The Grandmother In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor depicts a contemporary society, in which the characters’ behaviors are terribly like those habits and attitudes of the real-world, with citizens who attempt to live their lives not only under the precepts of ethics and morals, but to live according to the principles of human dignity. The main character of the story, the Grandmother, wishes to see this moment of death postponed indefinitely, as any other human being does, however her behavior reveals how alienated she is from the real world. The unnamed grandmother is a fussy, manipulative, ridiculously old-fashion Southern matron. She is living proof of calcified Southern womanhood. Grandmother is obsessed with the outward appurtenances of

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at one that she was a lady”. Not only is she obsessed with her appearance, but her view on the world is absurdly limited that she assumes everyone is equally superficial. She claims that anyone can infer her status from the flowers pinned on her, even if she was a corpse. The offspring often reject or ridicule her pretensions. Her family disdain prompts the grandmother to continually invoke a vanished age of better manners and not the entrenched Jim Crow Era Southern attitudes. When faced with the murder of her whole family by the Misfit’s accomplices, the old woman continues to cling to her characteristic comical snobbishness, attempting to flatter The Misfit’s vanity by exclaiming, “I know you’re a good man. You don’t look like a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from good people.” She thus subjects The Misfit to the same absurd superficial duality of niceness vs commonness to which she has always held everyone. She tries to manipulate him again by entreating him to pray to Jesus which is another facet of manipulation rather than a plea arising from faith. After