hile 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 ."
Although the….

hen Granny, in the wanderings of her mind, thinks she is still a young wife and mother, the hard work Granny is accustomed to doing on a daily basis, even while resting, comes through, "there was always so much to be done, let me see: tomorrow," thinks Granny. Even now Granny takes pride in the neatness of her home, as she lies there, although she worries about the lost, resting love letters, stashed away fearing about being seen as silly, when individuals go over her personal possessions after she is gone.
Granny thus accepts her eventual death, even while she worries about the arrangement of the hairbrushes on the bedside table. She had expected to die at age sixty, now she is eighty. She "had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." But Granny wishes to control how she is remembered.….

Alienation in Different orks of Literature
Alienation is a common theme in many works of literature -- in many genres, across many periods, and of many different forms. The idea that one individual cannot truly know or understand another, or that the rules of society necessarily force those that question those rules to somehow be outside of that society, has been around since the time of Homer and certain of his characters. It can also be seen in more modern works of poetry, short stories, and dramatic texts, from a variety of authors writing in different times and with very different perspectives.

illiam Blake's poem late eighteenth century poem "The Tyger" does not deal with humanity's alienation from itself, or individuals' alienation from each other, but rather addresses the alienation of humanity from the divine. Describing the tiger as "fearful" and asking what "distant deeps or skies" the tiger's maker could….