Nesha79
1. Tragedy : In his article “One of My Babies,” Stephen Bandy…
1. Tragedy: In his article “One of My Babies,” Stephen Bandy critiques readings of the Grandmother in O’Connor’s story as a “vessel of grace” arguing that the Grandmother and the Misfit are not that different: “One cannot deny that the concerns of this story are the basic concerns of Christian belief: faith, death, salvation. And yet, if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters…Its message is profoundly pessimistic and in fact subversive to the doctrines of grace and charity….Noting that some squeamish readers had found this ending too strong, O’Connor defended the scene in this way: “If I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention.”…Much criticism of the story appears to take a sentimental view of the Grandmother largely because she is a grandmother… O’Connor said, In her efforts to strike a soft place in the heart of the Misfit, the Grandmother leads their conversation into religious channels. That is, she admonishes him to “pray”…: “If you would pray … Jesus would help you” (130). Mentioning the name of Jesus is a mistake, for it ignites a slow-burning fuse in the mind of the Misfit…the problem is one of faith. He cannot believe, because he has no proof. Therefore, the choice is clear:…[there is] No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl…This is the Misfit’s philosophy of life–nasty, short, and brutish…The Misfit’s anger is the product of a conviction that nothing has value, not even freedom…Unlike the Grandmother, the Misfit has struggled to understand good and evil. His final verdict is relentlessly logical. And yet, surprisingly, their philosophical positions–his by determination, hers by accident–are not so far apart in the end. By his lights, she could have been “a good woman”–if only she had not talked so much. Traveling by two different routes, the Grandmother and the Misfit have arrived at the same destination, both geographically and intellectually. No words could be more shocking, and yet appropriate: “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Indeed he is one of her babies; for her lack of values is his lack as well. Those two faces, so close together, are mirror images. The Misfit is simply a more completely evolved form of the Grandmother. In truth, one of her babies…To insist at this moment of mutual revelation that the Grandmother is transformed into the agent of God’s grace is to do serious violence to the story. It is as tendentious as to decree that the three bullets in her chest symbolize the Trinity. At the end…[the story] descends further into the depths of existential despair…There is a fierce internal coherence to the character of the Grandmother, and it has nothing to do with forgiveness, witting or unwitting.
Question 1: In literature, an “epiphany” is a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or the world. Bandy’s interpretation of the Grandmother’s character makes her equal to the Misfit because he argues that they share the same values: his nihilism (the belief that life is meaningless) is only a more advanced version of her own insincerity and selfishness. Bandy argues that the Grandmother’s declaration that the Misfit is one of her babies is not an epiphany of forgiveness for the man who murdered her entire family, but that she, too, is not a truly good person, but one who begs for her life and pleads with a murderer to pray to Jesus for forgiveness only so she can live. Bandy declares the ending does not have the Grandmother’s forgiving the Misfit, as readers typically seem interpret it, but the Misfit’s epiphany is that he should punish the unfaithful liar of a grandmother for being a hypocrite. Bandy quotes O’Connor’s defense of the ending: “If I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention.” Now that both the story and Bandy’s ideas have gotten your attention, what do you think about the story’s ending? What about both the Grandmother and the Misfit’s references to Jesus? Which reading of the ending do you prefer and why–the one of forgiveness and grace, or nihilism and existential dread (a feeling of discomfort in being alive)? What is your epiphany about the story’s ending and the two main characters?
Bandy, Stephen C. “‘One Of My Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother.” Short Story Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 61, Gale, 2003. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420050919/LitRC?u=22506&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=8094c140. Accessed 30 Dec. 2021. Originally published in Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 33, no. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 107-118.
2. Comedy: In his article “Flannery O’Connor’s Murderous Imagination,” Robert Rea argues O’Connor purposefully kills off the grandmother character as a way of killing off the Southern Belle archetype found in works of literature by such authors as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” ranks high on the short list for most violent finales in American literature. Held at gunpoint, an elderly grandmother clutches her handkerchief and blurts out one last cry of despair: “I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady!” … Leave it to Flannery O’Connor to amuse readers by pumping a granny full of lead, then handing over her pet cat to the man behind the trigger. It is Southern gothic at its best, and O’Connor pulls the whole thing off with deadpan humor…The grandmother hams up her role as a damsel in distress, with the purpose of fooling her would-be murderer into sympathy. Ironically enough, the Misfit, not Bailey, acts the part of the gentleman. He honorably defends her from another man’s insults and politely addresses her as “mam.” To top it all off, he stands bare-chested while exchanging courtesies until his henchmen, Hiram and Bobby Lee, do away with Bailey and emerge from the woods “dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it”…Having the Misfit slip on her son’s shirt is another exquisitely ironic touch. The shirt’s pattern is symbolically important: parrots, known for imitating what they hear, represent the grandmother and the Misfit’s shared tendency to imitate. His show of gallantry is a menacing travesty of courtly behavior, for there is no doubt he is a psychopath on a killing spree….Murdering the grandmother (poor gal, I know) radically revises the trope of the Southern belle as a tragic figure… [this] parodies neither white womanhood nor the Old South. For a writer aware of the towering presence of Faulkner and Williams, casting the Southern belle in a tragic role was an artistic dead end. To make room for her own writing, O’Connor mercilessly ridiculed what authors before her treated with a straight face.”
This semester you will have read several stories with the archetypal (and tragic) Southern Belle character (Emily Grierson in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” as well as Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Maggie the Cat in three plays by Tennessee Willaims). These female characters have more in common with Scarlet O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel “Gone With the Wind” than they do with any of Flannery O’Connor’s female characters (all of whom get their “just desserts” for being racists in the stories “Revelation” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”). And the typical Southern Belle character, known for beauty (belle is French for beauty), is certainly not as funny as the comedic Blanche Devereaux in TV’s “The Golden Girls.”
Question 2: What do you think of Rea’s idea that Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic* tale goes further than other Southern writers because she kills off the Grandmother (and the archetype of the Southern Belle) in a funny way? How does O’Connor pave her own road as a Southern writer differently from William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Margaret Mitchell (referenced above)? How will she be remembered differently from these other writers and their works because she approached the characters in this story in a darkly comedic way to point out their flaws then in less romantic (dreamy) ways to praise the past as other authors did?
*According to Wikipedia, Southern Gothic fiction is about “eccentric characters …in…decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and…sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence…[and] dealt with similar themes of to expose the myth of old antebellum South, and its narrative of an idyllic past hidden by social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions.)
Rea, Robert. “Flannery O’Connor’s Murderous Imagination: Southern Ladyhood in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’.” Southwest Review, vol. 102, no. 2, spring 2017, pp. 168+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A510937085/LitRC?u=22506&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=12560239. Accessed 30 Dec. 2021.
