"Grandma got run over by the Misfit
Driving down to our house last summer.
You may say there's no such thing as good men,
But as for me and Ruby, we believe."
-Hunter Joplin, Grandma Got Run Over By The Misfit, Integrity Music, Inc.
Now that I've blown your minds with my incredible song parody skills (just eat it, Yankovic!), I shall now blog on the differences between The Grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Ruby Turpin in Revelation. Flannery O'Connor famously stated that all of her characters receive grace but are not well-equipped to support and nourish it. It has also been said that grace is supposedly "irresistible" but I wonder how well that theory holds out in O'Connor's writings, for these women both find grace but in different ways.
For those among us taking Schuler's Medieval Lit/Lyric Poetry class, both the Grandmother and Ruby represent the archetypical "proud lady peacock", a word which here means they walk along strutting their brightest feathers for the world to see, i.e. they are prideful. Upon hearing that her family will be traveling to Florida despite the threat of The Misfit, she dons her most beautiful clothes and does her hair up nice so that if and when she dies, she'll look like a lady. For Ruby, she is constantly comparing herself to the rest of society and looking as mankind as though they were all in one big layer cake, praising God for giving her her position in life (in public, I might add) and debating whether it would be better to be a nice black woman or what she calls white trash. They both claim to be Christians but it is fairly obvious that they are just a might twisted in their doctrine. Oh, sure, they're nice enough people-Grandma's pretty annoying but she's not a demented heathen and Ruby wouldn't hurt a fly-but everything about their characters, from their descriptions to the way you read them, is very off-putting, mainly because they're supposed righteousness and joy is only self-importance.
They both meet a character that brings them to terms with their true nature (The Misfit, Mary Grace), and here's where the results are slightly different. Grandma contends that she is righteous and pure until her very last moments of life, when she stops making those ridiculous requests for the Misfit to start praying and actually extends forgiveness to him, accepting him as her own child and as a damaged, broken human being just like herself. Ruby, on the other hand, suddenly becomes much more misanthropic and hateful, as though Mary's rage had passed on to her, and the sham of Ruby's entire life appears before her. It is through this existential discontent, and a dramatic confrontation with God, that she understands that she is really no better than anyone else and yet just as beautiful in God's eyes as the dirtiest black woman in the world, and this is the grace that changes her life. Both are different from each other, and yet they're the same; likewise, I am different from these two women, yet I suffer from the exact same thing. We all have the same face with the same fatal flaw, and in need of the same grace.
Thank you for reading, please feel free to comment as you please, I commented on Joy Vigneulle's post.
Just one thing to add: The grandmother stops being the righteous Christian and saying "Pray. Pray.", when the Misfit goes on his rant about Jesus Christ raising from the dead and how he wish Jesus had. Then the grandmother comes to the thought of, "Maybe he did not raise from the dead."
ReplyDeleteIt seems that they were both phony condescending Christians, but they were taken in two opposite directions. With the grandmother in Good Man, I think due to the confrontation, she realized the errors of her ways, and because of that withdrawn from her weak faith. However Mrs. Turpin realizes the error of her ways through her confrontation, but instead of losing her faith, her faith was strengthened. She learned a lesson about the grace of God. That's one thing that I've learned in my adventure at the University of Mobile as far as faith. You can either let a confrontation destroy your faith, or let the trial strengthen your faith.