The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall Analysis

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Ann Porter gives an insight to Ellen’s last day of life while she flashes between reality and the hardships she has faced throughout it. She mentions a tormenting memory of being left at the altar and her fear of being jilted by others including God. After reminiscing earlier parts of her life, she is doubtful about whether her life and dreams has been fulfilled. At the end Ellen was alone to blow out her candle, forming the idea of there being no God.

Firstly, regarding the view of people on Miss Emily, they seem to pity her, firstly by the fact that she could not fulfill her womanhood by marriage, and then by the death of her father. They also often relate the pity and loneliness with madness. This is clearly reflected in “That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last” (Faulkner 80).

This can be seen from her perception and description of the man who shares her “special” seat as a “… fine old man” and the woman as “a big old woman” (101). Her Surname 2 remembrance of the previous Sunday’s patient Englishman and his nagging hard to please wife whom she wanted to shake also shows her envy for women with male companionship. In Faulkner’s story A Rose for Emily, Emily is seen as a person who suffers from isolation from her community, by tradition and by law. Her isolation from the community and love is what seems to perturb her most; she is unable to accept the idea that her father is dead and she remains in denial.

The Fault in our Stars Held prisoner by the cancer flooding her lungs with fluid Hazel has lost her ability to interact with people, Hazel is lost to her books and herself, feeling guilty. She is aware that there is nothing she did to cause the cancer but she only tries to decrease the pain she believes that she is somehow causing her family. She gives in to death and gives up rather than make a profound impact on the people around her. She begins to explain this as she narrates “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about death,” Green, p.78. She realizes that she spends precious time obsessing about death, she is wasting her life grieving about something she cannot control, predict or change.

She refused that her father died and became mad. She isolated herself from the rest of the town causing them to wonder if she’ll ever leave home again. Like the story “A Worn Path” Phoenix too had her own issues which people have seen as mad. She believes that her grandson is still alive. Although the difference between the two would be the type of character they are.

This isn’t necessarily the case with Poe, as lost love fuels a minority of his writing. Pieces of Poe’s writing depict a woman who has died in the prime of her youth. This is an obvious parallel to Virginia Clemm, Poe’s unhealthy and prematurely deceased wife, who was taken from him in middle of his writing career. Love for an innocent and young girl who has died, is depicted in such poems as: “Tamerlane”, “Annabel Lee”, and “ To Helen”. After the deaths of the woman in these poems, the reaction of many of Poe's protagonists is to stay emotionally dependent upon the late women to the point of constant compulsion.

While “For My Daughter”, a poem written by Weldon Kees during the 1940s, resonates the bitterness of a mother’s feeling toward her daughter’s illness, it also shows her hopelessness and pain as a mother. What I find interesting about this poem is the strong statement in the last line “I have no daughter” for “I have none”. I find this line to be contradicting, because the mother obviously show hopelessness as she could only watch her daughter slowly dying away. However, she might not bare any love for her daughter or she did love her daughter, but she tries to detach herself from loving her daughter to reduce the pain of losing her. So, I chose this poem to find out if bitterness is the only attitude the poet reveals in this poem.

The husband decides everything for the protagonist and thinking it’s for her own good, but eventually his methods proves to worsen her illness, she can’t even write. She also has a brother, who is a doctor that doesn’t really help her on her sickness and just orders her to rest. The poor character has two family members that should be helping her, instead they are making her worse, even though that is not their intentions. In the story, she suffers from a mental breakdown after she obsesses over a wallpaper that consumes her every moment. She starts acting paranoid because of the things she is seeing in the yellow wallpaper.

Walk Two Moons takes its time to show you that Sal's mother died whereas the poem “Missing Mama” is right to the point. One of the feelings that they both go through is not being able to go with their mothers and be with them forever. In Claudia's poem, she writes “The day that you left I just didn't know, That you were going where I couldn't go” They both feel miserable about losing their mothers. Claudia’s feelings towards her mother aren't as deep as Sal’s to her mother.

Kate Chopin’s purpose for writing “The Story of an Hour” is to demonstrate the idea that with freedom comes delight and horror. She conveys this point by using characterization. At the beginning of the story, the audience reads that Mrs. Mallards husband has passed away. She is told by her sister that her husband has passed, but unlike most people, Mrs. Mallard does not “accept its significance” due to a “paralyzed inability.” Because of the inability, she is filled with misery and “physical exhaustion”, but not for long.

Figurative language is often used in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” because it shows Granny’s hallucinations. The flowery language that often personifies inanimate objects illustrates the intensity and detail of Granny’s hallucinations. For example, “Hapsy melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy shadow…” (398). Using the words “melted” and “gauzy shadow” give the reader a comprehensive picture of what Granny saw. Also, the figurative language used outside of Granny’s hallucinations help the reader understand how events occur in the story.

Imagine if your past was filled with tragic events/memories. Do you think you would still be the same person you are today? In “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe and “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen contain characters with a tragic past. Although both stories contained characters with a devastating past each story’s had a different outcome on their identity development. In “The Raven” the narrator has lost someone very close to him leading him to go insane.

The term jilted means to drop impulsively or without feeling. Granny Weatherall’s memories, of being jilted by George, are directly preceded by statements which are symbolizing her children, first being young, and dependent on Weatherall, then coming into the age of being more independent of her. Porter states, “Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. The children huddled up to her and breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight. Their eyes followed the match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then they moved away from her.

The events at Junior’s Grandmother’s wake are ironic because at the end, as the guests lowered her casket into the ground, the thousands of people who gathered at the field to grieve the Grandmother’s life laughed as they did so. This action is considered ironic because funerals are meant to be sad and full of sorrow, yet, it is full of laughter. “Two thousands Indians laughed at the same time. We kept laughing. It was the most glorious noise I'd ever heard” (Alexie 166).