How Old Is The Grandmother In Jane O Connor

As a woman with ties to Tennessee and Georgia, knowledge and fond memories of plantations, and who calls an African American child the derogatory term “pickaninny” (O’Connor 139), readers can tell that the grandmother in the story is a representation of the Old South and its traditional values. Based off of her representation of this world and its values, one can immediately argue that the grandmother is associated with the time way before the Civil War, a time when the South was striving with its grandeur and pompousness. Discussing the past in which she came from, the grandmother longs to return to the time where, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else” (O’Connor 139). Additionally, as …show more content…
Because of this, readers gain the understanding that the grandmother is extremely old-fashioned, as seen with the aforementioned quotes, and a bit racist. We can see specifically see her racism when she spouts absurd lines such as, “Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” (O’Connor 139). Additionally, the narrator also implies that the grandmother is selfish, by revealing things such as, “She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind” (O’Connor 137), and describing her deceiving tactic to convince the family to visit the plantation. These three things combined persuades readers to respond to the grandmother’s character with annoyance, simply because the grandmother is extremely selfish and stuck in her old-word point of view. In addition to being annoyed by the grandmother, the story also encourages the reader to consider the grandmother a nuisance. This can be seen by the family’s reactions to various things the grandmother says, such as glaring, talking back, and even ignoring