With her attempts to leave for Tennessee thwarted, grandmother has primped herself for Florida: “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 highway would know at once that she was a lady.” How the grandmother appears to other people is very important. Her insistence on image and appearance illustrates her comical superficiality and is symbolic of her superficial understanding of goodness. This idea is strengthened after hearing the story of Mr. Teagarden that she dramatically shares with the children while in the car: “The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentle man and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.” Once more money is placed over any real human sentiment. Just as the grandmother thinks first of what she’d look like in an accident and not of other more important repercussions, so does she place money on high, without any mention of loving or caring for Mr. Teagarden-a wonderful name O’Connor uses that is congruous with grandmother’s revealed ideals, while also evoking the fitting images of a high society tea party.
As the family embarks on their trip grandmother hides Pittysing, her cat, in a basket although she knows, “her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a cat.” She does this without once trying to honestly reason with Bailey. She habitually places her wants first, without any consideration for others. Little does grandmother know that bringing Pittysing on this trip will be the first step toward her and her family’s undoing.
While on the road grandmother stopped to reprimand her grandchildren for being disrespectful:
In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a negro child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?”
“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said.
“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little riggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.
The reader must stop and appreciate the irony in which the talented Ms. O’Connor reveals grandmother’s true colors. Just as she scolds the children to teach them how to be respectful and do “right” like people in her day, she sets a beautiful example before them in which she uses two racial slurs, stereo-typifies black children, and undermines the sadness of others going without by making it a matter of aesthetic! This kind of “back in my day” type of decency is tied to being a “gentleman” or a “lady” but isn’t very decent at all. It is becoming more and more clear that grandmother has a skewed sense of morality more tired to class and societal decency than to deeply rooted mores. Her brief encounter with Red Sammy Butts enforces this perception to the reader:
Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?”
“Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once.
The grandmother, just meeting Red Sammy, cannot really know this to be true. She seems to be playing ‘fast and loose’ with the word “good.” It is possible to see Red Sammy as “good” because he was willing to help and trust seemingly decent people. No matter how this is interpreted the grandmother appears to use the word frivolously.
Shortly after the family leaves Red Sam’s the grandmother recalls a nearby plantation she had visited in her youth:
[The grandmother] knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it…”There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found . . .
Another manipulative ploy from grandmother, and the second step in the wrong direction. Instead of requesting to see the plantation, she deceives the children with the excitement of a secret panel and manipulates them into convincing Bailey to make the detour. Moments later the grandmother startles the cat when realizing the plantation was in Tennessee-not Georgia. This causes a huge accident: “The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once.” The grandmother has indirectly caused the accident in two different ways. First, she proposes they go to the plantation and leads them down the wrong trail. Finally, she startles the camouflaged cat- that she should not have brought- into jumping on Bailey while he’s driving. She could feel guilty about a lot. But instead of apologizing, or being worried for the safety of the other family members, her first thought is hoping she’s injured so she can have his sympathy and not his wrath. To that end, she later makes the suspect claim that she’s injured an organ.
A car pulls up to the crash, and out comes The Misfit himself. Immediately the grandmother seals her family’s fate by exposing his true identity. Now grandmother realizes the danger they’re all in and instead of assuring him they’ll tell no one of his presence she manipulatively appeals to the Misfit’s ego:
“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from good people…you shouldn’t call yourself The Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell…you’re not a bit common”
This is so obviously ironic. The Misfit must see straight though her attempted manipulation. The Misfit, an escaped convict notorious for the bad things he has done to people, has the grandmother and her family at gunpoint; still she is trying to convince him he’s good. We’ve already seen the grandmother call somebody (Red Sammy) a good man before, and it appeared artificial. Now she seems to be hoping that she can either appeal to the “good man” in The Misfit, or manipulate him in to believing he is enough of a “good man” to let her go. Her incessant pleas continue; she uses the whole arsenal (class, chivalry, religion, money): “you’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!” Her cornucopia of manipulative tactics is to no avail; The Misfit has killed everyone but the grandmother. True to her hallmark selfishness, grandmother made no attempt to plead for anyone’s life but her own. Her desperation grows exponentially by the second; even after imploring The Misfit to pray and seek help from Jesus, the grandmother eventually denies Christ in order to create solidarity with The Misfit-the ultimate and most manipulative betrayal. We can tell this is her moral rock bottom. O’Connor describes her sinking down –earlier when she was urging The Misfit to pray she was standing above him. This insinuates her faith, much like her conception of goodness, is depthless. Ironically, The Misfit seems to have more courage his conviction than she does.
The grandmother’s last line in the story causes the Misfit to shoot her and can be dually interpreted as her last manipulation or as her only redeeming/humanizing act: “why you are one of my own babies. You’re one of my own children!” There is evidence in the text to argue either side. While uttering her last words to The Misfit grandmother reaches out to touch him, and he “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him”. This is the second time in the story that O’Connor compares the grandmother to a snake-a highly religious symbol used to denote deception and betrayal. The symbol runs parallel with her less than righteous character O’Connor has described thus far. However, it can be argued that the grandmother responded to the lamentation The Misfit conveys about being who he is now. She might have connected with him when “she saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry” becoming compelled to reach out to him one human being to another. The Misfit shoots her three times, an archetypal number often associated with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Surely this was O’Connor’s intended allusion, in that she was a devout Roman Catholic who wrote based on those beliefs. Perhaps the grandmother received the bullets as the Holy Trinity into her- finally redeeming her. This hypothesis is enhanced when O’Connor describes the grandmother’s dead body as: “smiling up at the cloudless sky” as if she were smiling at heaven or God himself. However, it remains counterintuitive to forgive the host of manipulations, primarily because it is clear to the audience that grandmother didn’t have a solid sense of true goodness throughout the story. So it must be asked: why she would have this epiphany of goodness now? After shooting the grandmother The Misfit tells Bobby Lee: “She would of been a good woman…if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life.” This straightforwardly tells the reader that the grandmother was in fact not a good woman. And the only time she might have been confused with being good is if she had a moment like her last everyday, by having someone there to shoot her.
Whether or not the grandmother was good in her very last moment has no bearing on the fact that because of her deceitful manipulation she and her young family are all dead. O’Connor made a point to carefully make known all grandmother’s character flaws though her exhaustive symbolism and her hysterical irony. The grandmother is held responsible, for death could have been delayed if only she had better judgment. Granny’s recipe for disaster in just three (again the archetype) selfish decisions: hide your cat from the family and bring kitty along against their wishes, manipulate the family in to seeing a plantation that isn’t even there, and lastly boast that you immediately recognize a sociopath to ensure he cannot let anyone escape. In the words of the notorious Misfit: “She would of been a good woman…” but she wasn’t.
by
missariellebee (student)
