Societal Pressures in O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor shocks readers with her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the tale of a road trip that ends in death for a family on vacation. The work features many characters that represent the piece's main theme: social pressures to define one's image. O'Connor, through this story, displays that forced obligations endanger the sanity of individuals by placing them under too much pressure, and do not serve as a boon.

Throughout "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", O'Connor's characters assign each other roles and assume qualities of each other without ever listening to one another. In the beginning paragraphs, the children of the family, June Star and John Wesley, assign the grandmother the qualities of having a stubborn, strong will: "She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day." (406). By saying this, June Star displays that the grandmother is restrained to a set and expected behavior. Her words reflect the viewpoints of the entire family against the grandmother. The elderly woman must struggle against these if she is to get her way even as she seeks to find herself at a different destination for the vacation. These prejudices have been taught at an early age to these children; it is clear that they permeate the society that these characters dwell in.

Societal influences are a way the characters learn to communicate with the outside world that surpasses all bounds of speech and sign. The grandmother herself knows that, when dressed in pristine white, lace, and lilac print: "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." (407). While foreshadowing the image of her later in the tale, we see that she knows that her outward appearance is most important in the eyes of the world, though she does not realize the weight of this fact until much later.

Richard Giannone wrote in his collection Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love: "The grandmother obviously works out her life on surfaces, a trait worsened by a sentimental moralism that disposes her to the critical animosity she has received." While she is not the only example of such work on surfaces, she is the clearest and most extreme. Her words display her "sentimental moralism" and therefore only compound upon the tendency of her behavior to be illusory and based too heavily in appearances. She has taught her descendents well, still exposing them to her attempts at control through pressure. Against the wishes of the entire family, she pursues her own desires and struggles against them when they protest. She gets her way in the end, though, leading them to bring the cat along on the trip that gets sidetracked and inevitably halted by a criminal who has himself struggled against the pressures of society to follow its rules. Her path of societal struggle and surrender leads directly into the path of a man whose measure balances opposite her. While she has been structured by society and now barely seeks to rail against it, the Misfit has railed against society extremely and now can't find a home within its secure walls.

Once the Misfit comes onto the scene, we see the product of the weighty problem of social blindness. He is a man, crazy or not, who claims that he can't fit his wrongdoings with his punishment, and therefore he can't return to society's system, so he wanders on merely surviving. The family is already trained by the newspaper that the Misfit is a horrible man and should be feared and rejected. The grandmother responds as trained by revealing his identity quickly and loudly while remaining true to her "ladylike" self. Society, which has threatened to strangle the woman through the eyes of her children and grandchildren for railing against it, now seals her fate. Her training to reveal the identity of a madman smacks of a vision of the world in black and white in which she will be rewarded for identifying such a man and there could be no other option. Seeing the threat they now pose to his survival, he has them killed slowly until only the grandmother, his societal opposite, remains.

The Misfit's lack of knowledge in the face of his penitence, has led to a precarious situation wherein he will never find respite though he cannot rest in hopes that he might, someday, achieve it. John Desmond wrote: "The Misfit, then, wants not only to understand the mystery of evil he feels, but also, somehow, to be justified in the face of it." This profound struggle is more epic than the struggle of the family that he kills sequentially. Desmond also wrote: "However, the Misfit seems more interested in personal vindication rather than communal justice." From the text, it is clear that he does not care for the "communal justice" to which Desmond refers, but one must also consider the implications of such justice. If one man could find the justice for himself, would this not grant respite for all individuals in situations such as these?

O'Connor poses a question similar to this by comparing the Misfit to Jesus, but the Misfit shrugs any such comparisons off. Like Christ, the Misfit's punishments do not match any of his wrongdoings. Unlike Christ, however, there was an initial crime that led the Misfit to his punishment, however extreme it may be. He rebukes Jesus for throwing things "off balance." In the same paragraph, we see the Misfit's only attempts at physical justice as he compares them to Jesus'. The imbalance threw him off, and now he has learned nothing but to sign his own name to things and keep a paper record as his jailors do.

In the final example of society's system of branding people through shallow image association, the grandmother's brain - facing death - panics and confuses the Misfit for her son, who is wearing her dead son's shirt. She comments on this and touches him, but the Misfit rejects this immediately. He cannot be allowed back into society and revolts at her attempt, even if it is mere confusion.

After killing her, he takes off his glasses and yells at his cohorts after they mock the grandmother. This one act of kindness for the grandmother and his final words - "She would have been a good woman [...] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" offer a quiet glimpse into the grace that the Misfit may possess. We are never granted a view long enough in, as he sits behind his glasses contemplatively, never letting society in, as he has forgotten how. He has offered her the respite that he so desperately desires. She knew she would be a lady in death, and the Misfit merely helped the inevitable. She would never be denied a trip to Tennessee again.

Bob Dowell wrote: "The grandmother recognizes him as one of her children because she suddenly realizes that her own commitment to good has been meaningless because she lived without faith (without Christ)." Taken from the standpoint of society standing as a barrier to Christ and freedom of will granted by this epiphany, Dowell's words ring true against the argument for independence from society's strangling efforts to control its citizens. The outward examples of the grandmother's status as a lady - her large hat, her gloves, and dress covered in lilac print - are shown as meaningless when compared to her status as a true and independent human being. These items are the shackles that bind her to her role. With her final statement, it is not clear that she realizes anything regarding good. Though she has told him to pray repeatedly preceding it, this is merely her attempts to redeem him in the eyes of the church's societal views on criminals, and not an attempt at grace.

Marshall Gentry, author of Flannery O'Connor's Religion of the Grotesque, would have readers believe that the narrator himself reaches a higher level of consciousness at the end of the tale, citing examples of his viciousness in his description of the family (32). However, the viciousness to which he refers is the only voice the reader hears that is not affected by society's pressures. John Clarke of the University of Scranton writes: "The rock-bed of [O'Connor's] belief was that the perspective on life of most of mankind had become so warped that it could be depicted only through grotesque symbols. Her approach, consequently, is [...] to make the reader aware of virtue's beauty by showing him the ugliness of its absence." (4). The voice of the narrator is closest to the author herself. What Gentry has mistaken for viciousness is merely truth carried out in a way that must be sardonic in order for its rebellious nature to be understood. Gentry also poses that the grandmother doesn't seek out her redemption, as many critics believe. It is clear that the woman never receives redemption, but only uses the tools she has been given by society to paint a different picture for her self-sufficient mind.

Right down to the end of the family, the story comments on the expectation of society to be separated, divided, and classified. The family follows their role, but they die. The grandmother tried to be everything she could, falling into her role as stubborn grandmother and still trying to be a lady, only to die in the clothes that forever mark her as a lady and nothing else. The Misfit never has followed his role, but he lives on at the end of the work, his bloody and human eyes held in check by his metallic, manmade glasses. Nobody wins in this morbid tale: The dead die when they follow their defined role, and the living lie rejected by the system that seeks to define them.

Works Cited

Clarke, John. "The Achievement of Flannery O'Connor." Flannery O'Connor: A Memorial. Ed. Quinn, John J. Bronx: University of Scranton Press, 1995. (1-10)
Desmond, John. "Flannery O'Connor's Misfit and the Mystery of Evil." Renascence 56.2 (2004): 129-137.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce. Flannery O'Connor's Religion of the Grotesque. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.
Giannone, Richard. Fannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Understanding Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Kalaidjian, Walter, Judith Roof, and Stephen Watt. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. (406-417)