The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Genre

Modernism, Drama

Katherine Anne Porter might not be as closely associated with modernism as big shot writers like James Joyce, William Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf, but her emphasis on the inner workings of Granny's mind totally justifies giving her story the Modernist seal of approval.

One of the hallmarks of modernism is a narration technique known as stream of consciousness. This is a lot like what it sounds: A steady stream or flow of a character's thoughts. Stream of consciousness writing is supposed to represent what human mental processes are actually like, and Porter's depiction of Granny' mind sure does a bang-up job of this. For example, take a look at a moment early on in the story in which Granny is resting and she starts thinking about what she's going to do the next day. At first she's thinking:

There was nothing to trouble about
(17).

She then continues to let her mind wander a bit more, when all of a sudden something totally urgent she has to do pops up in her mind:

All those letters—George's letters and John's letters and her letters to them both—lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy. Yes, that would be tomorrow's business. No use to let them know how silly she had once been (17).

We've all been there, right? We're going along thinking about what we're going to watch on TV tonight and then, shoot, the thought of our history teacher suddenly invades our mind, reminding us we have a test on the Civil War the next day. So much for watching that Big Brother finale.

Of course, just as any modernist writer worth his or her salt would do, Porter makes sure that some of Granny's thoughts are especially weird and difficult to follow. Yeah, you know the kind of thoughts we're talking about: The ones starring Hapsy. The narrator tells us:

It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting (41).

Huh? Who's Hapsy? And who's the kid on her arm? Wait…and now Granny is Hapsy who is also the baby and himself and herself? Oh, okay, that totally makes sense.

Not.

Remember, we're talking about stream of consciousness here. It's not like our own thoughts always make sense, so we can hardly expect that our characters' thoughts will always be perfectly clear to us (especially characters who are all drugged up and on the verge of death).

"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" may not be the modernism of Joyce, Faulkner, or Woolf, all of whom ambitiously dare to jump into the minds of multiple characters. That's no offense to Porter or anything. Some readers will definitely prefer "Granny" to Ulysses: you still get a nice dose of literary experimentation, but it's a lot shorter. On the other hand, if you do aspire to read something like Ulysses (which, btw, would give you mad bragging rights) this short story will give you great preparation.

In addition to being all cutting-edge modernist, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" can also be considered a good, old-fashioned drama. After all, the story is essentially about a dying character—it doesn't really get much more dramatic than that. Of course, this isn't to say that the story is uniformly serious; there are certainly some light-hearted moments thanks to Granny's general outrageousness. Rather, the story is a drama because of its focus on conflict and emotion. Granny's outward denial of her impending death creates conflicts between herself and the characters around her. On top of that, the prospect of death has stirred up a boatload of emotions within Granny herself. So not only are we readers following the drama of whether Granny will, in fact, die at the end of the story, we're also invested in seeing how she comes to terms with all of the memories that have been conjured up in her mind.