The Jilting of Granny Weatheral

This is an analysis of Porter's short story to show her use of metaphor, detail and background in making a main character seem real to the reader. Porter was noted for an objective style of storytelling, using only those details she felt were needed. She also had a brief and unsuccessful marriage due to the religious difference between her and her husband. And she fell almost fatally ill with tuberculosis and influenza in her late 1920s, an ordeal that is clearly reflected in her portrait of Granny Weatherall.

The opening of this story shows what has long since become a domestic cliche in hundreds of TV shows, namely a middle-aged daughter being the parent to her elderly, crotchety, dying mother as a young doctor tries to be reassuring to the dying woman.

As "Granny" Ellen Weatherall sinks deeper into a fog of impending death, she refuses to admit she is deathly ill (the autobiographical detail referred to above), resents Doctor Harry's patronizing manner, and holds his relative youth against him: "Get along and doctor your sick," says Granny Weatherall. "Leave a well woman alone . . . Where were you forty years ago when I pulled through milk-leg and double pneumonia? You weren't even born" (p. 1484).

Indeed, "Granny" Ellen Weatherall comes across as a stereo- typical know-it-all old lady. For one thing, she is obsessed with neatness:"It was good to have everything clean and folded away, with the hair

. . .
w old is this priest?) when "the whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away. His hand had caught her under the breast, she had not fallen" (p. 1488). Further on, she again tries to remember her feelings as she wished they had been: "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." Better maybe, but did Ellen love him as much she hungered for George? Just as Ellen tries to convince herself of the good life she had after all, she tries just as hard to convince herself that she isn't going to die, that she has more strength than her daughter, Cornelia, realizes:"Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about. Things were finished somehow and when the time came, thank God there was always a little margin over for peace" (p. 1485). In depicting Granny Weatherall's vain struggle for life, Porter fixes on a repeated metaphor of light vs. darkness, shown in the following quotes: Her eyes closed of themselves, it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed (p. 1484) . . . A fog rose over the valley, she
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1555
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)