Comparison

The Evolution of a Good Woman

Author(s): Laura Mandell Zaidman

Source: The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin , 1998-2000, Vol. 26/27 (1998-2000), pp. 43-51

Published by: Board of Regents of the University System by and on behalf of Georgia College and State University

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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 43

Laura Mandell Zaidman

The Evolution of a Good Woman

In a letter to John Hawkes of 14 April 1960, Flannery O'Connor

complimented his students' grasp of her Catholic way of thinking in "A

Good Man Is Hard to Find"—the grandmother "is not pure evil and may

be a medium for Grace." Perhaps because Hawkes did not teach in the

South, O'Connor did not attribute the students' perceptiveness to their

all having grandmothers who, like her character, "exactly reflect the

banalities of the society"; nonetheless, the students surmised that "the

effect is of the comical rather than the seriously evil." Contrary to the

Protestant perspective, the Catholic viewpoint would allow the old lady to be a medium of grace precisely because she is "imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical" (HB 389).

In fact, this most famous O'Connor story succeeds because it shows that the most culpable human beings may be the most ready for

conversion. At the story's conclusion, the reader wonders whether The

Misfit will transcend being Christ-haunted to being saved, for this

sinner expresses the truth of the grandmother's imperfect life with grim

humor: "She would of been a good woman [. . .] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (CS 133). An

analysis of several drafts of the story proves that O'Connor constructed

the grandmother in stages, revising the characterization from a woman

desperately in need of God's grace to a medium of grace for The Misfit.

O'Connor "wrote by rewriting," yet tracing the stages of extensive

rewriting is impossible because O'Connor destroyed work she did not

want read (Driggers ix). The only extant working draft for "A Good

Man Is Hard to Find" in the O'Connor Collection at Georgia College &

State University consists of two photocopied pages (numbered 2 and 3

in the upper left corner).* The collection also has The Avon Book of

Modern Writing (1953), a thirty-five-cent paperback anthology pub lished by the editors of Partisan Review. The cover describes the book

as a "collection of original contributions by today's leading writers."

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44 The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin

O'Connor wrote Sally and Robert Fitzgerald on 7 June 1953 that she "sold 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' to the Partisan Review Reader,

another of those [fifty-cent] jobs" (HB 59), but she does not offer any further comment. Because the O'Connor Collection does not contain

working drafts of the manuscript, the contrast between the two-page

fragment and the completed versions seems all the more striking.

Analyzing the evolution of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" from

fragmentary draft to inclusion in the Avon collection to O'Connor's

own collection and then into reprints, the reader is struck by the epigraph in the collection Three by Flannery O 'Connor (1962): "'The

dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest

he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass

by the dragon.'—St. Cyril of Jerusalem." This quotation, attributed to

the fourth-century Catholic bishop, curiously does not appear in any

earlier publication of the story. Nevertheless, it serves as a splendid

metaphor for the concept of evil lurking along the road of life, as embodied in The Misfit. As O'Connor explains to Hawkes, "His shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he has done

it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman if he had

been there every moment of her life. True enough" (HB 389). The writer herself thus makes it absolutely clear that she considers the

grandmother to have been a good woman at the end of her life. The

reader can infer from this act of grace that it will be hard to find the

good man in The Misfit as he struggles to know and find Christ.

The process of constructing the grandmother must have involved

countless destroyed revisions. Tracing the evolution of the story starts

with the undated fragmentary draft. The two-page (thirty-eight typed

lines) manuscript begins, "The grandmother was the first one [. . .]."

This opening became the tenth paragraph in the 1955 version: "The next morning grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go" (CS

118). The fragmentary text also has a few handwritten changes. For

instance, O'Connor marked out "valise" in favor of "grip," but returned

to "valise" in paragraph ten in the 1955 version.

Among the many differences between the early and final versions

are those of characterization. Initially, O'Connor named Bailey

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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 45

"Boatwrite" and made him much more aggressive than the emotionally

distanced son who will not even look up from his reading to answer his

mother in the second paragraph of the final version. In the early draft

fragment Boatwrite curses at Baby Brother, "Why the hell did you

bring that goddam rocking horse?" Then, his older son, John Wesley,

imitates his father by yelling in response to Grandma's comment that

Tennessee is a beautiful state, "Like hell [...]. That's just a hillbilly dumping ground." Perhaps O'Connor considered the name Boatwrite

to suggest how the father should keep the family boat aright, not rudderless, but her choice of Bailey is another stroke of genius. As my

student Renae Martin has observed in her model student paper, "Sin

and Punishment According to Flannery O'Connor," bailey is a castle's

outer wall meant to ward off potential attackers, and Bailey has surrounded himself emotionally with a wall to block out his mother's

nagging and manipulation. Unfortunately, when his family is about to

be murdered, he can do nothing to protect them or himself (Martin 111

12). O'Connor's revisions made the son totally powerless; for a man who wears a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots, he is not much of a talker.

Interestingly, Boatwrite's mother is called "Granny" or "Grandma,"

connoting a warmer, more lovable woman than "the grandmother."

Furthermore, in this fragment it is Boatwrite's wife, not his mother,

who appears ridiculously, fastidiously dressed for the family vacation.

His wife wears a purple silk dress, a hat, a choker of pink beads, and

red high-heel pumps. However, in the final version, she is described

as "a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as

a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two

points on the top like a rabbit's ears" (CS 117). To make the contrast

between the mother and grandmother even more dramatic, O'Connor

puts the two in the same sentence in the final version: The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head

tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and

a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her

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46 The F tannery O'Connor Bulletin

neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. (CS 118)

Thus, O'Connor has reworked the characterization of the grand

mother in this final version, making her the one obsessed with the

appearances of fashion—banal, superficial, and all too human. The final version adds this line of dead-on irony: "In case of an accident,

anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she

was a lady" (CS 118). Ironically, an accident does occur, and she as well as the rest of her family will be found dead—but not on the highway because she has so convincingly persuaded the children to demand that Bailey take the fatal detour, and thus she is responsible for

the accident. Her culpability is crucial in preparing for the story's climax, pointing the finger of blame directly at the grandmother. As

if she has not done enough, she seals her family's doom when she

shrieks, "You're The Misfit! [...] I recognized you at once!" The Misfit

replies, "[I]t would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't

of reckernized me" (CS 127). The further irony, of course, is that a few moments before she blurts out the words that seal her fate, she knew

this man's face was familiar but "she could not recall who he was" (CS

126). Moreover, the revision that O'Connor made in the completed 1955

version shows that she wanted the old woman to bear the total blame

for putting the family in harm's way and meeting the dragon. "A Good

Man Is Hard to Find" in the Avon volume (1953) differs from that in A

Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) in one important respect: the road

detour in the 1953 story is taken because of construction, whereas that

of the 1955 story is taken because of the manipulative old woman. She

is to blame for luring her family off the highway on a wild-goose chase,

having told her grandchildren about silver hidden behind a secret panel

in a plantation house when Sherman's troops rampaged through Geor

gia. Both detours lead to The Misfit, Hiram, and Bobby Lee, but the

significance of O'Connor's revision is that now the grandmother is even more responsible for their fate. In the introduction to his casebook on this story, Frederick Asals comments briefly upon this essential difference between the two versions and notes the

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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 47

grandmother's culpability for the detour in the revision (4). However,

Asals offers no further analysis and no mention of the two-page draft.

To be more specific about how O'Connor rewrote this crucial detour scene, we look at both stories after the family leaves Red Sammy's Tower restaurant. Paragraph forty-five of the 1953 version

begins the same as the 1955 final draft: "They drove off again into the

hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke herself up

every few minutes with her own snoring." However, in the next sentence after the words "Outside of Toombsboro," the 1953 version

reads, "the highway was being paved and they had to detour on a red

dirt road" (Avon 191), whereas the 1955 version reads, "she woke up

and recalled an old plantation [. . (CS 123). As the old woman "craftily" weaves her tale about the hidden family silver, she entraps

herself and her family in a web of deceit. They are easy prey for the

dragon waiting "by the side of the road."

Reworking the story for the 1955 publication, O'Connor explains

this detour from the highway—which is a significant detour in charac

terization—by adding fifty-two lines of richly realistic details, with the

grandmother's nagging, John Wesley's yelling and kicking, June Star's

whining, and even the baby's screaming. The words "They turned onto the dirt road and" mark the end of this addition to the 1953 version

(Avon 191). O'Connor seamlessly merges the revised passage into the

words "the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust." She then

adds another rewritten passage to create the accident scene.

Both versions have the grandmother recalling earlier times and

describe the landscape; both use the words "then the next minute, they

would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them" (Avon 191; CS 124). But the final version reveals more

revision in the section preceding the accident. The 1953 version blames the sharply curving, uneven road for the valise falling over and

the hidden cat jumping out: "The grandmother's big black valise was

shaken from its place in the corner. The old lady gasped, remembering

the cat for the first time. The newspaper top she had over the basket

rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing sprang onto Bailey's shoulder" (Avon

191). However, the 1955 version adds, "'This place had better turn up

in a minute,' Bailey said, 'or I'm going to turn around"' (CS 124). This

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48 The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin

version includes nine more lines here, detailing how the grandmother

gets a "horrible thought" that makes her feet jump up and upset the

valise, thus freeing the snarling cat. Once again, the revision reaffirms

the grandmother's guilt. Both versions have much the same wording

about the accident, but O'Connor adds, "The horrible thought [the grandmother] had had before the accident was that the house she had

remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee" (CS 125).

Despite her sudden epiphany, she does not share the knowledge with

her family, and her "horrible thought" leads to horrible consequences.

Whereas the grandmother is clearly constructed as an imperfect

woman by this final version, in the early fragmentary draft O'Connor

might have been considering the mother as the more fallible one to

have the final confrontation with The Misfit. She certainly seems a

likely contender as she dresses like a would-be Hollywood stage mother and reads Screen Mothers and Their Children. Because

O'Connor had in her library a first edition copy of Nathanael West's

The Day of the Locust (1939), West's image of Mrs. Loomis, an overbearing stage mother in Los Angeles, immediately comes to mind.

Another image is that of her not-so-adorable son Adore, provocatively

singing the sexually suggestive "Mama Doan Wan' No Peas"; West describes the would-be child movie star this way:

"His singing voice was deep and rough and he used the broken groan of the blues singer quite expertly [...]. He seemed to know what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks writhed

and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain." (107-08) This characterization must have struck O'Connor as perverted in much

the same way as her writing about an absurd, but perversely amusing

newspaper item she had read of—a "crimped and beribboned seven year-old" singing the popular blues song "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

to win an amateur contest (Fitzgerald xi).

The early two-page draft also offers a fascinating insight about the

only family member to survive the massacre. Granny does not hide

Pitty Sing (O'Connor stays firmly committed to this name) in the fragment draft. The cat awakens from a nap, jumps into the front of the

car, and causes Boatwrite to swerve into a ditch. Pitty Sing is a "large

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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 49

grey-striped cat with a yellow hind leg and a big solid white face"; in

the final draft O'Connor describes the cat as "gray-striped with a broad

white face and an orange nose—clinging to [Bailey's] neck like a caterpillar" (CS 124-25). Also the fragment gives the cat an aloof, almost hostile personality: "Granny thought that she was the only person in the world that he really loved but the truth was he had never

looked farther up than her middle and he didn't even like other cats."

In the revision, she defies Bailey's authority (he does not like bringing

the cat to a motel) by sneaking Pitty Sing into the hippopotamus-head valise because she thinks "he would miss her too much" and because

"he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself" (CS 118). Thus, O'Connor has again sharpened her focus to make the grandmother more culpable.

Still another example of O'Connor's re-visioning of the grand mother appears right after the accident. In the two-page draft Pitty

Sing jumps snarling onto Boatwrite, whose shoulders "[snap] above his head" as the car nose-dives into a red embankment. The draft

continues, '"Count the children, count the children!' Granny screamed

for her first thoughts were always for others." In stark contrast is the

image in the final version of the self-absorbed, manipulating old woman: "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" (CS 125). Although it is only her hat that is broken, she tries

to get attention and sympathy by complaining that she has injured an

organ. Everyone ignores her. The 1953 version differs in other interesting ways. Surprisingly,

the word not is omitted at a most crucial point. As the grandmother

pleads for her life, the passage erroneously reads, '"Jesus, you ought to

shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've got!'" (Avon 198). Did O'Connor ever read the published story word for word to see this glaring editorial mistake? We have no way of knowing. Another (presumably intentional) difference at the end of the story cleverly humanizes The Misfit after the cold-blooded murders. The 1953

version reads, '"Take her off and throw her where you thrown the others,' he said" (Avon 199); however, the 1955 version adds that he

"[picked] up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg" (CS 133).

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50 The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin

Consequently, the reader considers the possibility, however remote, of

The Misfit's becoming a good man by the end of his life.

The Avon version of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" appeared a year after Wise Blood, so it is intriguing to compare how O'Connor

handles the theme of the human spirit under construction in both works, particularly as she shapes her vision of the grandmother. Coincidentally, Wise Blood precedes "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in

the 1962 collection Three by Flannery O'Connor, so the two works invite comparison. Two pages before the end of Wise Blood Haze Motes lies "in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction project" {Three 125). Indeed, both Motes—"honest-to-Jesus blind man" (Three

117)—and the Christ-haunted Misfit are abandoned projects under construction. Motes, having seen beyond his own limited existence,

chooses not to see anymore, whereas The Misfit takes off his glasses

and cleans them to see more clearly, leaving his eyes "red-rimmed and

pale and defenseless-looking" (CS 132-33). Furthermore, before his

conversion, Motes declares, "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified" (Three 64), and The Misfit needs a good car to continue the

escape. Indeed, The Misfit suffers the existential dilemma of whether

he can believe without seeing Christ's miracles, but he seems to be moving toward the need for God's grace. Motes clears the motes from

his eyes and dies at home with the old landlady, and the grandmother

sees clearly when she touches The Misfit just before she dies smiling.

O'Connor's brilliant "re-visioning" of the manipulative grand mother makes the old woman more responsible for the family's trag

edy, yet The Misfit brings her to a state of grace. The reader gains more

insight into O'Connor's writing process by tracing the grandmother's

evolution—from being a vain, manipulating hypocrite to being a good

woman—and following the story's evolution from the fragment to the

1953,1955, and 1962 versions. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" proves that, like human beings, stories are merely works under construction.

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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 51

Works Cited

* Permission to quote from the two unpublished pages of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is granted by O'Connor's literary executor, Robert Giroux, and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The quotations are ©2000 by the Estate of Flannery O'Connor.

Asals, Frederick, ed. Introduction. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find. " Women Writers: Text and Contexts Series. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers UP, 1993. Driggers, Stephen G., and Robert J. Dunn, with Sarah Gordon. Introduc

tion. The Manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor at Georgia College. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.

Fitzgerald, Sally, ed. Introduction. The Habit of Being. Letters of Flannery O 'Connor. New York: Farrar, 1979.

Martin, Renae. "Sin and Punishment According to Flannery O'Connor." "A Good Man Is Hard to Find. " Ed. Laura Zaidman. Harcourt Brace

Casebook Series in Literature. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1999.

O'Connor, Flannery. Undated fragment of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Flannery O'Connor Collection. Georgia College & State Univer sity.

—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Avon Book of Modern Writing. Ed. William Phillips and Philip Rahv. New York: Avon, 1953. 186 99.

—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1971. 117-33.

—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Three by Flannery O'Connor. New York: New American Library, 1962. 128-43.

—. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. New York: Farrar, 1979.

West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962.

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