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Literary analysis text
Literary analysis text
Literary analysis text
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Literary Analysis: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Katherine Ann Porter’s lamentable short story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” illustrates that abandonment has the power to leave one scarred even years down the road. Porter’s utilization of stream of consciousness highlights Weatherall’s fixation on being left at the altar and the role this distress plays in her life, leaving her detriment. Porter employs stream of consciousness in order to portray that even as Granny lies on her deathbed, her mind diverges from her current thoughts and she refers back to the time which she was left at the altar. Granny Weatherall’s train of thought shifts numerous times throughout the story: one particular change of thought shows Granny telling her children “You waste life when you waste good food” to her recalling the day of wedding which she was left at, “Fresh breeze.. green day.. she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come.” The sudden shift of thought from dialogue to …show more content…
Stream of consciousness, however, provides an internal monologue of her train of thought, consisted of George and proving herself worthy to him. Abandonment can leave others impaired and alter the way they see themselves. In these ways, being left at the altar had stripped off any self-worth Granny saw within herself and has pushed her to follow a checklist of what a perfect housewife should be in order to build back any esteem George had destroyed through leaving her at the altar. Additionally, Granny still thinks about George and their wedding day together 60 years after it had happened -- even after having married John and having 3 kids. Abandonment left Granny scarred in taking control of what she spent the rest of their life doing in order to prove her worth, leaving her fixated in the memory of being jilted even near the end of her
"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," with its third-person, stream of consciousness point of view, is not the first story one would think to make into a film. However, it was done! Please watch the short film version and discuss what the director did to the story to make it into a film. Is it a successful adaptation, to your mind? Why or why not?
From the very beginning of this story, it came to my attention that Granny continually repeats are "there's nothing wrong with me" and "that's for tomorrow.” This repetition, to me, shows two very important aspects about Granny Weatherall as a person – she’s stubborn and hardworking, yet procrastinates all the time. When she felt death come upon her on her bed that day, she wasn't expecting it. We know this because of the repetition of all that she needs to do and that she'll get it done tomorrow. At the same, who can blame her for not expecting it? I mean, who really expects to die every day they wake up? Sure, one knows they are going to die, but they don’t wake up planning it to happen that day. Aside from that, it stood out to me that Granny Weatherall didn’t fail to mention that she thought she was going to die once before during her sixties. From this near death experience, she somehow, in my opinion, allowed herself to think she was invisible and immortal simply because she managed to survive.
Similarly, in The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall, Porter discusses the regrets of an old woman revealed by her reactions to her being left at the altar and her slow death sixty years later.
Kate Morrison is a well educated, independent woman with a decent job, supportive boyfriend and family. Externally, Kate has a life that some people might envy of but, internally, she isn’t as stable as she seems. Crow Lake, a novel written by Mary Lawson, leads the readers to the protagonist, Kate Morrison and the struggles in her life. Kate loses her parents in her early age and for this reason she lives with her siblings with some help from her neighbours and other family members. Despite the absence of her parents, Kate and her siblings seem to grow well. Although there is some crisis in the family, they seem to be inevitable consequences of not having an adult in the family. However, Kate spends an innumerable amount of time accepting and letting go of the past and eventually it causes another crisis in her present life. She continuously has some kind of depression, and she does not realize that her depression is coming from herself, not from anything or anybody else. Crow Lake contains a great message that shows refusing to face the past affects your future negatively. We see ...
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” a short story by Katherine Anne Porter, describes the last thoughts, feelings, and memories of an elderly woman. As Granny Weatherall’s life literally “flashes” before her eyes, the importance of the title of the story becomes obvious. Granny Weatherall has been in some way deceived or disappointed in every love relationship of her life. Her past lover George, husband John, daughter Cornelia, and God each did an injustice to Granny Weatherall. Granny faces her last moments of life with a mixture of strength, bitterness, and fear. Granny gained her strength from the people that she felt jilted by. George stood Granny up at the altar and it is never stated that she heard from him again. The pain forced Granny to be strong.
Edna’s final despair derives from a paradoxical fear of entrapment…and a fear that she will be left alone, without authentic intimacy. This reaction to engulfment-estrangement is frequently interpreted as Edna’s heroic struggle against social roles and expectations, but the terror of engulfment-estrangement is a common effect of depression, one often understood as resulting from the depressive’s early frustration of dependency and intimacy needs (Ryan).
In “To Set Our House in Order” Margaret Laurence, it conveys the message that alienation is self-inflicted on the character “Grandmother MacLeod” as a result of a tragic event. In this case alienation is used as a coping mechanism for the Grandmother who lost her son Roderick in the battle of Somme. In the story she tells Vanessa, “When your Uncle Roderick got killed, I thought I would die. But I didn’t die” (Laurence 94). This shows how she now avoids affection and emotion in fear of becoming vulnerable. In consequence the Grandmother is in a state of emotional withdrawal which is shown where it states, “For she did not believe in the existence of fear, or if she did she never let on” (93). By doing so she decides she is better off trying to feel no emotion which supports the fact her alienation is self-inflicted.
Granny Weatherall is prideful and has a need for control. In contrast, Miss Emily lives in a fantasy land and is obstinate. Like anyone dealing with trauma, Miss Emily and Granny must find a way to deal with it. Their differing personality traits dictate how their coping mechanisms. Granny Weatherall pushes away the hurt, and Miss Emily denies it in favor of clinging to a fantasy. Granny Weatherall and Miss Emily may both have skeletons in their closets, but what they have done with them is what separates the
“Like a river flows so surely to the sea darling, so it goes some things are meant to be.” In literature there have been a copious amount of works that can be attributed to the theme of love and marriage. These works convey the thoughts and actions in which we as people handle every day, and are meant to depict how both love and marriage can effect one’s life. This theme is evident in both “The Storm” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman; both stories have the underlying theme of love and marriage, but are interpreted in different ways. Both in “The Storm” and in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the women are the main focus of the story. In “The Storm” you have Calixta, a seemingly happy married woman who cheats on her husband with an “old-time infatuation” during a storm, and then proceeds to go about the rest of her day as if nothing has happened when her husband and son return. Then you have “The Yellow Wallpaper” where the narrator—who remains nameless—is basically kept prisoner in her own house by her husband and eventually is driven to the point of insanity.
In her bedroom, Granny is literally confined to her deathbed, revealing to the reader that death is approaching. Granny speaks of a longer life from the place her life will end, emphasizing that death could come at any moment. As her mind starts deteriorating, she begins confusing the past with the present. At one time, she remembers having to dig hundreds of postholes after her husband’s death, and enlightens the reader with the fact that “digging post holes changes a woman;” (Porter 85). The change from a genteel lift to one of harsh labor representing another type of death. She worked hard for years, foreshadowing the time she will no longer need to work. Consequently, since she familiarized herself with hard work, accepting that her death is effortless is very difficult for Mrs. Weatherall. In the end, nighttime draws near, and Porter uses the time of day to symbolize mortality; the end of day is not only passing so is Granny’s life. Similar to the candle beside her bed, Granny draws her last breath to blow out light of her own life. Just as day has its end, so does every
Women throughout time have been forced to cope with the challenges of motherhood along with society’s expectations as to what a mother’s relationship should be with her child. Novelist, Agatha Christie said of the relationship between mother and child, “A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” In Beloved, Toni Morrison examines the same idea; ultimately showing that the mother’s willingness to protect her child at all costs often endangers the mother herself. Beloved is set in the late 1800’s but Sethe’s experiences as a mother ring true with the experiences of mothers throughout time because the act of being a mother is timeless. As a child Sethe was separated from her mother both physically and mentally because of slavery, so when she has her own children she is determined to keep her family together. In her attempt to free herself and her children from slavery Sethe finds herself separated from her daughter, Beloved as a result of Beloved’s death. When Beloved returns, Sethe’s guilt causes her to overcompensate for their lost time. Her attempts to make up for this lost time with Beloved lead her to become too dependent on her children’s happiness and to abandon any of her own pursuits in favor of ensuring that her children are content. She gives her children everything she has, but is eventually sucked dry with nothing left to give. This struggle is similar to the struggle of modern women who must leave their children while they work then try to make up for the lost time when they are home. From the time they are girls women are led to believe that more important than their happiness, is their respo...
Most women in Mrs Mallard’s situation were expected to be upset at the news of her husbands death, and they would worry more about her heart trouble, since the news could worsen her condition. However, her reaction is very different. At first she gets emotional and cries in front of her sister and her husbands friend, Richard. A little after, Mrs. Mallard finally sees an opportunity of freedom from her husbands death. She is crying in her bedroom, but then she starts to think of the freedom that she now has in her hands. “When she abandoned herse...
The psychological maltreatment is one of the most important subjects for women in every culture, and there is no difference regarding to what their social class, educational level or income is. The majority of wives experience psychological abandonment caused by their spouses and other relatives where mental suffering or even death is a frequent result (Emotional Neglect). The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is about a young mother who is affected by an illness, supposedly postpartum depression, and whose breakdown results in her awareness and understanding of her own role in a marriage and society in general. In the nineteen century, the typical medical care of such depression is a complete separation from others, work and
”I think I’ll die without you.“ She let herself be reliant on him threefold for physical safety and emotional stability, which was horribly crippling to her growth as a twenty-first century woman and unfair to Tim Haspel. She was using him and his selfless love and support–he renovated the garage into a Writer’s Workshop, told her he understood her detachment and moodiness was needed to channel creative juices into poetry and prose–as a crutch to feed into her destructive urge. She settled, denying herself and in the process denying him. ”Every time I think everything’s going really well. I mean, I try really hard. It all fucks up. And I think that maybe I’m just one of those people that…doesn’t deserve…to be
Every morning I wake up thinking that she is in the dining room drinking her coffee and watching her favorite TV shows. All of a sudden the truth starts rushing up and I come to realize that it was just a dream which was still hanging around me. In spite of my outward calmness, I felt as if there was a big hole inside me. My grandmother’s death was truly a sobering event and the most traumatic loss in my life. The commemoration of my grandmother will always be with me wherever I go and always tinting my dreams with her gentle smell of rosemary and the glittering silve...