Thursday, July 4, 2013

Is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" a feminist work??

It would be difficult to define "Good Man is Hard to Find" as a feminist work. First, the central female character, the Grandmother, is not a feminist figure. She continually defines herself as a "lady" throughout the story, an anti-feminist term that implies that she is more delicate than a man. She wears a navy blue straw sailor's hat with a sprig of white violets pinned to it and lace around her collar and cuffs to signal "at once" that she is a lady. In fact, she uses the idea that women need to be protected as the weaker sex as a defense when she realizes the Misfit is about to kill her, saying "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" Then, as if to reinforce the message, she takes out a "clean handkerchief" (what a proper lady would carry) to wipe her eyes.


Second, O'Connor defined herself, first and foremost as a Roman Catholic, and in a 1963 essay, stated that her "assumptions" in this story "are those of the central Christian mysteries." The Grandmother's gender is secondary to the point O'Connor is trying to make: that God's grace is available to everyone, male or female.


It's important to note that a work of literature can transcend or jump beyond an author's intention, but in this case, the story does not head in a feminist direction.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What was the device called which Faber had given Montag in order to communicate with him?

In Part Two "The Sieve and the Sand" of the novel Fahrenheit 451, Montag travels to Faber's house trying to find meaning in th...