Feedback
on exam question over Porter's "The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall"
A key requirement in
stipulated in the question is that you restrict your answer to
the story. So if you start talking about Granny’s
obsession with making a cake (looking for a recipe [for a white
cake] her daughter has never seen her use, searching out the
right eggs, churning butter), cleaning house (rummaging in the
attic), dressing up for a party (complete with Spanish comb), you
indicate that you didn’t review the story in the light of
the prep sheet (since these are all inventions of the
film).
If you did re-read the story with an eye out
for indications of unconscious motives at work, here are some of
the ideas you might have noticed:
- Granny contradicts herself in the very act
of telling Cornelia (or fantasizing telling Cornelia) to
go find George and tell him that she’s forgotten
him.
- She "protests too much" when she
tells George that she is satisfied with the fine husband
and family she ended up having.
- The general texture of the flow of her
thoughts indicates that more is at work than just the
present moment dictated by external events or logical
reasoning: there are passages in which perceptions,
memories and fantasies swirl out of and into each other.
- She hallucinates that she is getting ready
to give birth to Hapsy, when she feels a pain pushing up
from underneath. (This indicates not only a
preconscious pre-occupation with Hapsy, but a denial that
anything is really wrong in the present moment, that
death is immanent. Yet on several occasions she finds
herself skirting thoughts of death. We realize that
she’s "thinking of" this more than when
the idea irrupts into consciousness ["While she was
rummaging around she found death in her mind and it felt
clammy and unfamiliar"]; in other words, most of the
time she’s managing to repress the thought.)
- At the end of the story, we realize in
fact that all along the memories of being jilted by
George have been connected (but not in any way of which
she was explicitly aware) with the expectation of being
"a bride of Christ" in recompense for her
sufferings and dutiful life.
- Reflecting on the story as a whole, we
realize that up until her dying day she had more or less
successfully repressed her continuing anger towards
George, which nevertheless continued. But this
could only be so because she has never really given up
her love for him. (This is certainly something she
has successfully hidden from herself: she never
recognizes it even at the end — only the reader
does.)
- And this unresigned love has made her
understandably but irrationally unsatisfied with her real
children, by John, because they never measured up (never
could measure up) to the undefined fantasies of the
children she always really wanted, the union of herself
and George.
- This preoccupation with these fantasy
children helps explain her fixation on her youngest
daughter Hapsy, who has died young, and thus functions as
a kind of stand-in for these other ones she always
wanted but never had because they were sadly taken from
her.
The basic idea is to cite some specific fears,
wishes, fantasies, feelings, attitudes that the explicit
facts of Granny’s mental activity lead us to infer "behind"
them. Of course you aren’t expected to mention
all of these! But you should cite several of them
in order to get beyond begging the question by just spinning your
wheels repeating, in different words, the point that it’s
your job to demonstrate, namely, that the stream of thoughts the
story’s sustained inside view of Granny’s conscious
shows us indicates in turn that these conscious thoughts are just
the surface of what’s going on in Granny’s experience.
Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome. Please
send them to lyman@ksu.edu
.
Contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A.
Baker.
Permission is granted for non-commercial educational
use; all other rights reserved.
This page last updated 17 April 2000
.