Flannery O'Connor

Alyssa Achiron

Mark A.Tabone

Themes in Literature

November 13, 2016

Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories generally involve a life lesson towards the conclusion of her narrative. The life lesson that she most commonly conveys to the reader is that people are not always moral citizens, no matter how they appear. O’Connor successfully uses the difference between her characters’ upstanding outer-appearance and their flawed inner realities to emphasize how underneath their socially acceptable facades, many people are immoral or corrupt. Flannery O’Connor uses The Grandmother and Manly Pointer in her short stories, “Good Country People” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” as two characters who seem like upright everyday people, but when in fact they are both very sinful humans who are not who they pretend to be. The Grandmother is depicted as a “southern lady” and Manly Pointer is portrayed as a bible salesman. O’Connor deliberately assigns her characters’ certain roles that society would consider honorable. She does this to point out the hypocrisy that exists in everyday people such as: a bible salesman and a southern lady.  

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” The Grandmother makes a conscience effort to play the role of the Southern lady. The Grandmother defines a southern lady as someone who is delicate, self-deserving, and always “ladylike.” A true southern lady, in The Grandmothers eyes, always makes sure she is dressed as such, “her collars and cuffs [are] white organdy trimmed with lace and…her necklace... [has] a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet” (12). The Grandmother relies heavily on her outer appearance to portray what she classifies as a southern lady, even during a car ride with her family where no one is likely to see her. She goes to these great lengths to seem womanly because “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (2).  The Grandmother has an automatic notion that her outward appearance alerts others that she is a good southern lady.

O’Connor on the other hand, can see right through those pearls and “respectable” outfits that The Grandmother wears for every occasion. The Grandmother’s inner reality is that she is a racist snob. The Grandmother’s racism is evident in the story when she points out to June that “Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” (3). This quote also points out how conceited she is because she claims she is better than the children due to the excessive material items that she acquires. In O’Connor’s stories she calls attention to the fact that materialistic items do not make one person better than another and outer appearances do not matter to everyone. A character that O’Connor introduces, at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is The Misfit who proves to The Grandmother that outer appearances mean nothing to him after he shoots her in the head. The Grandmothers fake facade cannot save her from her inner flawed reality. The Misfit shots her despite her desperate need to hold on to the old southern idea of a true gentleman. The Misfit may not be a gentleman, but he is at least honest with himself and others. O’Connor achieves her goal of proving that in the end, no matter how ladylike or well-mannered The Grandmother pretends to be, she will always remain flawed.  

Another character that portrays morally upright conduct due to his outer appearance is Manly Pointer in the story “Good Country People.” Manly Pointer goes door to door to sell bibles to people and claims to be an extremely religious character in O’Connor’s short story. Manly tells Mrs. Hopewell that he “want[s] to devote [his] life to Chrustian service” (8). This creates an image of a “good country boy” in Mrs. Hopewell’s mind. He calls Mrs. Hopewell ma’am and has exceptional manners throughout dinner. Manly successfully tricks Mrs. Hopewell into regarding him as “sincere and genuine” due to his outward facade that he puts on for her family at dinner (11). However, Manly’s true self becomes harder to hide under his disguise as a religious bible salesman. While Manly realizes he is corrupt in every way humanly possible, he does not care if he is seen as unjust by his peers.