Mrs. McIntyre Cried, So Now I Feel Bad

From the movie adaptation of "The Displaced Person."

As I was reading “The Displaced Person,” there were many aspects of the story that surprised me. But about halfway through the story, Mrs. McIntyre breaks down and begins crying on her bed, and I was so shocked that I needed to go back through the story to reanalyze Mrs. McIntyre. It is clear to the reader that Mrs. McIntyre is racist when she calls her African American workers “half-witted” and “thieving” (O’Connor 222). And Mrs. McIntyre only cares for The Displaced Person because he is useful to her. But When Mrs. McIntyre sat on her bed and cried, I genuinely felt bad for her.

            Despite Mrs. McIntyre’s unfeeling ways, I pitied her, which made me want to evaluate Mrs. McIntyre and attempt to discern why Mrs. McIntyre acts the way she does throughout the story. Mrs. McIntyre doesn’t have a husband or children, and Mrs. Shortley seems to be the only companion Mrs. McIntyre has, but Mrs. McIntyre drives the Shortleys away. Mrs. McIntyre needs the people who work for her to be dependent on her because she doesn’t have anyone else. In Mrs. McIntyre’s eyes, “there was nobody poorer in the world than she was” (O’Connor 221).

            Mrs. McIntyre divorced two husbands and buried one, but Mrs. McIntyre has “a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in the grave,” (O’Connor 218). While many would think that someone who has died has permanently left the earth, O’Connor explains Mrs. McIntyre’s fear by saying that unlike Mrs. McIntyre’s other husbands, “the Judge, sunk in the cornfield with his family, was always at home” (O’Connor 218). Though the audience learns from Mrs. McIntyre that the years she spent with the Judge were “the happiest” of her life (O’Connor 218). But the fact that the Judge is still on the farm upsets Mrs. McIntyre.

Toward the end of the story, the reader learns that Mrs. McIntyre “had never discharged anyone before; they had all left her” (O’Connor 231). Mrs. McIntyre states that the Guizacs “would not hesitate to leave her,” and yet she is unable to fire Mr. Guizac (O’Connor 230).  It seems possible that Mrs. McIntyre wants the Guizacs to leave on their own because she is used to people leaving her. The Judge will not leave on his own, and neither will Mr. Guizac, which makes Mrs. McIntyre uncomfortable because this breaks the pattern of people choosing to leave her that she has become accustomed to.

A cherub on top of a tombstone like the one
taken off of the Judge's grave

            I don’t know if the reader is meant to feel bad for Mrs. McIntyre. Mrs. McIntyre is unsympathetic toward the Guizacs and says that Mr. Guizac “had probably not had to struggle enough,” which causes me to believe that perhaps Mrs. McIntyre is not meant to be a character one feels badly for (219). But O’Connor created a complicated woman in Mrs. McIntyre because despite it being Mrs. McIntyre’s own doing that she is left to live on her farm alone at the end of the story, I didn’t like the idea that the only person that doesn’t leave Mrs. McIntyre is dead in the ground under a desecrated tombstone.