I would not be able answer my conscience if I did.” She is too paranoid. She tries to control her son by trying to convince him to go on a vacation to Tennessee instead of Florida. On their way she brings her cat along she makes all kinds of excuse why the cat can’t stay at home. Also the grandmother goes to great lengths to dress in her best clothes. Another example of Southern Gothic.
Such as when her son Bailey does not want her to bring her cat Pitty Sing on the trip. Instead of arguing about it she just hides the cat in a basket and brings it anyway. The grandmother then wishes to go visit an old plantation along the way yet knows that Bailey will not want to do this, her solution to this is to let the children persuade him. She tells the children of a house filled with secret panels and hidden treasure, this in turn gets them excited and begging Bailey to take them there for a visit. It is quite clear that through her actions that the grandmother is very selfish thus trying to satisfy her selfishness by manipulating others.
Also, she insists on unnecessarily bringing her cat along for the three day trip though she knows her son Bailey does not like traveling with pets. The grandmother’s badgering takes place in front of the grandchildren and she undermines her son’s role as a parent when she says “’ "The children have been to Florida before…you all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee’” (O’Connor 186). So after all of this “the next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go”, in her Sunday best no less, a clear act of spite because her efforts have not changed her son’s resolve to go to Florida. In his critical essay “Secular Meaning in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'” Stanley Renner says “the grandmother is a caricature of the South, but in the way that her every impulse is tainted by instinctive, unconscious egoism, she is also a droll personification of human nature as we have come to understand it in the wake of Darwin and Freud; she is, then, Reality” (Renner).
For some reason though, we don't quite believe her. The rest of the story shows the grandmother doing more of the same. We learn that Bailey doesn't want her to bring the cat. Instead of causing a ruckus (Bailey's the type who would make a big stink), the grandmother just hides the cat in a basket and secretly brings it along. The grandmother decides she wants to go see the old plantation, but knows Bailey won't
The grandmother is a complex character who believes that her conscience and faith are the motivating forces behind her moral superiority. She constantly passes judgement on others, but has the inability to see her flaws. As the story unfolds the grandmother is conveyed a racist, liar, and a hypocrite. On the road to Florida the family passes by a "pickaninny," boy with no pants, and the grandmother says that "He probably didn't have any" pants because "little niggers in the country don't have things like we do." The grandmother refers to the boy as a pickaninny and a nigger, two terms that are used to racially degrade African Americans, coloreds, or blacks.
Then when she grows up she has a baby and Madame Valmonde goes to visit her and her baby. Armand, being a slave owner when realizes that the baby is not white meaning that Desiree is not white he tells her to leave the house. Desiree feels sad and desperate because of the situation and writes to her mom for help. She tells Desiree to come home with her baby. Later on, Armand burns anything that belongs to Desiree and feels like he doesn’t love her anymore just because the shame she brought to his family.
Nobody listens to her and the trip will end up in tragedy. The writer uses a simple story to show how simple events can have dramatic effects on our life. On the road to Florida they take a side road to look at an old house that the grandmother wanted to see. The father had initially refused to take that side road but he gave up after the children insisted. To gain their support, the grandmother had mentioned the existence of “secret panels” in the house.
Title effectiveness 1. Unstable Situation: The conflict in this story is the grandmother being unloving and manipulative. She always thinks she’s always right and never wrong. Some examples from the story are as fallow: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Baily’s mind” (pg.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a story about a southern family and their conflict they are faced with while driving down south to Florida. Morals are challenged face to face at its finest in this short story when two very different groups of people happen to cross paths resulting in a tragedy. The grandmother in the story consistently uses the word “good” many times throughout the story, specifically when she tells Red Sammy he is a good man and of course the Misfits also. The word good was used for the wrong meaning by the grandmother; Her judgment was poor and unwise which ended up costing her family and herself their lives. People are all different in their own ways, not everyone has the same perspectives on life and moral
The cat symbolizes the things in life that the wife wants but something is keeping from them. The idea of the cat being caught in the rain represents her dreams and wants being put on hold. When she goes out into the rain the cat has disappeared within a matter of minutes. This symbolizes her dreams constantly being pushed away by her husband. At the end of the story the maid brings a cat to the room; however, we do not know if it is the same cat that she saw in the rain.