Choose any of the works in this module and describe the "act" of travel in as much detail as possible. Why is the travel being undertaken? What are the outcomes?

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia. She studied at the Georgia State College for Women, and she won a fellowship to the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa, from which she received her MFA. In 1950, she was first diagnosed with lupus, a painful autoimmune disorder that had killed her father and would trouble her for the rest of her brief life. Her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952, and her first collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955.

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Southern gothic has been described as literature focused on “disturbed people doing disturbing things.” As a genre or a topical focus of some southern writing, southern gothic is characterized by its casts of strange characters, its interest in bizarre or macabre occurrences, and the way it uses these “grotesqueries” to explore social issues unique to the American South. Narratives in the southern gothic tradition tend to examine social and behavioral codes by depicting people who are engaged in acts ranging from the out of the ordinary to the eccentric to the taboo. Incest, murder, suicide, lynching, rape, castration, and insanity are not unusual topics within southern gothic literature. O’Connor’s fiction was deeply influenced by her Roman Catholic faith and by her commitment to revealing what she thought of as “the central Christian mysteries,” or moments of awakening, grace, and redemption. O’Connor explained that she found “violence strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.”

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That the grandmother imagines and represents the past as a safer place is suggested by her introducing the threat of the Misfit as part of her argument against the journey. In doing so, she implies a necessary connection between the violence and criminality the Misfit represents and the journey to the present and future that she doesn’t want to take. In the past, one knew whom to trust because everyone dressed and behaved according to clearly marked social distinctions.

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Meeting with the Misfit comes about precisely because the grandmother has misremembered the past, forgetting that the plantation she yearns to see one more time isn’t where she remembered it to be. The Misfit, the very embodiment of the violent present, is as obsessed with his own past as the grandmother is and also appears as insistent on social “niceties.” In this story, it becomes impossible to draw the lines between a “good man” and a bad one—yet why does the Misfit persist in using the term “good’ to describe the woman the grandmother might have been?

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Students can often identify the ways in which the title echoes familiar laments about the difficulty of finding good employees or servants, eligible husbands, or fit soldiers. The laments all imply that the present is worse than the past. Based on the titles students create, do they seem to believe that O’Connor’s story is endorsing the view that the past was better than the present?

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