illness has muddled her thinking. 
• She is experiencing a normal fear of death and the inability of humans to grasp fully the concept of God.

.......Following are examples of figures of speech in the story. 

Alliteration
Repetition of a consonant sound

Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. 
All as surely signed and sealed as the papers for the new forty acres. 

Cornelia says to Granny, “Oh, is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything I can do for you?” Granny responds with these thoughts: "Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him."
Here, Granny's desire to find George contradicts her assertion that she has forgotten him--a bit of humor that lightens the deathbed atmosphere. 

Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges. (Comparison of breath to an object with sharp edges)

She listened to the leaves rustling outside the window. No, somebody was swishing newspapers. 

She always kept things secret in such a public way. 

He had cursed like a sailor’s parrot. (Comparison of a human to a parrot)

.......In an interview with Barbara Thompson (Writers at Work, 1963) Katherine Anne Porter said she always wrote the last paragraph of a story first, then backed up and wrote about all of the events leading up to the events described in the last paragraph. It was important for her to know the destination of her literary journey first so that she could set a course (like sailors and airline pilots) leading to the destination. 

. .
Study Questions and Essay Topics

1...Granny says she prayed for sixty years to forget George. Why, then, did she keep his letters?
2...Why is Granny concerned about the letters in the attic?
3...Granny indicates in her deathbed reflections that she loved John. Did she really? Or was she simply trying to persuade herself that she did? 
4...Read the following quotation from the story:

Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know 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 had hoped for even. Tell him 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. . . . 

.