Grace and Theology: A Necessary Discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s “A
Good Man is Hard to Find”
by Heather Chandler
D.H. Lawrence asserts in his Studies in Classic American Literature, that “the proper function of a critic is to
save the tale from the artist who created it” (8). While this approach is
helpful and necessary in many works of literature, it is both misleading and
damaging to do so with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A
popular new way of interpreting her work is to look through a secular lens, but
separating her Catholic beliefs and allusions reduces her work to a simplistic
ambiguous tale, molded to suit our own postmodern desires; and, this is
essentially as misguided as looking at Da Vinci’s Last Supper and
refusing to note its religious connotations. Instead, we should look at the
larger picture, seeing her clear intentions and accepting that her challenging
views on redemption and grace are designed to make us uncomfortable.
Catholicism places a strong emphasis on the violence and suffering of Christ,
particularly its association with grace and redemption. In a sense, we cannot
take the Catholicism out of Flannery O’Connor any more than we can expect to
take it out of her work. As she once remarked, “I’m a born Catholic and death
has always been brother to my imagination. I can’t imagine a story that doesn’t
properly end in it or in its foreshadowings” (Sparrow 107). In order to move
beyond the grotesque Southern explication, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is
Hard to Find” demands an existential reading, specifically one that sees beyond
the literary meaning and explores the theological exegesis of grace.
When “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was published in 1955, it was
received with a fair amount of criticism, particularly with regard to its
brutal violence and disturbing characters. A grandmother accompanies her only
son and his family on a trip to Florida, but through manipulation she diverts
their course, and their fate. They encounter The Misfit and his brood of serial
killers and are systematically murdered on the side of the road. The storyline
is harsh, brutal, and severe. Flannery O’Connor uses familiar themes of grace
and heroism, but she does so in the most unorthodox way; her portrayal of grace
seems distorted, but her meaning is clear: grace came to the world violently,
and sometimes the price of salvation is life itself.
The ironic twists O’Connor uses in character names illustrates the
widespread hypocrisy she wants to warn us against. For example, June Star is
the granddaughter, and she is anything but the shining star her name implies.
The grandson is John Wesley, possibly a nod to the Wesleyan preacher, but he
too seems to contradict that suggestion with his blatant disrespect toward his
grandmother. Her son Bailey is
reminiscent of George Bailey from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but he isn’t
anything like the devoted family man of the film. Leaving the main character,
the grandmother, unnamed is both ironic and symbolic. She’s both the typical southern
grandmother we have and adore, and the kind of person we despise. She is
careful about her appearance, dressed in her prim navy blue dress and making
sure her “collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her
neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In
case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the side of the highway would
know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor 277). The grandmother behaves like
one of the spoiled grandchildren, and none of them seem to exude the goodness
their labels imply. The mother who “still had on slacks and still had her head
tied up in a green kerchief” may be dressed like a modern woman but she seems
distant, disengaged, and submissive (O’Connor 277). Even The Misfit’s name doesn’t seem to fit his crimes. It’s
ambiguous, and falls short of the allegory a stronger description might imply.
What they portray and what they are illustrate both hypocrisy and
contradiction. Absolutely none of these
characters are likable. Many feel they all deserve the death and violence that
awaits them; but this view contradicts the divine grace O’Connor sought to
explain. Furthermore, it reveals the Christian hypocrisy she warns against.
Further symbolism illustrating
hypocrisy and grace is presented in the
descriptions of scenery. When the two
children are arguing in the back with the grandmother, she retorts, “In my time
children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and
everything else. People did right then” (O’Connor 278). Just after this
statement she notices a “Negro child standing in the door of a shack” and
thinks it would make a nice picture (O’Connor 278). The granddaughter notices
he’s not wearing pants, but the grandmother just dismisses it as the way things
were. Her ideal of a picturesque scene seems to reflect an emperor without
clothes. She fantasizes about the good old days when things were better, but
here before us is evidence of distorted perceptions. What she wants to see and
what really stands before her are the same kinds of contradictions O’Connor
layers in the story. The grandmother is so perfectly attired in the Southern
costume, and the little black child stands naked before her. She sees this as
picturesque, but O’Connor suggests a more
anagogical illustration. Here is
a representation of the very Gospel the typical Southern Protestant clings to,
but the “least of these” is left unclothed. Here is a reference to Jesus’ statement in Matthew 25:20, where He explained clothing
the naked and feeding the hungry amounted to doing those things for Him. So the
grotesque juxtaposition of racism and poverty on the one hand, and Jesus’ teachings on the other, illustrate the
spiritual hypocrisy O’Connor begs us to see. But the child waves at
the grandmother from the doorway. Kindness is revealed to her through horrific
circumstances, and she continues on oblivious, thinking, “If I could paint, I’d
paint that picture” (O’Connor 287). This scene illustrates O’Connor’s painting
of the gospel through the clothes of the characters. She is clothed in the
righteousness of Southern gentility, but before her stands a sheep, naked; and
yet for her, it is only an image of nostalgia.
O’Connor
also used the scenery to illustrate her main idea, that all people are both
good and evil. As the family drives down the road, “the trees were full of
silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” This alludes to the
eschatological theme encountered at the end of the story. The Misfit was the
leader of this band of killers, the meanest of them all. But standing there
among the other criminals, a spark of goodness was planted. This illustrates a
sacramental view of good and evil, and the power of redemption and grace, which
emphasizes that even the worst of sinners can find grace and redemption. Taking
a secular approach to this story misses both the forest and the sparkling tree.
In “Secular Meaning in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Stanley Renner suggests
that “it seems quite unhelpful to see the grandmother and The Misfit in terms
of good and evil or innocence and evil.” This statement willfully ignores the
story’s main idea good and evil are intertwined within all of us, but according
to O’Connor, so are grace and redemption.
Renner continues to strip away theological meaning and eventually asks
us to view this story as a condemnation of the grandmother, her southern
heritage, her poor parenting skills, and her religion. He would like for us to
find “that the grandmother’s shallow view of goodness is nothing less than the
institutionalized mind of the culture,” and that it is The Misfit that is
fatally entrapped and subjugated “to a view of existence that is enforced upon
him with all the authority of society even though it does not fit visible
reality and is belied by the lives of those who judge him by it” (Renner 129).
He asks us to forgive The Misfit, because fitting into a mold of “goodness” and
a religious culture was too stifling for him, and his only recourse was the
brutal slaughter of the hypocrites that revered such a society.
Renner’s
argument ignores too much textual evidence.
O’Connor did not make the The Misfit any more likable than grandmother.
Both are flawed. One may pretend superiority, but the other demands it through
violence. If we can forgive the
murderer, but not the hypocrite, aren't we taking just the stand that O’Connor
warns us against: That all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God?
She tells us they are both the same. Both are sinners. Both can be redeemed. To
take Renner’s view, the blame is just shifted, and we try the grandmother
instead of The Misfit because she “exemplifies the simplistic, uncritical
religiosity for which the South is well known” (Renner 126). However, as none
of the characters are likable, the story is more about testing our own ideas of
grace and redemption, rather than looking for guilt in either of the
protagonists.
The final showdown between the
grandmother and The Misfit further drives home the connection between the evil
in all of us and the correlating need for grace. After the grandmother’s family is led off two by two and killed, the
grandmother stands before The Misfit, in shock that her “Bailey boy” is gone.
She is positioned under a cloudless sky that also seems to have hidden the sun,
and there is “nothing around her but woods”(O’Connor 287). Light has been
hidden, and only her impending death and The Misfit loom before her. His
drawing into the ground with the butt of his rifle and the tip of his shoe
seems to allude to Christ standing before the woman at the well, drawing in the
sand. The questions both Christ and The Misfit ask are essentially the same.
Christ asks who was free from sin, and The Misfit asks her, “Does it seem right
to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?
(O’Connor 287). This existential question with the most profound Catholic
doctrine essentially asks us, “Who can escape judgement?” The old woman, faced with her own death and
judgement, cries out, “Jesus!”(O’Connor 287). One last time she tries to appeal
to The Misfit’s honor, saying he has good blood. But, as the title of the story
implies, goodness is hard to find. Goodness isn’t in the manners or upbringing
of the children, it isn’t in the way her son speaks to her, and it isn’t in her
ladylike appearance. Goodness cannot be seen in the romanticized view of
Southern culture, old plantations, or the cute little “pickaninny” child
standing in a doorway. And it most certainly isn’t standing before her as The
Misfit. There really isn’t any goodness, and that is where grace comes in.
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor illustrated not only that
imperfect people need perfect grace, but also that grace arrives through a
violent act. It is precisely because we are dealing with a bunch of unlikeable
characters that the need for grace becomes clear. When the grandmother asks The
Misfit what crime he committed, he can’t remember. “I forget what I had done,
lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t
recalled it to this day” (O’Connor 287). Here the grandmother sees The Misfit’s
life in the same light as Jesus’ crucifixion—the punishment does not fit the
crime. The man standing before her faced a “misfit” punishment, and now she
will too. When she reaches out to him, and exclaims, “Why you’re one of my
babies. You’re one of my own children!” she has committed her first act of real
grace in the story. This grace she has received and then imparted has come to
her through the violence of the day. This is seen in The Misfit’s statement
that, “She might have been a good lady if there had been someone there to shoot
her every day.” We might all be good
too, if someone kept a gun pointing at us each day.
Likewise, violence has brought grace
to The Misfit. He recoils like a snake and shoots her three times. The
grandmother’s legs remain crossed
beneath her. This seen cannot be read without acknowledging the religious
significance present in the scene. The snake alludes to Lucifer and the Garden
of Eden. Shooting her three times evokes the Holy Trinity. Her legs crossed
beneath her seem to suggest Jesus’ position at the cross. He is horrified at
the grace extended to him, and reacts brutally. But his own mustard seed has
been planted in this moment. When we see in the earlier passage that the
meanest of the trees sparkled, the imagery suggests that even though it may
look cruel, there is something beautiful about it. The Misfit’s character
leaves little room to be described as beautiful. On the contrary, he is cold,
an embodiment of evil, and seemingly undeserving of love. But grace sees
through this, and in the end, so does the grandmother. She understands that all
of us are misfits, and by calling him one of her babies, perhaps she is
recognizing her own life has given birth to further sin.
The story hinges on grace, and so
reading it as a generalized condemnation of Southern religion censors the very conversation it demands that
we have. In The World of Flannery O’Connor (1970) Josephine Hendin
dismisses O’Connor’s
Catholic worldview as irrelevant and describes her characters as soulless and
her fictional world as one- dimensional, summing up her work as “art of raw
power without depth” (155). When the religious discussion is stripped away,
she’s right- nothing remains except horrific violence. But Hendin dismisses the
very discussion The Misfit struggles with. For The Misfit, it is the most
crucial question. He contemplates Jesus’ resurrection and says, “He shouldn’t
have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then
it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He
didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left
the best you can —by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some
other meanness to him” (O’Connor 288). According to Derek C. Hatch in his
essay, “Wingless Chickens and Desiderium Naturale: The Theological
Imaginations of Flannery O’Connor and Henri de Lubac,” everything, according
to Flannery O’Connor, boils down to
this: “One either accepts the world as transformed by the incarnation of Jesus
Christ or one embraces the ever-present abyss of modernity”(128). The doubt
experienced by the grandmother and The Misfit illustrates the impossibility of
a “simplistic, uncritical religiosity” Renner claims. She stated in a
correspondence in “The Habit of Being” that “What people don’t realize is how
much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course
it is the cross” (Worner). The Misfit understood this, and he angrily states,
“I wisht I’d been there. It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been
there I would of known” (O’Connor 288). This is a passage for both the believer
and nonbeliever. In a sense, it asks us if the Resurrection matters. What is
the cost if it does? Furthermore, if there wasn’t one, can we all carry on with
our lives seeking the kind of hedonistic pleasures The Misfit sought? Had he
known, everything about him would have to change. And it will, because even after
killing the grandmother, he realizes, “It’s no real pleasure in life” (288). To
deny this struggle with faith and its resolution through a violent act, is to
make the violence in the story gratuitous.
I would suggest, then, that ignoring
the discussion of grace, redemption, and the Resurrection in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” amounts to
censorship. O’Connor brings forth important questions and observations about
hypocrisy and righteousness, and challenges our position on who should be
extended this divine grace. The story
cannot be stripped down to modern abstractions. Ignoring O’Connor’s
Catholicism, and more particularly her views on grace, means ignoring the
textual evidence and perhaps more important, it means censoring the ferocity of
O’Connor’s
vision: Grace through violence. It is a brutal and uncompromising stance of
authentic Christianity. The critics that
overlook this, overlook the dogmas and history of Christianity. Flannery
O’Connor referenced this very thing in another letter, stating “This notion
that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the
sword Christ said He came to bring” (O’Connor 411). We do not have to agree
with her, but we should not ignore what she is stating because of that
disagreement. A modern approach that eliminates the discussion of salvation and
redemption does a great disservice not only to O’Connor’s work, but to
academia. Isn’t Renner's stance, that we shouldn't read into the themes of good
and evil in her work, essentially applying his own ideas of good and evil?
Flannery O’Connor uses “A Good Man is Hard to Find” to show us her
distinctions, and we can disagree, discuss, and dissect that story, but what we
cannot do is willfully dismiss the dialogue on religious beliefs.
Works Cited
Hatch,
Derek C. “Wingless Chickens and Desiderium Naturale: The Theological
Imaginations
Of Flannery O’Connor And Henri De
Lubac.” Christian Scholar’s Review 44.2 (2015):
117-133. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
Hendin,
Josephine. The World of Flannery O’Connor. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1970. Web.
Liendard,
Marie, and Charles E. May. “From Manners To Mystery: Flannery O’Connor’s Ti
tles.” Critical Insights:
Flannery O’Connor (2011): 289-291. Literary Reference Center.
Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
O’Connor,
Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Literature: A Portable Anthology. Third
Edition. Bedford St.
Martin’s. Boston. 2013. 276-288. Print.
O’Connor,
Flannery. The Habit of Being. Farar, Straus, and Giroux. Canada. 1979. Print.
Renner,
Stanley. “Secular Meaning In ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’.” n.p.: Gale,
2003.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Web. 27 Apr.
2015.
Sparrow,
Stephen. “‘And The Meanest Of Them Sparkled’: Grace Versus the Glamour of Evil
in ‘A
Good Man is Hard to Find.’”
Flannery O’Connor Repository. We. 8 April 2015.
Worner,
Ted. “The Mean Grace of Flannery O’Connor.” Flannery O’Connor Repository. Web.
8
April
2015.
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