The jilting of Granny Weatherall

Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter

"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is a particularly difficult short story to adapt to film, as seen in the 1980 made-for-television movie of the same name. On the surface, the film and as Katherine Anne Porter's story have a similar plot line -- the title character is jilted at the altar, goes on to have a successful but physically demanding life as a wife, mother, and pioneer, and then finally succumbs to old age after losing her youngest daughter, Hapsy, to childbirth. However, by losing Porter's distinct voice as a narrator, the film emerges as less successful and less radical in its approach than its original, written source. It is not the storyline that is so innovative, but the way that it is told that makes the story a classic: it unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness narration by a dying woman whose inner voice is still as strident, stubborn, and proud as it likely was when she was a young woman. Film, except in the hands of a very gifted director, is less skillful at creating a character's inner life.

One of the advantages to fiction in delineating character, as opposed to film, is that an entire story can take place inside a character's head, as is the case of the printed version "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." The events of Granny's life, like driving in fence posts after her husband dies, or lying on a bed, close to death, are not really cinematic. What makes them interesting is the way Granny thinks about these significant, life-changing events. The story is driven by Granny's lack of fulfillment and regrets. Because of her age and the fact she is dying, she is able to travel back and forth in time with great ease. She recalls, George leaving her, asking her husband for the doctor first for her own labor, then for Hapsy's, losing Hapsy, finding Hapsy again with the baby. The indeterminacy of whether these events are taking place, and where Granny is in her wandering, mental flashbacks gives the story its poetic as well as narrative power.

The film pairs different flashbacks together, but the events look too substantial and real. In prose, Hapsy, George, and Christ are all fused together seamlessly. Granny focuses on the negative sense of loss and being let down by a man: "Her mistake is that she expects to receive this sign [of salvation] from Christ, when it is not Christ she should expect but her own daughter Hapsy," and she shows a failure to recognize "the power of the feminine spirit" (Layman 279-280). While her own tenacity never lets her down, men always seem to lack Granny's staying power. Because she has been abandoned by two men, one because he did not marry her, another because he died young, Granny cannot believe in the certainty of her future salvation through the vehicle of a male figure. The fact that she has had to assume the role of man and woman is underlined: "I pay my own bills," she says. "In her day she had kept a better house and had got more work done. She wasn't too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the children jumped the track, and Jimmy still dropped in and talked things over: 'Now, Mammy, you've a good business head, I want to know what you think of this?…' Old. Cornelia couldn't change the furniture around without asking ."