“This is the story of an eighty-year-old woman lying in bed, getting groggy, and dying; I can’t see why it should interest anybody.” How would you answer this critic?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Such a critic will be hard to convince. But perhaps discussion can show that the story is remarkable for its condensation of a long life into a few pages. How does it feel to die? All of us find the question interesting, and Porter answers it. Although Edith Wharton has argued in The Writing of Fiction (New York: Scribner, 1925) that it is not the nature of a short story to develop a character, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” certainly makes character its central concern. We finish the story persuaded that we know Ellen Weatherall very well indeed—better than she knows herself.
Here is a bleak reading of the story for possible discussion: For sixty years Ellen Weatherall has suppressed the memory of George, the man she loved, who jilted her. She prays not to remember him, lest she follow him down into the pit of Hell (par. 29). If she remembers him, she herself will be damned—yet she remembers him. She longs to see him again (par. 42), imagines him standing by her deathbed (par. 30). In the end she beholds the pit: a darkness that will swallow up light. For the sake of a man, she has lost her soul.
But is the story so grim an account of one woman’s damnation? It seems hardly a mortal sin to remember a person and an event so crucial in one’s life; damnation seems undeserved. We sense that the author actually admires Granny’s defiance in blowing out the light at the end. To say the least, the story is splendidly ambiguous.
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” lent itself effectively to the PBS television film series The American Short Story, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald and Henry Fonda, and obtainable on DVD. Anyone interested in writing for television might care to see Corinne Jacker’s excellent script, reprinted in The American Short Story, Volume 2 (New York: Dell, 1980), together with a revealing interview with the scriptwriter on the problems of adapting “Granny”—such as a dearth of physical action in the present—and Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s short critical essay on the Porter story.
Porter’s familiarity with illness and the threat of death may have been drawn from memory. As Joan Givner recounts in her biography, Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Simon, 1982), Porter had to struggle for years against bronchial troubles and tuberculosis. Defiantly, she endured to age ninety.