A Good Man Is Hard To Find Feminist Analysis

Throughout early history, women have always been viewed as inferior and as modern society challenges these ideas, women are recognizing when they are being treated poorly. The feminism theory focuses on the role of women in society and how the world is affect/unaffected by their presence. In Barn Burning, Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been, and A Good Man is Hard to Find, the men continually display their superiority over women through fear tactics. Men have an overpowering psychological impact on the women in all three stories by prying on the women’s weaknesses and putting them in inferior psychological standings.

In Barn Burning, Faulkner does not give great detail to the female characters. Abner’s wife, the mother, remain nameless. …show more content…
In the end of the story, the grandmother redeems herself at the barrel of a gun held by a violent criminal. The ending of the story suggests that for a women to be able to redeem herself, she needs a man. This story casts the grandmother as being a crazy, delusional and an emotional wreck who must depend on her male child to get by. The grandmother is a very proper lady who demonstrates the idea that women are something to be looked at as she dressed in elaborate southern lady-like clothing simply to sit in a car through a road trip. Much like Barn Burning, all the women in A Good Man is Hard to Find remain nameless. The names are reserved for the men. Even the Misfit’s companions have names though they only briefly appear in the story. The grandmother and the mother have been in the story the entire time and they do not have the privilege to be named. After Bailey is shot, it is portrayed that the mother willingly goes into the woods to be shot with nor protest or fight. This portrays her as a submissive woman to the men. It can be said that she does this because she’s so terrified of the men (they did just kill her husband, after all), or it could be said that she does this because she is so dependent upon Bailey that she feels as though she cannot live without him. She abandons her children to face her death. While all of this is happening the grandmother does not defend her son, daughter-in-law, or her young grandchildren. She’s too concerned with trying to make the misfit pity her in order to save herself. When the misfit finally murders the old woman, he says she would have actually been a good person if “it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life”. This ridicules any salvation the woman felt she had found in her final moments and implies that a man is necessary in order to keep women in