Katherine Anne Porter

1. Katherine Anne Porter

2. Main Content І. Life Ⅱ. Theme Ⅲ. Artistic Features Ⅳ. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

3. І. Life • She is remembered as one of America’s best short-story writers, she is the fourth of five children of her family. In 1892, when Porter is two years old, her mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter is raised by her father and grandmother. Her grandmother died when she was 11, but her strong character provided a model for grandmother in her stories.

4. In 1930, she published her first short story collection “the Flowering Judas and Other Stories”. An expended edition of this collection was published in 1935 and received many supports, it assured her place in American literature. In 1962, “The Ship of Fool”. She died at the age of 90, and her ashes were buried next to her mother.

5. Ⅱ. Theme 1. Betrayal 2. God and Religion 3. Death

6. 1. Betrayal The idea of betrayal is a central theme underlying many of Porter’s stories. At the heart of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” are Granny’s memories of her betrayal by George, who abandoned her at the altar some sixty years earlier.

7. 2. God and Religion Many readers have suggested that the ultimate betrayal of Granny involves God and that the story is primarily a portrait of a woman at the end of her life facing a devastating spiritual crisis. When Father Connolly comes to visit Granny Weatherall on her deathbed, she is cordial to him. It is stated that Granny “felt easy about her soul.” Yet, his arrival seems to trigger Granny’s most vivid and painful memories of the day sixty years earlier when she was left by her fiance.

8. 3. Death Granny Weatherall struggles against death, and though she lacks the strength to get out of bed, denies even being ill. The final image in the story — of Granny blowing out a candle — evokes the notion that her life is coming to an end. Yet, there is no sense of closure to Granny’s life, no sense that the conflicts raised in her memories have been resolved. The final realization in the story is that “there was no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end of it.”

9. Ⅲ. Artistic FeaturesStream of Consciousness 1. Definition of stream of consciousness 2. The narrative style of the stream of consciousness inThe Jilting of Granny Weatherall 3. Examples of stream of consciousness

10. 1. What’s the stream of consciousness? • Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.

11. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device.

12. The term was first introduced to the field of literary studies from that of psychology by philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of writer Henry James. • It is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods.

13. 2. The narrative style of the stream of conscious-ness in The Jilting of Granny Weatherall • Early in her career, Porter came to be admired as an innovative and masterful stylist. In The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, she uses experimental, modernist narrative techniques in creating a moving and believable portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her death bed.

14. Though the story is written in the third person, its narrative point of view is extremely close to that of the central character, Granny Weatherall. The story is told through stream-of-consciousness. Granny’s thoughts are presented in a spontaneous fashion, as if readers had access to her thoughts at the moment each one occurs to her. Porter conveys what it is like to be an eighty-year-old woman whose mind tends to wander by enabling readers to experience some of the same confusion Granny feels.

15. Since Granny sometimes mistakes one daughter for another, for example, the characters in the story sometimes dissolve and become other characters. Because Granny’s awareness slips back and forth between her present reality and her remembered past, events in the story are presented as they occur to Granny rather than chronologically.

16. 3. Examples of stream of consciousness • Virginia Woolf's ：To the Lighthouse (1927) • James Joyce's：Ulysses (1918) • William Faulkner's：The Sound and the Fury (1929) • Marcel Proust：In Search of Lost Time( À la recherche du temps perdu )1913 – 1927

17. Ⅳ. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall 1. Analysis of character granny Weatherall (1) Repeatedly deserted but brave —— deserted four times: Joe, John, daughter; God. weather-beaten but brave, staunch: a new woman who tries to change her own destiny through struggling against the hardships of life. (2) Charitable, capable —— she takes care of others, both man and anima, props up the family alone.

18. (3) General—— takes care of poor people and forgives those who desert her, such as Joe. (4) Others —— a typical good wife and good mother: intelligent; independent; considerable; diligent Similarity between the author and the character, even a collection of women in the southern American: should control their own fate, independent

19. 2. Plot The setting: the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying; Most of the action occurs in Granny’s head; The story of the last day in the eighty-year-old woman’s life; In her final hours with her surviving children around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death.

20. 3. Summary • On her death bed, surrounded by her children, doctor and priest, a memory of 60 years ago, the day she was jilted by her husband-to-be, could no longer be repressed by Granny Weatherall-- "the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head . . . ." Voices and visions, imagined and real, mingle and merge throughout the story as this hardy woman, one who has weathered so much, lives out her final moments.

21. Ironically, Granny Weatherall is jilted for a second time when the final sign she's been waiting for from Jesus never appears. "For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house . . . She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light."

22. Homework 1. Please write a "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall View". 2. Search for Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s personal information and report to the class.