Granny Weatherall's deaththe absence of sings

Zusammenfassung

Granny Weatherall lies motionless on her deathbed while her mind keeps on running at top speed, reaching the most inaccessible corners of her intricate memory. Thus, some of the ghosts of her past are awakened from their eternal rest and liberated from the graves which have enclosed them in her mind for years. Now they come back to torment poor Granny’s expiring hours. In Porter’s story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” Granny gradually loses not only her life, but also her articulate speech in a process which reverses the linguistic development of children from their immediate contact with the world to their introduction into the symbolic depths of language. The ghosts of George and Hapsy function in the story as references to different moments in Granny’s life when the promise of immediacy was especially alive: George represented a promise of sexual fulfillment which was never carried out in Granny’s life, and Hapsy represented the possibility of fulfilling her need for immediacy through motherhood. Their prominent presence in Granny’s mind while she is dying characterizes this process which leads her away from the order of linguistic articulation into the world of the immediate senses devoid of signs. In Kristeva’s terms, Granny’s speech gradually loses its symbolic function and becomes exclusively defined by its semiotic aspect.