The opinion of many women today can be summarized in the words of Red Sammy: “A
good man is hard to find” (O’Connor 1138). Women are constantly looking for ‘Mr.
Right,’ but he never seems to appear. Men are either too weak, too strong, too
fat, too skinny, too polite, too impolite, too sensitive, or too insensitive.
Are women just too picky, or is it truly too hard to find a ‘good man?’ In the
feminist short stories “Sunday in the Park,” by Bel Kaufman, “A Jury of Her
Peers,” by Susan Glaspell, and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” by Dorothy M.
Johnson, men are portrayed as failures, unobservant, cruel, and cowardly,
showing that many women think of men in these terms.
In the short story “Sunday in the Park,” all of the male characters are
portrayed as failures, and by the end of the story, the unnamed woman has had
enough of them. Her husband Morton is weak and cannot even defend their son from
playground bullies. He is described as “city-pale,” with a “shy, apologetic
smile” and glasses (Kaufman 838-839). He is lost in the world of books and
learning, and cannot handle life in the real world, but instead has to escape
conflict—“Come on, let’s get out of here” (Kaufman 839). The woman is
disappointed in Morton for not fighting, even though it would have been a
hopeless battle. Why is she disappointed? Perhaps it goes back to a statement
she makes earlier in the story: “She always said that she wanted Larry to learn
to fight his own battles” (Kaufman 838). Since Morton cannot fight his own
battles, then Larry will never learn to do so from following his father’s
example. She also may be disappointed because, according to John Eldredge, women
need: “to be fought for, to be part of a great adventure, and to be the beauty
in the story” (42). However, life does not fulfill these desires in most women:
The world kills a woman’s heart when it tells her to be tough, efficient, and
independent. She learns early that she must fight for herself because no one
else will. There is no great adventure to be swept up into, only chores and
errands and “to do” lists. [Life] leaves her doubting that she is the beauty in
any story. (28)
This sounds like a pretty accurate description of the woman in this story. At
the end of the story all she wants to do is “get home and busy herself with
familiar tasks; perhaps then the feeling, glued like heavy plaster on her heart,
would be gone” (Kaufman 840). She is disappointed not only with her husband, but
also with her son—“her mouth tightened in resentment” towards his “defenseless
little body” (Kaufman 840).
Not only are the men in her family portrayed as failures, but Joe and his father
are also described in a negative light. Joe’s father is the complete opposite of
Morton. He is a “big man” and “insolent,” with “great arms” (Kaufman 838-839).
This is not a very flattering description. The father permits his son to
continue acting in negative, which will cause Joe to grow up to be a cruel man
like his father. Even though their fathers are different, neither Joe nor Larry
have proper role models, because neither of the fathers discipline their sons
properly. Joe’s father ignores discipline and Morton leaves it all to his wife.
As a result, finding a ‘good man’ is not only difficult in the adult generation,
but it does not look like finding one in the younger generation will be easy
either
The short story “A Jury of Her Peers” is another story in which a ‘good man’ is
hard to find. At its root, the story examines whether Minnie Wright should be
judged by a jury of “twelve good men” or the two farm women (Bendel-Simso 292).
As the story progresses, the women discover the motive for the crime, which is
what the men are searching for, but the women choose not to reveal this motive
to the sheriff and the other men. The men do not believe that the women “would
know a clue if they did come upon it” (Glaspell 569). They think that they are
only concerned with “trifles” (Glaspell 568). This leaves the reader to wonder:
“If these men don’t know what to look for, and can’t recognize and understand
what they do find, then how can they be qualified to judge this woman?” (Bendel-Simso
293). Even though the sheriff and the jury may be ‘good men,’ they still are
unable to see the clues pointing to the murder’s solution, making them unable to
properly judge Minnie.
Of course, the story is also about John Wright, who has been a failure as a
husband. He has trapped Minnie just like the bird in the cage, and when he kills
the bird, he kills part of her as well. She seems to snap inside, which causes
her to kill her husband. This is a popular notion among feminists—that men trap
women and hold power over them. The women in the story “all suffer from the
unwillingness or inability of the men to understand their situation of helpless
isolation, their constrained passivity, their overwhelming enforced dependence”
(Alkalay-Gut 78-79). John Wright did not care that Minnie had worn out clothes,
a life without music, and a broken stove with which to cook. His neighbors
described him as “a good man,” but Mrs. Hale saw past the fact that he “didn’t
drink…kept his word as well as most…and paid his debts” and saw him as “a hard
man…like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” So, even when a ‘good man’ is found
like Mr. Wright (Right?), women still suffer, as shown by Minnie Wright, who is
driven to killing her husband just because he has killed a bird, an action which
does not seem to deserve death.
The short story “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is full of male characters,
including Bert, Ranse, and Liberty. Of course, Liberty is the easy man to
characterize in the story. He is the ‘typical’ bad guy, whom no woman would ever
consider ‘Mr. Right.’ Ranse and Bert are slightly more difficult to figure out.
Because of his encounter with Liberty, Ranse changes from a weakling into a man
that was “despicable and despised” (Johnson 800). Even Ranse realizes that he is
not a ‘good man,’ since when he “thought of the several men he has been through
the years, he did not admire any of them very much” (Johnson 794). The only man
in the story who could be considered a ‘good man’ is Bert. However, even though
Bert may be a ‘good man,’ he still lets Ranse marry Hallie. He becomes Ranse’s
“conscience, his Nemesis, his lifelong enemy, and the man who made him great”
(Johnson 799). While this may be good for Ranse, it does not seem to have any
benefits for Bert, which may be one reason that ‘good men’ are so hard to
find—even if they do exist, they are sometimes too cowardly to stand up and
pursue the women they love.
The short stories “A Jury of Her Peers,” “Sunday in the Park,” and “The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valence” are all memorable stories in their own right. The short
story “A Jury of Her Peers” is “a small feminist classic” (Hedges 89). It can be
found “in almost every anthology introducing college students to literature” (Carpentier).
The short story “Sunday in the Park” won the PEN award (Nelson). The short story
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” has been made into a movie, which has become
far more famous than the short story. In these short stories a ‘good man’ is
truly hard to find. In “Sunday in the Park,” Morton, Larry, Joe, and Joe’s
father are failures, while the men in “A Jury of Her Peers” are unobservant and
John Wright is cruel. In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” Bert is the only
man who could be considered a ‘good man,’ but he ends up dying alone, and does
not even marry the woman he loves. So, even though he may be a ‘good man,’ he is
still too cowardly to pursue the woman he loves.
Works Cited
Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “Murder and Marriage: Another Look at Trifles.” Susan
Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ed. Linda Ben-Zivi. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 71-81.
Bendel-Simso, Mary M. “Twelve Good Men or Two Good Women: Concepts of
Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers.’” Studies in
Short Fiction. 36 (1999): 291-297.
Carpentier, Martha C. “Susan Glaspell’s Fiction: Fidelity As American
Romance.” Twentieth Century Literature. 40.1 (1994). 14 Apr. 2003
<http://www.web9.epnet.com/delivery.asp?...>.
Eldredge, John. Dare to Desire: An Invitation to Fulfill Your Deepest Dreams.
Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2002.
Glaspell, Susan. “A Jury of Her Peers.” Pickering 564-578.
Hedges, Elaine. “Small Things Reconsidered: Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her
Peers.’” Women’s Studies. 12 (1986): 89-110.
Johnson, Dorothy M. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.” Pickering 791-801.
Kaufman, Bel. “Sunday in the Park.” Pickering 838-840.
Nelson, Ronald J. “The Battlefield in Bel Kaufman’s ‘Sunday in the Park.”
English Language Notes. 30.1 (1992). 14 Apr. 2003
<http://web18.epnet.com…>.
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Pickering 1135-1146.
Pickering, James H., ed. Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories. 9th ed.
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001.
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