Moral Blindness In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

The Southern Gothic genre of literature portrays the moral blindness of the South in the past, or through a specific era. There are five themes of Southern Gothic which include; Being an Outsider, Unrequited Love, Violence, Good vs. Evil, and Race/Class/Social Structure. A few of the traits that you can add to the theme, are disturbed personalities, macabre situations, and moral blindness. Throughout this unit of Southern Gothic there were three stories that were apart of this genre. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor was the first. The second was “The Possibility of Evil” written by Shirley Jackson. Lastly, was “A Rose for Emily”, whose author was William Faulkner. The traits throughout the story were portrayed through the different character types, and settings of the story.
The first trait of a disturbed personality is present as The Misfit kills the kids right in front of the grandmother with no care and no mercy. This scene also depicts the trait of a macabre situation as The Misfit and his crew gun down the family. Next, Shirley Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil”, tells the story of an elderly lady that thinks her job is to keep her town away from evil, however, in the end she gets more than what she bargained for. The disturbed personality in this story is the one of Miss Strangeworth as she assumes it is her prime duty to keep evil out the town like she is some sort of angel. In the town that Miss Strangeworth lived in, the residents looked up to her only because she was more affluent than them. For them she was a town mayor and