The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Essay Example

We meet Granny Weatherall as she is lying in her deathbed. She is eight years old, and in obviously poor health. The author describes how “her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin.” She seems to have a difficult time focusing on her surroundings; the visiting doctor appears to be floating at the foot of her bed, and later floating away from her toward the ceiling. Her thoughts drift from the present to the past; at one moment she is speaking with someone in the room, in the next she imagines she is hearing the voice of someone she knew long ago.

Her thoughts wander to a time when she was a young woman, and she was left at the altar by a man named George. Though she tells herself she has forgotten him, and had a good life without him, it is clear that she has not. In fact, considering that he is in her thoughts as she lay dying, it seems clear not only that she has not forgotten George, but that she has never stopped thinking of him. She wishes for one of her children to find him and tell him that she had a good life with John, the man she did marry, though it appears that both George and John are deceased.

Her life with John was often a difficult one; she grew skilled at tasks involving physical labor, such as digging holes for fence posts, and at handling all the daily chores involved in raising children and taking care of a farm. She cooked, she cleaned, she sewed, she took care of sick children and animals. This life, and this hard work, aged her quickly, and she seems to have some regret about the life she led, as if she secretly suspects that her life with George would have been better than the her life with John.

Though she is obviously wounded by the fact that she was jilted by George, she tries to convince herself that she was unaffected. “Plenty of girls get jilted,” she tells herself, “stand up to it.” But as she drifts in and out of sleep, she is reliving the details of what should have been her wedding day: she remembers the cake, and the white dress she didn’t get to wear, and even how the priest threatened to “kill” George for her (an offer she declined).

It seems that Granny has, in some ways, never gotten past the fact that George stood her up at the altar, and that she has carried the sadness of that day with her for the ret of her life. In the very moment of her death, she thinks again of George, and the sorrow she felt then and still feels now. The presence of the priest reminds her again of her wedding day, and she thinks only of that as she breathes her last breath.