Yes, Ellen Weatherall
has persevered through a great many difficult times. When she is sending Doctor Harry away at
the beginning of the story, she talks about "pull[ing] through milk-leg and double
pneumonia" even before he was born, some forty years prior. The narrator also describes
how, when she was sixty, Ellen thought that she was "very old, finished" and made
plans to die. However, it turns out that this was "just a notion like a lot of other
things," and it helped her "get over the idea of dying" for quite a long time
afterward. "Now she couldn't be worried" about death. She certainly persevered through
that "notion."
Ellen gets somewhat irritated by her daughter,
Cornelia, because she feels that Cornelia "remind[s] her every minute" that she is
old. Ellen considers how her other children drive long distances to seek her advice about their
children or their businesses and wishes Cordelia would think of her as more capable. Ellen
thinks of her long-dead husband, John, and how she raised their children by herself how she
"fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself." Ellen "[sat] up
nights with sick horses and sick Negroes and sick children and hardly ever [lost] one." She
persevered grandly through the loss of her husband and managed the responsibilities of both
husband and wife, farm and children. Even now, on her deathbed, she makes plans for tomorrow and
the things she wants to accomplish before she dies. Finally, she seems to recall being left at
the altar, being jilted by her first fianc©, George. Her "Wounded vanity" compelled
her to move on, to persevere and to make a good life for herself. Now, she wishes she could tell
him that her life was "Better than [she] hoped for even." Perseverance seems to have
been the story of her life.
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