Porter

The Winding River of the Mind

The human mind flows like a river, gently drifting over memories blended with the furious rush of the present and the faint promise of the future. In "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," Katherine Anne Porter applies the rhetorical technique stream of consciousness to guide her audience through the last sixty years of a leathery, bitter woman jilted in life, and finally in death. The seemingly aimless and casual technique, similar to a human's thought pattern, effectively develops the exposition, conflict, and denouement.

By using the stream of consciousness technique, Porter establishes Granny Weatherall's background. The occasional glimpse into the main character's past reveals the demanding responsibilities of a young widow. She reflects on how digging post holes, riding country roads in the winter, and sitting up nights with sick horses, negroes, and children, changed her from the bride her late husband had known. Furthermore, the technique challenges the reader to draw conclusions from the vague references of death of her husband, John, and her daughter, Hapsy. Granny Weatherall imagines seeing John again, pondering on how her children are now older than he was and he would seem like a child beside her. To visualize the shadowy memory of Hapsy, Granny Weatherall "had to go a long way back through a great many rooms." The cryptic stream of consciousness technique allows the reader to draw their own conclusion from the many possibilities.

This technique establishes the dramatic conflict as Granny Weatherall recalls how her beau, George, jilted her at the altar. Although it is unclear to the reader what leads up to the wedding day abandonment, she was clearly haunted for sixty years as "she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell." She becomes a bitter, controlling woman striving for a neat and orderly life by "tucking in the edges" as if it were a sheet. She spends her life avoiding and despising surprises, after the stunning surprise at the altar.

By applying the stream of consciousness technique to demonstrate the effects of Granny Weatherall's lifetime struggle with the jilting and its effects, Porter establishes the main character's need to control circumstances, even death. The darkness of death, like the familiar dark, smoky hell of being jilted, surprises Granny Weatherall. After sixty years of anger and bitterness, the jilting of death blocks out any other sorrow because the grief of dying erases them from her memory. Determined to control her death as she had her life, she blows "out the light."

In conclusion, Porter's flowing inner monologue provides an opportunity for many interpretations. Did the jilting cause her to be an angry, bitter woman or was the anger and bitterness the cause of the jilting? Did her arrogant spiritual beliefs force her to a life of endless darkness? Did she realize that death was the cruelest surprise of all? As gently as a river, Granny Weatherall's mind floats over the past sixty years, setting the exposition, conflict, and denouement in the free flowing stream of consciousness. By using this method, Porter encourages her audience to examine the universal feeling that life and death are as unpredictable as the winding river of the human mind.

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