THE JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL (1929)
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 brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen" (1485). For another, she wallows in and romanticizes the so-called good old days, when she had all her vim and strength and she was used to doing a lot of heavy chores by herself: "She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help. That changed a woman" (p. 1486).
But thinking about that triggers memories of the man she loved, the man ...