Pride, Prejudice, and Redemption

Pride, Prejudice, and Redemption

Although the traits of pride and prejudice are a classic combination that will likely bring to mind Jane Austen before Flannery O’Connor, the latter incorporates the catchy characteristics within her writing just as adeptly as the former. Within A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor demonstrates a keen understanding of the pride and prejudice in human nature and personifies those characteristics in the protagonist of her story. The grandmother--or the old lady, as she is referred to--is a put-together woman who takes great pride in herself and her status. She considers herself to be proper and civilized, in contrast to most of the society around her. She is prideful and she is prejudiced, especially against those who do not fit her notion of good and lofty. Though the grandmother’s moral philosophies are severely handicapped by her petty and trivial nature at the beginning of the story, she is able to overcome her own superiority complex by the end and embody a different kind of “good”--a more virtuous kind--than the one she originally propagates. Flannery O’Connor illustrates through the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find the importance of abandoning one’s pride and prejudice in order to become more like Christ, and ultimately shows that even the haughtiest and most judgmental individuals can still find and receive grace.

When readers are first introduced to the grandmother, they encounter an immature woman whose actions more closely resemble that of a child’s than an adult’s. Though the grandmother is supposed to be the wise, respectable elder of the family, her frivolous nature fails to warrant any such respect from the rest of the family. This lack of regard for the grandmother is clearly illustrated when the family clambers into the car to prepare for the road trip. In the car, she sits “in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her”, separated from the adults both literally and metaphorically (O'Connor 118). When she wishes to visit a house on a road nearby and is ignored by her son, she resorts to manipulation in an attempt to get her way. She lies to the children by spinning a story about a “secret panel” in the house that she wishes to visit and starts the family down the dirt road to their doom (O'Connor 123). However, the grandmother quickly realizes with great dread that the house is actually in Tennessee, not Georgia. Instead of swallowing her own pride and informing Bailey of her error, she attempts to silently compose herself. Her mortification, however, causes her feet to “jump up” and overturn the valise containing her cat (O’Connor 123). The cat wreaks havoc in the car, and they swerve into a ditch. Even after the car accident is over and the family is recovering, the grandmother refuses to admit out loud that she made a mistake, electing instead to fake an injury in the hopes of lessening Bailey’s rage (O’Connor 124). She avoids consequences for her actions through deceit, all for the purpose of maintaining a respectable image.

The grandmother’s inability to admit when she is wrong is most obviously a result of her immaturity, but it holds deeper roots in her prideful nature. The grandmother is a haughty and judgmental woman, prejudiced towards those who do not conform to her ideals. She maintains a proper image and demands respect, even when it is not warranted. For instance, she places a special emphasis on her appearance even when traveling, wearing a large frilly hat and noting that “in the case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady” (O'Connor 118). She considers her outward appearance and what others would think of her more important than the fact that she would be dead, a perverted mindset which is a result of her prideful self-consciousness. The grandmother not only considers herself to be the ideal “good lady”, but also believes herself the appropriate judge of good men on the whole. The Misfit, for instance, serves in her mind as the dark contrast to good ladies and gentlemen such as herself and Red Sammy, the owner of a restaurant they pass through. Red Sammy notes pointedly that “a good man is hard to find” in this day and age, and the grandmother wholeheartedly agrees (O'Connor 122). The two reminisce on “better days” and gripe about how “people are certainly not nice like they used to be”, both in mutual agreement that they are the remnants of a bygone era in which people practiced basic decency (O'Connor 122). Yet, at the same time, they’re both rude and scornful towards Red Sammy’s wife without even realizing their own lack of empathy. They fail to realize that their judgments are shallow, or that their definition of “good” lacks real moral value. They deem themselves judge and jury of who’s good and who’s not, all the while sitting on their hypocritical high horse of supposed-propriety. Never once does the grandmother turn to look within herself and see the blatant hypocrisy that she practices, but she instead lets her judgment befall others.

The grandmother’s facade of superiority falls away, however, when she is stripped of her title as a lady and thrown face-to-face with the man she has demonized for the entire story: the Misfit. After the accident, the family stumbles out of the overturned car with great difficulty. The grandmother’s hat, which once represented her pride and status, now has a “broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side” (O'Connor 125). As the hat breaks apart, the grandmother’s preconceived notions of good and bad begin to chip away along with her judgmental mindset. Despite her initial prejudice towards the Misfit, once seeing the man in person, she holds out hope that he would respect her as a “good man” should. She claims that he “wouldn’t shoot a lady” and that he has to have “come from nice people”, still trying desperately to fit him into her own conception of “good” in order to save her own life (O'Connor 132). 

Only when her entire family has left her and she finally collapses onto herself, hat falling to the ground, is she able to finally see the Misfit without her previous judgmental lens. She observes that he is near the point of tears and reaches out to him, calling him “one of [her] babies” (O'Connor 132) in a moment of clarity. The man who has served as the antithesis to her moral standards for so long is simply a broken, hopeless boy, and as her “head clear[s] for an instant,” she finds it within herself to offer him grace and acceptance that she’d previously withheld from those around her (O'Connor 132). It is essential to note that it does not benefit her to extend grace to the Misfit at this point, and it doesn’t bring her family back from the dead. The grandmother does not reach out to the Misfit because it offers her a chance at survival, either. Rather, she does it because she is gripped by a compassion that she could not understand until she abandoned all of her previous pride and prejudice. By offering the Misfit--a heinous murderer and the killer of her family--grace and forgiveness, the previously morally deficient grandmother demonstrates compassion and understanding that she has never exhibited before.

Throughout A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor creates a character in the grandmother who is unlikeable and selfish, haughty and manipulative. The grandmother is the personification of pride and prejudice, so concerned with condemning others that she never considers her own moral deficiencies. However, by the end of the story, O’Connor proves that everyone, no matter how flawed and sinful, can both receive and offer grace. Judgment is not the place of man, and once the grandmother recognizes this, she is able to truly embody the “good” she thought she already was. Instead of considering herself superior to men such as the Misfit, she relinquishes her pride and extends an olive branch to a man just as broken as she is. Although her selfless mercy is rejected when the Misfit shoots her, he is deeply disturbed by the lack of pleasure he takes in doing so. At the end of the story, as he cleans his glasses after the incident, he decides that “there’s no real pleasure in life” when you’re shunning grace (O'Connor 133). Flannery O’Connor masterfully spins a story of pride, prejudice, and ultimately, redemption in the character of the grandmother, and demonstrates to readers the fundamental truth that no one is past the point of grace, no matter how flawed.