Gender Roles In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the author, Flannery O'Connor, demonstrates how a family vacation can quickly face a violent end, caused by a criminal known as “The Misfit.” Looking at the short story through a feminist point of view, one can quickly gather that O’Connor uses the traditional gender roles right from the beginning of the story.
As reading the title, it automatically suggests the men in this short story are untrustworthy, not prevalent, and dangerous. With that being said, the female characters in this story are viewed in the eyes of how a woman should act. With the title stating that a good man is hard to find, it suggests that woman need a man in their lives. In a sense, woman are helpless without a man in their lives and can only survive with the help of a good man.
Gender roles are common to suggest, and for men the roles are known as strong, protective, and superior. As for woman, they are portrayed as emotional, weak, obedient, whiny, and submissive. It is heavily demonstrated that women are reliant on men when O'Connor describes how the Grandmother lives, “Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy” (O’Connor). This suggests that because the Grandmother seems to

Viewing The Misfit as a tragic figure, we sympathize with his actions and feel remorse for who he has become. The readers see him as a victim and sympathize for his actions, including killing the elderly Grandmother. Although he is an awful person, because he is a male character, it is acceptable for him to have issues, but it is not acceptable for a woman to have any sort of issue. As the Misfits says, “She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor), this suggests that the Grandmother was an awfully annoying woman, but if she had a man there to keep her in line, she would have been a decent