Monday, July 27, 2009
Assignment #11 "A Good Man Is Hard To Find"
This story was difficult to understand and I could not figure out what O'Connor was trying to show with her choice of characters. We have the grandmother that tries to stay very "old" by wearing white gloves and such, much like women did in the 50's and 60's. I believe this is trying to show innocence or friendliness. The two children are also very rude and have no manners; I think O'Connor was trying to show the generation gap between the children and the grandmother and how people are becoming less and less friendly to each other. The grandmother also brings in the white perception of african-americans when she is quoted saying how after they saw the african-american with no pants, she says that they probably don't have them because they can't afford things like the white people can. I believe the Misfit plays the grotesque character, he is not necessarily deformed or anything but jus the way the character carries himself and his acitons make him grortesque.
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The grandmother is the ideal and best representation of an old southern lady from the antebellum. Southerners believed blacks to be god made inferior to white and whites to be above them because whites are the image of God and were places to be watchmen over creation and all it inhabitants, people of color. The believed it was their duty to govern the blacks into some civilized society and the grandmothers is a women with the exact mindset whom when she sees the "pygmey" African-American child she is showing her mindset that is stuck in old southern racisism
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that the grandmother is portrayed as the ideal Southern belle, or at least the old-fashioned ideals of what a Southern lady should be. However, I also think that the ending showed a lot about what Flannery O' Connor was trying to say about society. The twist at the end reveals that the Misfit is in fact the son of the grandmother. Obviously the grandmother must have done something dark and "un-ladylike" in her past in order to make her son turn out so dark. Maybe O'connor was trying to say that the role of females in society was just a facade, that they really had much more depth; they weren't as innocent as people beleived.
ReplyDeleteI like how you compared the grandmother and her traditions to the younger kids. I think the author hit it dead on. Even though I'm part of the younger generation, we are definitely not as nice or as caring as people used to be back in the day.
ReplyDeleteI think it is interesting the play on teh generation gap aswell... I have noticed it is usually the older characters that are grotesque and i think that it can be argued that the grandmother in this story could even be grotesque because of her ignorance and unappealing qualities yet she is somehow endearing.
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