The Jilting of Granny Weatherall quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary movement best describes "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

   • Realism
   • Romanticism
   • Correct answer: Modernism
   • Naturalism
   • Southern Gothic

   Modernism (roughly 1910s to 1940s) broke with straight chronology and explored consciousness from the inside, using techniques such as stream of consciousness. This story, which first appeared in an avant-garde Paris magazine, fits squarely in that movement.

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2. 2

   Question 2. In the opening scene, how does Granny see Doctor Harry?

   • As a trusted friend whose advice she follows
   • Correct answer: As a boy who ought to be in knee breeches
   • As a stranger Lydia sent to spy on her
   • As a famous specialist she cannot afford

   Granny thinks "The brat ought to be in knee breeches" and orders him off like a schoolboy: "Get along now, take your school books and go." To a woman "nearly eighty years old," the doctor is a child, and she will not be managed by him.

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3. 3

   Question 3. What most annoys Granny about her daughter Cornelia?

   • Correct answer: She treats Granny as if she were deaf, dumb and blind
   • She moves the furniture around without ever asking
   • She leaves Granny alone for hours without checking
   • She spends Granny's money freely on her own family

   The story says "The thing that most annoyed her was that Cornelia thought she was deaf dumb and blind." Cornelia whispers at the door and trades glances over her head, as if Granny lived "in a thin glass cage." The furniture option reverses the text: Cornelia "couldn't change the furniture without asking."

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4. 4

   Question 4. Granny thinks, "Cornelia was dutiful: that was the trouble with her." What does dutiful mean?

   • Openly defiant toward those in charge
   • Careless about chores and daily tasks
   • Quick to complain about every small trouble
   • Correct answer: Careful to do what obligation requires

   Dutiful means faithfully doing what one owes to others. Cornelia nurses her mother patiently, and that is exactly what Granny resents: "So good and dutiful," said Granny, "that I'd like to spank her." Being cared for reminds her that she is old and no longer in charge.

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5. 5

   Question 5. When Granny protests that Doctor Harry "just left five minutes ago," what does Cornelia tell her?

   • That he never came to the house that day
   • That he left an hour ago to see another patient
   • Correct answer: That it was this morning, and now it is night
   • That the doctor is staying in the house overnight

   Cornelia answers, "That was this morning, mother. It's night now." A whole day has slipped past without Granny noticing. Because we see everything through her mind, we learn to distrust her sense of time; she is an unreliable perceiver, not a liar.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Who tells Ellen, "Don't let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you"?

   • Cornelia, speaking softly at the bedside
   • Father Connolly, during his evening visit
   • Her husband John, on their wedding night
   • Correct answer: A sharp voice in the top of her own mind

   The rebuke comes from inside: "Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind." No one in the room speaks these lines. It is Granny's own stern self-discipline, the voice she has used for sixty years to push the jilting down: "Plenty of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren't you? Then stand up to it."

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7. 7

   Question 7. The narration slides from the sickroom into memories and back again without warning, following the unbroken flow of Granny's thoughts. What is this technique called?

   • Correct answer: Stream of consciousness
   • Dramatic monologue
   • Epistolary narration
   • Omniscient frame narrative

   Stream of consciousness tries to reproduce a mind's unedited flow, where sensations, memories and present events run together. The fog "like an army of ghosts" or the smoke that "rose up and covered the day" arrive with no signal that we have left the room. A dramatic monologue is a speech to a listener; epistolary narration is told in letters; a frame narrative sets one story inside another.

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8. 8

   Question 8. The story is told in the third person, yet a line such as "Well, and what if she was? She still had ears." carries Granny's own retort in the narrator's voice, without quotation marks. What is this called?

   • Dramatic irony
   • Direct address to the reader
   • Correct answer: Free indirect discourse
   • Omniscient commentary

   Free indirect discourse is third-person narration that takes on a character's own voice and thoughts without quotation marks or a tag such as she thought. Porter's point of view is third person limited: it stays almost entirely inside Granny's mind, and it often slips further into her first-person thoughts, such as "I want you to find George."

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9. 9

   Question 9. What is the name of the man who jilted Ellen sixty years ago?

   • John
   • Correct answer: George
   • Jimmy
   • Michael

   The name comes late, when Granny asks Cornelia to find George: "I want you to be sure to tell him that I forgot him." John is the husband she married afterward, Jimmy is one of her children, and Michael is only the saint she names, St. Michael.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What detail shows that Granny's husband, John, died young?

    • His picture shows a boy wearing knee breeches
    • Cornelia cannot remember ever meeting him
    • He died the day the wedding cake was thrown out
    • Correct answer: All the children are now older than their father

    Granny reflects that "now all the children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if she saw him now." She raised the family and ran the place for decades after his death, which is why she imagines pointing to the children and saying, "Well, I didn't do so badly did I?"

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11. 11

    Question 11. Granny longs for Hapsy above all at the end. What do the story's clues suggest about who Hapsy is?

    • A younger sister who nursed her through double pneumonia
    • Correct answer: A beloved daughter, likely dead, whom she longs to find
    • A neighbor girl who once helped Granny run the farm
    • A cousin who moved away after the ruined wedding day

    The text never says outright, but the clues point one way. In a vision Hapsy stands "with a baby on her arm," turns "flimsy as grey gauze" and says "I thought you'd never come," as if greeting Granny from beyond death. Near the end the words "You'll see Hapsy again" surface, and Granny makes "a long journey outward, looking for Hapsy." Most readers take Hapsy to be a dearly loved daughter who died, possibly in childbirth.

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12. 12

    Question 12. Granny asks Cornelia to find George and "tell him that I forgot him." Why is this request ironic?

    • She wants to spare Cornelia the family shame
    • She means it as a kindly blessing of forgiveness
    • Correct answer: Sending word that she forgot him proves she has not
    • She hopes George will come at last and marry her

    Someone who had truly forgotten would not need to send a message sixty years later. The request proves the opposite of what it says. Then she takes back her claim that God repaid her in full: "Oh no, God no, there was something else beside the man and the house and the children. Something not paid back."

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13. 13

    Question 13. Granny sees "Doctor Harry with a rosy nimbus around him." What is a nimbus in this sentence?

    • A gray cloud that brings steady rain
    • A flush of color from fever or heat
    • Correct answer: A halo of light circling a figure
    • A loose robe worn for church service

    A nimbus is a halo or glowing cloud of light, the kind painted around saints. That is why Granny teases him: "You look like a saint, Doctor Harry, and I vow that's as near as you'll ever come to it." In weather, nimbus can also mean a rain cloud, but that sense does not fit here.

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14. 14

    Question 14. Granny calls the blue light from Cornelia's silk lampshades "No sort of light at all, just frippery." What does frippery mean?

    • Correct answer: Showy ornament with no practical use
    • Sturdy goods built to last for many years
    • A soft glow that soothes tired eyes
    • Costly silk imported from overseas

    Frippery is showy, frivolous decoration. Granny, who "had to live forty years with kerosene lamps," scorns pretty shades that dim "honest electricity." The detail matters: this same blue light later becomes the light she watches shrink and go out.

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15. 15

    Question 15. When the rosary falls from her hands, Granny closes two fingers around Cornelia's thumb instead. Why?

    • She wanted Cornelia to pray the rosary for her
    • She was trying to pass Cornelia the amethyst set
    • She mistook Cornelia's hand for her husband's
    • Correct answer: Beads would not do; she needed something alive

    The text says "Beads wouldn't do, it must be something alive." At the edge of death, ritual objects cannot comfort her the way a living hand can. The gesture can be read as a quiet reconciliation with the daughter she has spent the day scolding.

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16. 16

    Question 16. What does Granny want to send to Sister Martha?

    • Correct answer: Six bottles of wine
    • Her embroidered altar cloth
    • The amethyst jewelry set
    • The deed to the Forty Acres

    Among her unfinished business, Granny remembers she meant to "send six bottles of wine to Sister Martha for her lungs." The amethyst set goes to Cornelia (with Hapsy to wear it), the altar cloth is unfinished, and she has not settled the Forty Acres.

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17. 17

    Question 17. Granny's tidy pantry shelves, her plans for "tomorrow," and her cry "I'm taken by surprise" all point toward which theme?

    • Hard work is always rewarded with a peaceful end
    • Correct answer: A lifetime of order cannot control memory or death
    • Children always betray the parents who raised them
    • Modern comforts make people weaker than their elders

    Granny likes "to have everything clean and folded away," and she believes she has handled death in advance: "She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." Yet death arrives on its own schedule, and the memory she buried for sixty years rises anyway. Her protest, "I'm not going, Cornelia. I'm taken by surprise. I can't go," shows the limits of control.

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18. 18

    Question 18. At the end, the blue light from Cornelia's lampshade shrinks to a tiny point. What does Granny recognize it as?

    • Correct answer: The light that was herself
    • The lamp she lit for her children
    • A candle Father Connolly is holding
    • The dawn rising over the orchard

    Granny lies "staring at the light that was herself," while her body is "a mass of blackness that would curl around it and swallow it up." Light runs through the story, from her memory that "Lighting the lamps had been beautiful" for her frightened children to the final line, where she "blew out the light."

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19. 19

    Question 19. Right after Granny's plea "God, give a sign!" the text says "No bridegroom, and the priest in the house." What does this line connect her death to?

    • The day John died and left her alone
    • The birth of the child she most wanted
    • The day she fenced in the hundred acres
    • Correct answer: The wedding day when George never came

    The line repeats the wedding day sixty years earlier, when George ran away and left "the priest in the house" waiting. Many readers also hear an echo of Jesus's parable of the bridegroom who arrives at night for those whose lamps are lit. On that reading, this bridegroom does not come either: Granny is jilted a second time, now by God, which gives the title its fuller meaning.

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20. 20

    Question 20. How does Granny meet the final grief that "wiped them all away"?

    • With calm acceptance, asking Cornelia to lead one more prayer
    • With confusion, asking Cornelia why strangers fill her room
    • Correct answer: With defiance: she will never forgive it, and she blows out the light
    • With relief, because at last she can forgive George for everything

    Her last thought is a protest, not a surrender: "Oh no, there's nothing more cruel than this—I'll never forgive it." Then "She stretched herself with a great breath and blew out the light." She does not simply fade; she acts, as she has all her life.

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21. 21

    Question 21. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Granny once fenced in a hundred acres, digging the post holes herself.

      Happened

      She remembers that "She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wire with just a boy to help."

    • Granny has already burned the old letters in the attic so no one will find them.

      Didn't happen

      She has not touched them. She plans to go through the box "tomorrow," uneasy about leaving them "for the children to find."

    • Granny asks Cornelia for a noggin of hot toddy.

      Happened

      Remembering the grandfather who credited his long life to a birthday toddy, she decides to plague Cornelia: "Well, Cornelia, I want a noggin of hot toddy."

    • The story names the illness that Granny is dying of.

      Didn't happen

      It never does. We learn only that she once survived double pneumonia forty years earlier; her present illness is never named.

    • Granny tells Doctor Harry that he looks like a saint.

      Happened

      Seeing a rosy nimbus around him, she says, "You look like a saint, Doctor Harry, and I vow that's as near as you'll ever come to it."

    • Granny plans to leave the Forty Acres to Jimmy.

      Didn't happen

      She thinks the opposite: "Jimmy doesn't need it and Lydia will later."

    • In John's enlarged picture on the dresser, his eyes are black instead of blue.

      Happened

      The picture shows "John's eyes very black when they should have been blue," and Granny decides, "For a picture, yes, but it's not my husband."

    • Cornelia's silk lampshades fill the room with a warm golden light.

      Didn't happen

      The light is blue: "The light was blue from Cornelia's silk lampshades." That blue light is the one that shrinks to a point at the end.

    • Father Connolly speaks Latin at the bedside.

      Happened

      As Granny drifts, "Father Connolly talked Latin in a very solemn voice and tickled her feet," most likely the last rites, as her failing senses take them in.

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