Landscape as Death: The Gothic Borderlands of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

    There is an inseparable bond between Death and the Gothic. One cannot speak on either subject for long before aspects and elements of other begin to come into play. Flannery O'Connor deals in both in "A Good Man is Hard To Find", highlighting their interconnected nature, while also rightfully treating each as its own unique thing. By using the landscapes in her story to create distinct borderlands, O'Conner is able to craft a story whose narrative becomes both a literal and figurative journey from Life into Death. The ultimate Gothic roadtrip. 

   A Shadow on the Landscape 

    At initial pass A Good Man is Hard to Find doesn't immediately read as Gothic. A family and their matriarch on a roadtrip through southern Georgia in the Summer, past the "blue granite" of Stone Mountain, the "brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple", the "crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground, and trees "full of silver white sunlights". However just as the family's fate lies in wait for them somewhere in the landscape, so to does the Gothic, both waiting to reveal themselves. For the Gothic, that reveal comes quickly in the form of early foreshadowing. 

(Photo credit the author)

            "They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small            island. 'Look at the graveyard!' the grandmother said, pointing it out. 'That was the old family                burying ground. That belonged to the plantation.'" (O'Conner 613)

    

    This is a key moment in the story. The family has left the city of Atlanta on their way to Florida. Between them lies a long stretch of rural southern Georgia, symbolized by the large cotton field the family passes. It serves as a boundary, marking their departure from the city and whatever safety and comfort it afforded them. They are now in the country, whose borderland is defined by the placement of the family graveyard in the middle of the cotton field as if to draw maximum attention to it. The key defining characteristic of this new land is Death. The grandmother diving the details of those interred hints at both secret knowledge and communing with the dead, frequent tropes within the Gothic genre.

    As the family progresses across this new land, they meet residents who all present their own anxieties about the world around them, focused primarily on the potential presence of a mysterious and dangerous man. As though attempting to run away from that potential the family diverts from their roadtrip, turning off the asphalt and on to a dirt road in search of an abandoned plantation the grandmother has told them about. A house with a secret panel, and perhaps buried treasure, all implied by the grandmother. Secret knowledge and the symbolism of a haunted house becoming the defining characteristic of this third and final borderland, whose border is marked by the departure from asphalt.

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                "The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous             embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for             miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees             looking down on them." (O'Connor 616)

    It is a dark and ominous change from the relative safety of the highway left behind. The roads conditions and its dangers foreshadow worse to come, while the trees looking down on them summons up images of haunted forests and malevolent tree spirits. This is aided by the repeated red imagery, highlighting the Georgia red clay as a symbolic representation of blood all around.

    These two elements continue as death begins to strike near the climax. As red blood is spilled on the red Georgia clay the wind moves "through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath" (O'Connor 620). Here the Gothic haunted forest manifests itself most clearly, as the trees sigh with satisfaction at the spilling of blood at their roots. All alone at the end the grandmother finds, "There was nothing around her but woods." (O'Connor 621), the trees remaining to bare witness to the very end.

(Photo credit the author)

There is no Round-trip in Life

    Flannery O'Conner's A Good Man is Hard to Find is a shining example of the Gothic in Literature, as well as being a pillar of the Southern Gothic subgenre. It accomplishes this not by the amount of Gothic influence it wields, but because of the precision with which it is employed. The landscape becomes synonymous with Death, with the family's journey through it symbolic of our own journey through Life and toward an unknowable fate. From roadside graveyards to spooky forests, O'Conner maps out that journey through the use of borderlands, whose borders and defining characteristics all directly align with themes of Life, Death, and the Gothic. 

Works Cited

O'Conner, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8th ed., W.     W. Norton & Company, pp. 28–40.