Text 3 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.ppt

1、Text 3 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,by Katherine Anne Porter, 1930,The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,Katherine Anne Porter (15 May 1890 18 September 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetra

2、ting insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.,I. The story: The setting for The Jilting of Granny Weatherall is the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying, though most of the action occurs in Grannys head. Told as a stream-of-consciousness mono

3、logue, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall is the story of the last day in the eighty-year-old womans life.,In her final hours with her surviving children around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death. Almost against her will, her thoughts return to an incident

4、that occurred more than sixty years earlier: She was left standing alone at the altar when her fiance George jilted her.,The border between past and present, living and dead, becomes even more blurred in the final pages of the story and the final minutes of Granny Weatheralls life. While the priest

5、gives her last rights, Granny slips closer to death and the sights and sounds in the room mingle with her memories.,When she grasps her sons thumb, she realizes this is the moment of death. As “the blue light from Cornelias lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain,” Granny asks Go

6、d for “a sign,” some reassurance about the afterlife. But “for the second time there was no sign.” Granny Weatherall is jilted once again in a betrayal that is so monumental that it makes the first incident seem insignificant. “She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them al

7、l away.”,II. Characters of the story: Granny Weatherall ( first name: Ellen) Doctor Harry Cornelia (daughter) John (husband) George ( the first child, in memory of the truant bridegroom) Hapsy ( Happiness, daughter, the youngest ) Lydia (daughter),Lydia (daughter) Jimmy (son) Cornelias husband Fathe

8、r Connolly (the priest ) George ( the truant bridegroom),III. The arts of the writer: i. Stream of consciousness technique: A. Porter gradually reveals the details of the jilting through Granny Weatheralls fragmented recollections. In Granny Weatheralls semi-conscious state, the past mingles with th

9、e present and people and objects take on new forms and identities.,In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individuals point of view by giving the written equivalent of the characters thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in c

10、onnection to his or her actions.,Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing a characters fragmentary t

11、houghts and sensory feelings. The speakers thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself).,B. interior monologue: “There was always so much to be done, let me see: tomorrow.” P.78 “ Come in, children, dont stay out in the night air.” P.81 “God, for all m

12、y life I thank Thee. Without thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail Mary, full of grace.” P.81 Can you find more examples like these? What is the function of the direct and indirect interior monologue?,ii. Irony: A. Grannys refusal to admit her disease, being seemingly strong ( She had reall

13、y been very strong in her earlier years.) B. Not realizing her coming death ( In fact, she once faced death when she was sixty, but this time, she did not know death was really coming.),C. Twice being jilted George left her at the wedding, with the cake and guests, and Granny never let go of the mem

14、ory. This memory is what dominates her thoughts as she nears death. At the end of the story as she asks God for a sign and doesnt get one, she feels that now God has jilted her. She blows out the light, and her life and the story are over.,iii. Symbol: the name Weatherall the title : “The Jilting of

15、 Granny Weatherall”, why not “The Dying of Granny Weatherall”? Can you find any other symbols?,IV. The coming of the story: Katherine Anne Porters story, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall was first published in transition magazine in February, 1929. The story, concerning a dying womans memory of bein

16、g left at the altar on her wedding day and her current fear of being jilted in a similar manner by God, was subsequently collected in Porters first published book, Flowering Judas.,She has said that the character of Granny Weatherall was based on her own grandmother and that the story was the first

17、of many of her works to be inspired by her Texas roots. Porters often fragile health may have also influenced the story. In 1918, she nearly died of influenza; funeral arrangements had been made and her obituary written.,In her autobiography, Porter stated that the experience made her different from

18、 others: I had what the Christians call the beatific vision, and the Greeks called the happy day, the happy vision just before death. Such experience may have led her to explore that moment of death in her fiction, a moment in which Granny Weatherall feels that her body is a deeper mass of shadow in

19、 an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up.,Nevertheless, the story has remained popular since its publication for the complexities and ambiguities inherent in its stream-of-consciousness narrative and for its carefully drawn portrait of a Southern matriarch confronting