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
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