The grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor is a mean-spirited, self-centered woman who is focused on proving her superiority. For example, she entreats her son, Bailey, to go to Tennessee so that she can visit her relatives, while she is indifferent to the desires of Bailey and his wife and children to go to Florida.
While traveling with Bailey and his family, the grandmother pins a bunch of cloth...
The grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor is a mean-spirited, self-centered woman who is focused on proving her superiority. For example, she entreats her son, Bailey, to go to Tennessee so that she can visit her relatives, while she is indifferent to the desires of Bailey and his wife and children to go to Florida.
While traveling with Bailey and his family, the grandmother pins a bunch of cloth violets with a sachet on her dress to keep up her public appearance as a "lady." As O'Connor writes, "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." However, the grandmother is not a lady in the true sense of being a moral person. When she drives by a poor African-American child on the road without any pants, she says, "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" She is insensitive, as she doesn't care that the child has no pants and is only imagining how he'd look in a picture she could paint.
In her self-centered way, the grandmother insists that the family visit a plantation with a secret panel, and, driving there, the family has an accident and encounters the Misfit, a killer on the loose. Even as the Misfit shoots the rest of the family, the grandmother, without showing any grief for the loss of her loved ones, continues to beg for her life in the ultimate example of self-centeredness.
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