This skilled use of ironic prose is also observable in "A Jury of her Peers" by Susan Glaspell, as when the woman who has just committed murder tells the investigators: "after a minute...'I sleep sound.'" the tale depicts how a group of women gradually deduce, through small and simple clues, how Mrs. Wright killed her husband, and why. The women's observations are more astute than the male investigator's analysis, according to police protocols. The point of the story is not murder, but the fact that the murder's quiet wifely desperation has gone ignored for so long, and that only fellow female sufferers can see this sorrow after the fact. Likewise, the point of O'Connor's story, more than the lurid aspects, are the ways that families and human beings fail to connect and communicate with one another, before it is too late.
A naysayer might sniff and ask why use murder as a way of dramatizing a central truth of human life? Firstly, O'Connor and Glaspell use aspects of human reality -- they do not create fiction out of whole cloth. Serial killers exist and so do battered wives who turn on their husbands. By representing the extremes...
Not every reader will emerge with the same answer, of course. Some readers may be shocked, other readers will feel that society is to blame, not the Misfit or the women. But fiction allows an author to temporarily suspend judgments about characters, and present issues of human existence beyond the facts, like a news story must. These stories are not politically incorrect, for it is not politically incorrect to think and to question one's assumptions. The only political correctness is to take the ethical standards of society for granted.
Works Cited
Glaspell, Susan. "A Jury of her Peers." 6 May 2007. http://www.learner.org/exhibits/literature/story/fulltext.html
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." 6 May 2007. http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.html
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." 6 May 2007. http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html
