The grandmother
represents people who enjoy cultural privilege. She is white, and she is likely from an
upper-middle class background. As such, she has a very particular stance on the pastshe thinks
of it as a time when things were better; it was a time when people were trustworthy and shared
her values. It was a time when ladies acted like ladies (unlike her daughter-in-law, who wears
slacks), and men were "good" and well-mannered, polite and polished. In fact, she even
dresses up for a road trip because, just in case the family gets into an accident and she's
injured or killed, she wants people who see her body to know that she was "a
lady."
The grandmother is precisely the kind of person who would have
judged and imprisoned the Misfita poor, uneducated man who can easily be scapegoated because he
lacks much of the privilege the grandmother enjoys and has no one to fight for him. She might
have taken one look at him, in another situation, and never once considered his humanity, his
similarity to her. This is what makes her final epiphany, that they have more similarities than
differences, so shocking, and it explains the Misfit's comment that "she would have been a
good woman . . . if there had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life."
She wasn't actually a "good woman," ironically, for most of her life; only in her
final moments were her priorities in order and only because she knew they were her final
moments.
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