Granny Weatherall Analysis

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I really liked the story because is a consciousness description of Granny Weatherall's thoughts on her deathbed, focusing particularly on her being jilted at the altar when she was a young woman. It seems clear that Granny has never really gotten over the incident even though she tells herself otherwise. She has kept it hidden from her children, and the shame and sorrow of the incident loom large in her final thoughts. Granny is so focused on her abandonment that she lets it overshadow the enormous self-reliance she has developed in her life. In the end, she feels abandoned by God in death just as she felt abandoned by her fiancé in life, but the evidence in the story suggests she is not alone at all. Saviors; Granny is clear that God is her …show more content…

But we are told, "For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house." Once again she is seized with despair, just as she was at the altar, when the "whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away." Yet I would argue that Granny's pronounced fear of abandonment is very different from actual abandonment. George is not God, and God is not George. Just as someone caught Granny as she fainted, there are signs that many people, living and dead, care about her. Her family gathers around her deathbed. Her dead daughter, Hapsy, appears to be waiting for her, ready both to take care of her and to be taken care of. Granny herself has an ongoing relationship with God and feels "easy about her soul." She is not unprepared, like that other famous Grandmother from Flannery O'Connor. At one point, Granny imagines a cart coming for her. Porter writes: "Granny stepped up in the cart very lightly and reached for the reins, but a man sat beside her and she knew him by his hands, driving the cart." The driver might be interpreted as John, as Christ, or perhaps as some