Where the Woods Gape Like a Dark Open Mouth and Pretense Falls Away
“She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
– The Misfit
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Historical and Literary Context
A Good Man Is Hard to Find was first published in 1953 in the collection of the same name. O’Connor wrote it during the post-World War II era and the early Cold War period, a time of significant social change in America, and in the South. The 1950’s saw the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, and the traditional Southern way of life that the grandmother represents was beginning to face core challenges.
Several themes preoccupied O’Connor:
- The clash between an old South and the changing modern world
- The superficiality of social niceties and conventional morality
- The disconnect between how people perceive themselves and reality
- Grace in unexpected, often violent moments
The Grandmother’s Arc
Beginning as a self-centered, manipulative, and superficially “good” person, the grandmother’s character arc is central to the story. We first meet her trying to manipulate the family into going to Tennessee instead of Florida by mentioning The Misfit. She’s preoccupied with appearing respectable, wearing her dress and hat so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” Throughout the road trip, she’s judging others while elevating herself and romanticizes the past (“better to be a lady in the old days”), makes racist comments about a Black child, and tries to impress her grandchildren with stories that center on herself. After causing the accident by bringing her cat and then lying about the plantation house location, her self-image begins to crack. When confronted with The Misfit, her superficial Christianity and social graces prove useless. In her final moments, facing death, she has what O’Connor would call a moment of grace by reaching out to The Misfit and saying, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” This is her first genuine human connection—recognizing their shared humanity beyond pretenses.
“She would of been a good woman…”
The Misfit’s final line—”She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”—is one of O’Connor’s most enigmatic and powerful statements. Interpretations include:
- The Necessity of Violence for Grace: O’Connor often wrote about how violence can strip away pretense and force characters to confront reality. The Misfit suggests that only facing mortality made the grandmother genuinely “good” by connecting with another human being in an authentic way.
- Constant Awareness of Mortality: In Catholic thought (central to O’Connor’s work), awareness of one’s mortality (memento mori) is considered essential for spiritual growth. The Misfit suggests the grandmother only achieved this awareness when directly threatened.
- The Nature of True Goodness: The grandmother thought herself “good” through manners and social position. The Misfit recognizes that true goodness comes through authentic connection and recognition of shared humanity, which she only achieved at gunpoint.
- The Limitations of Human Nature: Perhaps most disturbing is the suggestion that most people, like the grandmother, only achieve moments of grace under extreme duress—that our nature is so fallen that we require catastrophe to rise above our self-centeredness. (Prompt)
O’Connor herself said in Mystery and Manners that the grandmother’s final gesture “is not ‘nice’. “It is an action of grace.” And this line encapsulates O’Connor’s unsettling vision of grace which is that it comes at great cost, arrives unexpectedly, and transforms even as it destroys.
Though this grandmother dies with a “half-pleased, half-bewildered” smile, suggesting she experienced something transformative in her final moment, the ending is brutal and one of the most shocking in American literature. At the moment of awakening and transformation, the grandmother reaches out in genuine human connection only to be shot three times. What makes it even more unsettling is how O’Connor describes it: “She half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” That image of childlike positioning combined with the smile and the violence is deeply disturbing. Yet there’s something meaningful in this brutality. O’Connor believed that because most people were spiritually “hard of hearing,” she had to use shocking, violent moments to communicate spiritual truths. Most disturbing is that without facing The Misfit’s gun, the grandmother might never have experienced that moment of grace and recognition.
The Misfit as Dark Mirror
The Misfit functions as an inverted reflection of the grandmother in several key ways:
- Authenticity vs. Pretense: The grandmother lives by social codes, constantly concerned with appearing “ladylike.” The Misfit, by contrast, is brutally honest about who he is. When he says, “I ain’t a good man,” it’s actually more truthful than the grandmother’s lifelong pretense of goodness.
- Religious Understanding: The grandmother tosses around religious phrases superficially, while The Misfit has thought deeply about faith, even if he’s rejected it. His statement about Jesus “throwing everything off balance” shows more theological engagement than anything the grandmother says until her final moment.
- Self-Knowledge: The Misfit knows himself – “I’m worse than him [Bobby Lee]” – while the grandmother lacks self-awareness until her final revelation.
- Consistency: The Misfit lives by his own warped code (“No pleasure but meanness”) and is consistent in this, while the grandmother’s principles shift based on what’s convenient (lying about the secret panel to visit the old plantation).
With The Misfit, the grandmother peers into a disturbing mirror. When she recognizes him as “one of my babies,” she’s acknowledging a kinship she would have denied earlier in the story.
Setting:
1. The Family Car (Comfort/Illusion)
- Opens with domesticity and family squabbles
- The grandmother fully armored in her hat and dress “in case of an accident”
- Description emphasizes artificiality: “Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace”
- The landscape described as pastoral: “brilliant sunlight,” “green tops of trees”
- The grandmother tells stories of her genteel past
Key descriptive passage: “Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady.” This innocent-seeming memory triggers the fatal detour.
2. The Red Sammy’s Barbecue (Transition/Warning)
- First mention of “a good man is hard to find” – foreshadowing
- Red Sammy as prophet figure warning about “terrible accidents”
- Description turns ominous: “big black battered hearse-like automobile”
- The grandmother falsely claims to recognize Red Sammy, continuing her pattern of social manipulation
Key descriptive passage: “The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear him but the grandmother said she would have recognized him anywhere.” This pattern of false recognition foreshadows her fatal error about the plantation house.
3. The Dirt Road/Woods (Reality/Grace)
- Nature dominates: “woods gaped like a dark open mouth”
- Car crash strips away their first layer of protection
- Final setting described in primal terms: “a green meadow that rolled sharply upward”
- Descriptions become increasingly bare and elemental
O’Connor’s final setting indeed returns everything to basics—no car, no buildings, just humans facing each other in a natural setting where social codes mean nothing. The grandmother’s hat, symbol of her social standing, is destroyed: “The brim of her hat was bent down on one side and she stood staring at Bailey with her mouth open.”
This progressive stripping away—from comfortable car to roadside diner to isolated woodland—represents the spiritual journey O’Connor creates for the grandmother. Each setting removes another layer of protection and pretense until she faces The Misfit with nothing but her true self.
Note how the “cloudless sky” appears twice—once when they set out on their journey and once after the grandmother is shot. This circularity suggests her journey is complete.
Symbols of Note:
O’Connor’s ordinary objects take on extraordinary significance without becoming heavy-handed allegory. The hat, glasses, and car are realistic elements that accumulate symbolic weight through their positioning.
The Grandmother’s Hat, “a bunch of white violets on the brim,” worn so “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” This hat represents her obsession with appearances and social status. When the family crashes, “the grandmother’s hat, still pinned to her head but knocked to one side,” shows dignity beginning to crumble.
The Misfit’s Glasses “gave him a scholarly look.” He removes, wipes, and replaces them during his philosophical discussion with the grandmother and they symbolize his intellectual approach to evil—his attempt to “see clear” and rationalize his actions. They contrast with the grandmother’s willful blindness to her own nature.
The Car represents false security and modern disconnection from reality. Its crash removes this illusion of protection. The grandmother causes the accident by secretly bringing her cat—linking her selfishness directly to their vulnerability.
The Old Plantation House is an invented memory with “six white columns across the front” symbolizes her romanticized view of the past and the Southern tradition. That this house doesn’t exist (at least not where she claims) reveals how this nostalgia is built on falsehood.
The Cloudless Sky bookends the story, appearing both at the beginning and after the grandmother’s death. The “cloudless blue sky” after her death, when she’s left “smiling up” at it, suggests a kind of terrible clarity has been achieved. The open sky represents the unmediated truth she finally faces.
The Woods described as gaping “like a dark open mouth,” represent nature stripped of civilization’s veneer—a place where social conventions offer no protection. It’s in this primal setting that the grandmother finally encounters authentic existence.
Exploring the Rule of Three
We are all familiar, after study of Bones and other stories, of the rule of three in The Seven Basic Plots (pg. 229). Three is the final trigger for something important to happen. It’s the number of growth and transformation. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, the pattern is indeed significant and runs throughout on multiple levels connecting to both literary tradition and religious symbolism.
- Three-part Journey: As discussed above, we have three distinct settings (family car, Red Sammy’s diner, woodland road), each representing a stage in the grandmother’s unwitting pilgrimage.
- Three Generations: The family consists of three generations—the grandmother, her son Bailey and his wife, and the three children—creating a complete family unit that will be systematically destroyed.
- Three Groups Killed: The Misfit and his companions kill the family in three distinct groups—first Bailey and John Wesley, then the mother, June Star and the baby, and finally the grandmother alone.
- Three Gunshots: The grandmother is shot three times in the chest, a detail O’Connor specifically includes.
- Three Criminals: The Misfit is accompanied by two accomplices, Hiram and Bobby Lee, forming a dark trinity.
This pattern of three carries significant Christian resonance:
- The Trinity
- Christ’s three falls on the way to Calvary
- The three days in the tomb before resurrection
- Peter’s three denials
- The three gunshots parallel the three nails used in the crucifixion
The number three in Christian tradition often signifies completion or divine perfection. In this story, it might suggest that the grandmother’s journey to grace, however terrible, follows a divinely ordained pattern. Her death by three shots comes after she’s gone through the three stages of her journey and finally achieved authentic human connection.
Prompts: 500-750 word adventure. Only do as you have time/inclination. Not required!
- Recall, or create a moment where catastrophe reveals a hidden truth in yourself (memoir) or your character (fiction).
- Write a story that unfolds in three distinct settings, each one stripping away another layer of your protagonist’s security or self-deception. By the final setting, they should face a truth about themselves they’ve been avoiding.
- Create two characters who appear to be opposites but actually reflect different aspects of the same human tendency. In their confrontation, have one character recognize their disturbing kinship with the person they thought was their moral opposite.
Resources:
Flannery O’Connor reading her own story
Though the speaker, Walter Kirn, gets facts about O’Conner wrong (misquoting the story of her famous quote “If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it,” and mistakenly giving her a disease she didn’t have), this is a modern conversation between two men about the story.
Jessica Hooten opening the conversation about the challenge of reading this story too early:
