Visions and Revisions in Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"

In "How I Accompanied Katherine Anne Porter on the Last Great Pilgrimage of Her Life," Charlotte Laughlin recounts a conversation she had with Porter regarding "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." Like most readers of "Jilting," Laughlin was curious about the destiny of Ellen Weatherall. She questioned: "despite all Granny Weatherall's good work, the priest had been in the house the second time and the 'bridegroom' had not come. 'Was it because she had never forgiven the man who jilted her? … Is that why she couldn't go to heaven?'" Porter responded that she did not know where Ellen went when she died, adding that "We all have too much to forgive." After a pause, Laughlin noted that her voice became "nearly mischievous," as she said, "But the first bridegroom had given her plenty." After receiving puzzled looks, Porter clarified: "The baby. She fainted you know" (238).

One of Porter's most popular stories, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" leaves many questions to ponder, among them the identity of the baby to whom Porter refers. In a 1975 interview with Mary Anne Dolan of The Washington Star, Porter states that this "particular story has brought more letters from students and teachers. Hundreds of them in the last 25 years" (181). Indeed, this story has been one of Porter's most anthologized out of her many highly crafted works. However, the version that the majority of us read and teach is not the one she originally published. Even though the later version does not make explicit all the ambiguous parts in the original, a comparison of the first one published with the version collected just seven months later reveals that Porter made significant changes that merit exploration and that somewhat clarify the protagonist's relationships with other characters.

Crafting her story in 1927, Porter first printed the tale of Ellen Weatherall's last day in the February 1929 (fifteenth) issue of Eugene Jolas's transition, the literary magazine widely regarded as the most influential in shaping the modernist avant-garde. Already published in Century, she was still building her name, reputation, and confidence. Most likely, Porter's friends Josephine Herbst and Matthew Josephson encouraged her to submit her stories to transition. Never really a member of the so-called Lost Generation, Porter nonetheless published "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and "Magic" alongside the works of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom went to Paris while Porter went to Mexico. According to Joan Givner, the publication of these two stories in a magazine of international standing marked a turning point in Porter's career: "their completion was a significant achievement because they show that she was at last finding her own subject matter and establishing some control over it" (197). On September 11, 1930, the story appeared in revised form in Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, a slim volume (comprising "María Concepción," "He," "Magic," "Rope," "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," and the title story, "Flowering Judas") with a limited run of six hundred copies published by Harcourt, Brace that established her critical reputation. With slight modifications to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, this 1930 version of the story was reproduced in three subsequent volumes published by Harcourt, Brace during Porter's lifetime: Flowering Judas and Other Stories in 1935, a revision of sorts to the 1930 collection that published all of the 1930 stories and an additional four ("Theft," "That Tree," "The Cracked Looking-Glass," and "Hacienda"); The Old Order in 1955; and the version recognized as the definitive one, The Collected Stores of Katherine Anne Porter in 1965.

Several recent articles read Porter's collected stories in relation to their original magazine publications. In her 2015 article, "Katherine Anne Porter, Magic, and transition," Kerry Hasler-Brooks charts the role of "Magic" in the transformation of Jolas's magazine from a transnational monthly into what Jolas subtitled "an international quarterly for creative experiment" (222). She credits Porter's story for speaking the political potential of patois...