Essay Questions

What are three ways that Granny can be said to have been “jilted” in her life?

The most obvious and literal example of the jilting of the title character is when she is left standing at the altar on her wedding day by her fiancé, George. Granny recovers from this humiliation by marrying John only to experience a less literal and more figurative form of jilting when he dies at a young age, leaving her to raise their children on her own. And finally, the most symbolic jilting of all is her feeling of having been jilted by God at the moment she most needs to feel His presence. The lack of a sign from God despite her entreaties for Him to provide one becomes a third jilting of Granny Weatherall.

What traditional wedding item becomes the unexpectedly powerful symbol Granny being jilted at the altar and what is its significance?

When Granny finally gives into the memory of the jilting, it is the wedding cake that becomes the symbolic entryway into the past. Described as uncut, thrown out and waste, the cake takes on greater figurative significance as a metaphor for a life prepared for, but unlived. Granny had entered into the idea of marriage to George full of excitement and expectation for the future, doubtlessly planning in her mind an entire life that may have been quite different from the live she actually lived. In an instant those plans were—like the wedding cake—throw out, become not just unused, but wasted. Considering the harsh times and lives in which Granny lived, wasted food was also usually looked upon as a sin, lending the cake an extra religious dimension of symbolism.

How does Porter’s use of stream-of-consciousness techniques make the story a more powerful experience by mirroring the state of mind of its title character?

A conventional approach which relates the story in chronological order would be easier to follow, but would increase the difficulty of trying to get inside the head of the main character. Granny, nearing death, is experiencing a decreasing sense of lucidity in the form of controlling what is known to be actually occurring in the moment and what are memories of things which occurred in the past. Hers is not a mind lost, but a mind suffering from the simple mechanics of separating the past from the present. Since the past intrudes upon the present and the present stimulates memories from the past, a chronological account would be an inferior approach to telling the story. Porter’s choice of allowing more fluidity between what is actually going on inside the room and the more expansive setting of what is going on inside Granny’s mind offers ample opportunity for information about the past to be introduced that allows more sense to be made by the reader of what is going on in the present. This technique situates the reader in exactly the same position as Granny: a little confused and struggling to create a linear sensibility of randomly occurring flashbacks that create a portrait of a fully fleshed-out life when put together in the right order.