South Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery

¶ … South

Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Walker are all southern women who capture the South in their fiction. Writing in different eras, the authors' stories depict different social climates. However, while these women are of different times, and in Walker's case, of a different race, they use their fiction to analyze and criticize certain attitudes southerners have developed about themselves in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "Good Country People," and "Everyday Use."

The protagonist of Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (1929) is a woman of the Old South. Based on her wanting "to send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia" (p. 1740), she is probably comfortably middle class, as she can afford to give that much wine as a gift. Before her husband dies, Granny is a homemaker, like most women of her time. She performs traditional tasks such as sewing, tending the garden, and raising her children. However, her husband dies at a young age: "She used to think of him as a man, but now all the children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if she saw him now" (p. 1736). Without a man as the head of the household, it is Granny who has to work. She performs manual labor such as digging holes for fences. She becomes something of a country doctor and midwife: "Riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies was another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children and hardly ever losing one" (pp.). Her thoughts point to the way blacks are viewed. Granny would have been working around the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She views blacks like livestock, and during the time the story is published, blacks are not considered equals to whites -- especially in the South.

The South is often portrayed as a place where religion is of great importance, and southerners are stereotyped as being religious. Granny does not realize she is near death, even when the priest comes to offer her communion one last time. A devout Catholic, she is not worried about the state of her soul: "She had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her" (p. 1738). Her last name is attributive, suggesting that she has "weathered all" the trials and tribulations she has met in her life: being jilted by George at the altar, losing her husband, losing her daughter Hapsy, having to raise her children alone and work. However, by the end of the story, as she realizes she is dying, she asks God for a sign and does not get one: "For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom…She could not remember any other sorrow" (p. 1740). Christ is symbolized as a bridegroom in several places in the Bible, and here she feels she is being jilted again -- this time by God. Porter becomes a Catholic when she enters an unsuccessful marriage. The end of the story and the end of Granny's life seem to embody a disillusionment with Catholicism and religion in general. Porter appears to criticize an intensely southern tradition, that of religion. A person can spend her entire life doing what she is supposed to based upon her spiritual beliefs, and it still will not give her any peace regarding the afterlife.

A tenant farm in the segregated South is the setting for Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," and it highlights the class tensions between southerners (1955). Both Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Hulga are judgmental, but for different reasons. Mrs. Hopewell is middle class and has tenants on her farmland. She only wants "good country people" as tenants. In her estimation, "good country people" are stereotypically poor, "salt of the earth" types with no pretensions about them. They are not educated, but they do not behave in ways Mrs. Hopewell would find embarrassing. For this reason, she is happy with her current tenants: "Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody…" (p. 1991). Mrs. Freeman is acceptable company because she is someone who readily agrees with Mrs. Hopewell while entertaining her, and Mrs. Hopewell can feel superior to her, which O'Connor exposes in a bit of dialogue. Mrs. Hopewell flatters Mrs. Freeman by telling her she is the smart one in the marriage. Mrs. Freeman agrees, saying she's always been quick. Mrs. Hopewell responds with, "Everybody is different," and Mrs. Freeman answers, "Yes, most people is" (p. 1992).

Hulga and her mother are at odds for more than one reason. Hulga has a doctorate in philosophy, while Mrs. Hopewell sees girls going to school to "have a good time" (p 1994), not to necessarily get a degree. In the mid-1950's, it is still unconventional for women to have careers or seek advanced degrees. Hulga would like to be a professor if not for her poor physical condition. While Mrs. Hopewell sees herself as enlightened in her attitude towards the poor "good country people," Hulga sees her mother as vapid: "Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not?'" Hulga, in her own mind, is the only intelligent one. She is highly educated, and she is enlightened enough to be an atheist.