The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Summary & Analysis

Granny Weatherall tells Doctor Harry, who is inspecting her, to leave her be. She claims that the “brat ought to be in knee breeches.” In return, Doctor Harry ignores and dismisses Granny himself, telling her to be a “good girl” and calling her “Missy.” He tells Granny that she is ill, but she says that she is not.

Granny feels that her bones are “loose” and “floated around in her skin,” and that Doctor Harry floats too, like “a balloon around the foot of the bed.” She means to wave goodbye to the doctor as he leaves, but finds that it is “too much trouble,” and her eyes close without her meaning them to.

Granny hears Cornelia and Doctor Harry whispering outside in the hallway. They claim that she was never “like this” and dismiss her because she is eighty. This infuriates Granny, as she doesn’t like people whispering about her when she still feels perfectly healthy. She decides that she would like to “spank” Cornelia.

As she starts to drift back off to sleep, Granny thinks about all of the things that need to be done tomorrow, as there is “always so much to be done.” She muses on how it is good to “spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly,” and to “have everything clean and folded away.” She imagines, for example, “hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen,” but then remembers something very important that she must sort out: a box of love letters in the attic from two men, George and John. She decides that she must sort the box out tomorrow, so that her children don’t find out “how silly she had once been.”

Granny thinks suddenly of death, and the thought of it feels “clammy and unfamiliar.” She decides that there is no use worrying about death anymore anyway, because she has spent “so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again.” She remembers a time twenty years ago when she thought she was about to die and prepared her will, but she recovered. She thinks of her father, who lived until he was “one hundred and two years old” and claimed it was because he drank a “noggin of hot toddy” every day. Cornelia comes back into the room, and Granny asks her for the same drink.

Again Granny hears Cornelia talking about her behind her back, saying she is “childish,” and Granny becomes annoyed. She thinks back to a time when she had “kept a better house” than Cornelia. She was a strong mother and wife and housekeeper, and she proudly recalls her achievements. Her children still ask her advice, she thinks. Lydia, for example, drove “eighty miles for advice” about her own children. Granny remembers “all of the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed.” Once she “fenced in a hundred acres” with the help of only one young boy. She was also a midwife, and remembers “riding country roads in the winter” and “sitting up nights with sick horses” and “sick children” and “hardly ever losing one of them.”

As Granny thinks back to the past, she specifically thinks of her children as they were when they were younger, when she could look after them.

Granny thinks back again to what she must do tomorrow, but suddenly finds that she cannot think properly because a “fog rose over the valley.” This transports her back to a memory of calling her children in from their old orchard, away from the dark fog, so that she can “light the lamps” indoors. As she does this, her children gather around her because they are scared of the dark.

Granny then thinks about another memory of the orchard, when she told her children to “pick all of the fruit this year and see that nothing is wasted.” She tells them not to “let things get lost,” as it’s “bitter to lose things.”

Granny then drifts into a memory of her jilting at the altar sixty years ago. “What does a woman do,” she asks, “when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come?” As she tries to think of her failed wedding day, a “whirl of dark smoke rose and covered it” and creeps “into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows.” This, she decides, “was hell,” and she realizes that the thought of George himself is mixed up with this idea: “The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell.”

Granny is brought back into consciousness by Cornelia wiping her face with a cold cloth. She thinks to herself that she doesn’t like having her faced washed in “cold water,” and seems disappointed that it is Cornelia before her and not one of her other children. She notices that Cornelia’s “features were swollen and full of little puddles,” and tells her to wash her face because she looks “funny.”

Cornelia seems to be speaking to Granny, but Granny can’t understand what she’s saying. Cornelia explains that Doctor Harry has returned to see Granny. Granny is confused and thinks that he has only left “five minutes ago,” but Cornelia tells her that that was this morning, and it is night now. Granny thinks that she is speaking, but no one seems to be able to hear her. The doctor gives her a hypodermic.

Once the doctor has administered the hypodermic, Granny has a hallucination in which she goes through various rooms to find her daughter, Hapsy. She sees Hapsy holding a baby, and then imagines herself as Hapsy, and Hapsy as the baby.

Granny slips back into reality as Cornelia asks her if there is anything Granny wants. Granny replies that she has “changed her mind after sixty years” and would like to see George after all, to show him everything that she has achieved without him: a “good house,” a “good husband” and “fine children.” Nevertheless, Granny cannot help but think that there was something else, something more than all of this, that was missing from her life.

Father Connolly, the priest, arrives. He was also the priest who was supposed to marry Granny and her former fiancé George. Granny remembers Father Connolly as a man fond of gossip and cursing, rather than as a particularly pious priest. Nevertheless, she seems quite assured in her religion. She “had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her.”

As she comes close to death, Granny gets confused and has flashbacks to the time that she gave birth to Hapsy. She then imagines Hapsy giving birth.

Granny becomes very aware of the room around her. She thinks it looks like a picture. She then notices an actual picture on the side, a photo of John, her husband. She doesn’t like it, because she doesn’t think it captures him as a person. It is only a photograph, not “my husband,” she says.

Granny drifts in and out of reality but manages to pull a rosary out of her dress. Her children, Lydia and Jimmy, arrive. Granny drops her rosary and holds instead to Jimmy’s thumb, claiming that “beads wouldn’t do, it must be something alive.”

Granny comes closer to death and quickly tries to instruct her children as to what to do with her possessions after she dies. She reassures Cornelia that she won’t die yet.

Granny feels as if she has become a small blue light. As she dies, the light leaves her body and floats upwards. She asks God to give her a sign of reassurance.

God fails to give Granny a “sign,” and instead abandons her in her time of need, just as George did sixty years before—“again” there was “no bridegroom and the priest in the house,” because this is also what happened at her failed wedding. Granny claims that she will never forgive this cruelty, and instead blows “out the light” of her own life.