Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Flannery O’Connor

American writer, particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with
tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty,
Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the
decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was small,
consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters.

"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will
does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man, Freedom cannot be conceived
simply." (from Wise Blood, 1952)

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic
family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States.
The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O'Connor's writing as
described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969).
O'Connor's father, Edward F. O'Connor, was a realtor owner. He worked later for a
construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina L. (Cline) O'Connor,
came from a prominent family in the state - her father had been a mayor of
Milledgeville for many years.

When O'Connor was 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's birthplace.
She attended the Peabody High School and enrolled in the Georgia State College for
Women. At school she edited the college magazine and graduated in 1945 with an
A.B. O'Connor then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she
attended writer's workshops conducted by Paul Engle. At the age of 21 she published
her first short story, 'The Geranium', in Accent. In the following year she received the
degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. In 1947 she lived for seven months at
Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., an estate left by the Trask family for writers, painters
and musicians.

O'Connor published four chapters of Wise Blood in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review,

and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. The complete novel appeared 1952. It dealt
with a young religious enthusiast, who attempts to establish a church without Christ.
The Signet paperback version of the book advertised it as "A Searching Novel of Sin
and Redemption". O'Connor's second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), had a
related subject matter. The protagonist is Francis Marion Tarwater who begins his
ministry in his youth. He baptizes and drowns Bishop, his uncle's idiot son. Old
Tarwater warns his grand-nephew: "'You are the kind of boy,' the old man said, 'that
the devil is always going to be offering to assists, to give you a smoke or a drink or a
ride, and to ask you your bidnis. You had better mind how you take up with
strangers.'" Young Tarwater sets fire to his own woods to clean himself, and like his
great-uncle, a mad prophet, he finally becomes a prophet and a madman. O'Connor
once explained that "I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic
believers - because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which
is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle."

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The young protagonist of Wise Blood, Hazel Mote, returns from the army with his
faith gone awry. He founds the Church Without Christ, wears a preacher's bright blue
suit and a preacher's black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains. Asa Hawks
pretends to have blinded himself. Sabbath Lily, his daughter, turns into a monster of
sexual voracity. The fox-faced young Enoch Emery steals from a museum a mummy,
which he thinks of as "the new jesus." Enoch knows things because "he had wise
blood like his daddy." Eventually Enoch finds his religious fulfillment dressed in a
stolen gorilla costume. Hazel buys an old Essex automobile, his own religious
mystery: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified." Haze murders the False
Prophet, his rival, by running over him with his second-hand Essex, and faces his cul-
de-sac.

John Huston read the novel in 1978 - he received a copy of it from Michael
Fitzgerald, whose father was O'Connor's literary executor. Against all odds, Michael
Fitzgerald got the money for the production, some $2,000,000; the screenplay was
written by Michael and his brother, Benedict, and everyone worked for a minimum
wage. Most of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia. "There were seven outstanding
performances in Wise Blood. Only three of those seven actors have any reputation to
speak of: Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton. The other four are
unknowns. They are all great stars, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing would make me
happier than to see this picture gain popular acceptance and turn a profit. It would
prove something. I'm not sure what... but something." ( John Huston in An Open Book,
1988)

In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating
blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville where she lived
with her mother on her dairy farm. In spite of the illness, O'Connor continued to write
and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges. "I write every day for
at least two hours," she said in an interview in 1952, "and I spend the rest of my time
largely in the society of ducks."

"I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories," she wrote to Robert Lowell.
"I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing
anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to
measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself." O'Connor read
such thinkers as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-195), George Santayana (1863-
1952), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). In New York she had befriended with Robert
and Sally Fitzgerald, two other literary Roman Catholics. She lived and wrote in their
house in Ridgefield, Connecticut until illness redirected her life in 1951. O'Connor
named Robert Fitzgerald as her literary executor. He selected and edited with his wife
a volume of O'Connor's occasional prose, which was published in 1969 under the title
Mystery and Manners.

From around 1955 O'Connor was forced to use crutches. An abdominal operation
reactivated the lupus and O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39. Her
second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was
published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Short Stories (1971) contained
several stories that had not previously appeared in book form. O'Connor's letters,
published as The Habit of Being (1979), reveal her conscious craftsmanship in writing
and the role of Roman Catholicism in her life.

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O'Connor's short stories have been considered her finest work. With A Good Man Is
Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955) she came to be regarded as a master of the
form. The cover art of the 1956 Signet paperback edition featured an encounter with a
man in a dark suit and voluptuous woman. In the title story a grandmother, her son
and daughter-in-law and their three children, are on a car journey. They encounter an
escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers, Hiram and Bobby Lee. The
family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit
from his ''Wanted'' poster. The hallucinating grandmother murmurs: "Why you're one
of my babies. You're one of my own children!" The Misfit shoots her and says: "She
would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute
of her life."

'A View of the Woods' was a violent and perhaps pointless tale of the seventy-nine-
year-old Mr. Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter, Mary Fortune Pitts, both
selfish and mean. The story ends in a fight. The grandfather smashes Mary's head
several times against a rock, killing her. Exhausted, he manages to take a few steps,
has a final "view of the woods," and dies of a heart attack.

In the story "Good Country People" a young woman with a sense of moral superiority
experiences her downfall. The protagonist, Joy Hopewell, has an artificial leg as a
result of a hunting accident. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy and she has changed her
name legally from Joy to Hulga. Joy-Hulga tries to seduce a Bible salesman, a simple-
seeming country boy, with the obvious phallic name of Manley Pointer. He turns out
to be another 'Hazel Motes' and disappears with her artificial leg. "The Artificial
Nigger" is a lesson about injustice. However, O'Connor's short stories have not so
strong theological basis as her novels. They often focus on grotesque characters, have
a crisp humor, and are open to interpretation. Recurrent images include the flaming
suns, mutilated eyes, peacocks - she raised them in Milledgeville - colorful shirts, and
bright blue suits and stern black hats of preachers.

For further reading: The Added Dimensions, ed. by M.J. Friedman and L.A. Lawson (1966); The
Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor by L.V. Driskell and J.T. Brittain (1971); Flannery
O'Connor by K. Feeley (1972); Nightmares and Visions by G.H. Muller (1972); Invisible Parade: The
Fiction of Flannery O'Connor by M. Orvell (1972); The Pruning Word by J.R. May (1976); Flannery
O'Connor by D.T. McFarland (1976); Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies by C. Shloss (1980);
Conversations With Flannery O'Connor by Rosemary M. Magee (1987); American Gargoyles:
Flannery O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque by Anthony Di Renzo (1993); The True Country:
Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor by Carter W. Martin (1994); Flannery O'Connor: New
Perspectives, ed. by Sura Prasad Rath and Mary Neff Shaw (1996); Writing Against God: Language As
Message in the Literature of Flannery O'Connor by Joanne Halleran McMullen (1996); Flannery
O'Connor; The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary by ´Ted R. Spivey (1997); Flannery O'Connor's
Characters by Laurence Enjolras (1998); Flannery O'Connor: Comprehensive Research and Study
Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999); Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist by Richard Giannone
(2000); Flannery O'Connor: A Life by Jean W. Cash (2002) --- For further information: Flannery
O'Connor - Andalusia Foundayion, Inc. ; A Student's Guide to Flannery O'Connor; Flannery O'Connor;
Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Foundation

Selected works:

• Wise Blood, 1952 - film 1979, dir. by John Huston, starring Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty,
Harry Dean Stanton. - "Odd story, not easy to like but with many impressive moments."
(Halliwell's Film & Video Guide 2001, 2000)

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 • A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and Other Stories, 1955 (published in England
as The Artificial Nigger)
• The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
• A Memoir of Mary Ann. 1962 (ed., published in England as Death of a Child)
• Three by Flannery O'Connor, 1964
• Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965 (with an introduction by Robert
Fitzgerald)
• Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald and
Robert Fitzgerald)
• The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, 1971 - the National Book
Award
• The Habit of Being: Letters, 1979 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald)
• The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, 1983 (ed. by Carter W.
Martin)
• The Correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and the Brainars Cheneys, 1986
(edited by C. Ralph Stephens)
• Collected Works, 1988 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald)

Everything that Rises Must Converge

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Everything That Rises Must Converge is a title O'Connor borrowed from the French
paleantologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. After reviewing his book The Phenomenon
of Man, O'Connor was especially fascinated with his scientific explanation of the
Omega Point-a continual ascent towards a greater consciousness with oneself and the
world that eventually ends in Christ. O'Connor never understood the whole of his
argument but nonetheless found it "very stimulating to the imagination" (Whitt 111).

The story centers around Julian and his mother's weekly trip to the downtown YMCA.
Julian braces himself for the outing and in a bit of comic imagery is compared to Saint
Sebastian, "waiting for the arrows to begin piercing him" (O'Connor 405). Their
relationship is mired with constant conflict because Julian is far too self-absorbed to
appreciate the many sacrifices his mother has made for him. In his mind she is a "little
girl" ignorant of the changing times. He comes to view himself as her savior who
must teach her a thing or two about her outmoded viewpoints. And although Julian's
criticisms of his mother do have merit, she is not the oblivious southern racist he
makes her out to be. And either is he the free-thinking poet he struggles so hard to
make his mother believe he is. In reality, Julian's mother has sacrificed a great deal for
her son's well-being. She's allowed her own teeth to rot to afford him braces, has
worked hard so that he might attend college, and makes excuses for his
unemployment. Although she talks only through a string of cliches, Julian's mother is
all too eager to please her son and obviously lives through him. This makes Julian's
harsh view of his mother even more irritating to the reader.

The theme of Old South vs. New South fuels the conflict between Julian and his
mother. Ms. Chestny has been raised all her life too behave in the gentile southern
manner. She was once the grandaughter of the governor so position and wealth rank
high in importance. She dismisses the plight of blacks with the stereotypical southern

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response, "They should rise, yes, but on the own side of their fence" (O'Connor 408).
This attitude most likely resulted from being taught to talk this way all her life. And
although she makes thoughtless remarks, her genuine affection for her childhood
nurse Caroline shows that she has no real malice towards the black race. On the other
hand Julian daydreams about making black friends and even bringing home a black
lover. This dream is impossible though, mainly because of his refusal to deal with the
outside world and "the general idiocy of his fellows." Julian lives "in the inner
compartment of his mind...safe from any kind of penetration from without" (O'Connor
411). His view of the world is too cynical and ironically every attempt he makes with
blacks has failed. Julian only concedes to talk to "some of the better types" and the
men he deems "distinguished-looking." And he is annoyed when the black woman sits
next to him on the bus. Thus Julian judges just like his mother.
Another point of disagreement is culture and outward appearances. Julian asserts that,
"true culture is in the mind,"(O'Connor 410) while his mother argues culture is in the
heart. Ironically it is what Julian argues for that his mother could use improvement on
and vice versa. Julian's clinical view of his mother reveals his total absence of heart.
Ms. Chestney lives in the past refusing to come to terms with the here and now
opening her mind in the process. And while they both battle it out, they remain
oblivious to what they could learn from each other.

Ms. Chestney truly meets her match when the black woman who boards the bus with
her son refuses her charity. Julian becomes overjoyed when he notices that the
woman's hat is identical to his mothers. Thus Ms. Chestney's fears materialize-she
truly meets herself coming and going. When her attempts at inane conversation with
the woman fail, Julian becomes furious that his mother is too ignorant to understand
she is being condescending. So he shows no sympathy when his mother lies on the
concrete dumbfounded by the woman's blow. He seizes his chance to teach his mother
a lesson and begins lecturing her. But his mother is looking for a deeper message than
what is offered in Julian's sermon on race relations. She wants to return to the sweet
smelling mansion of her childhood that she views as a safe haven where she will be
welcomed. Her son has nothing to offer her except reminders that the world is
changing-which she'd just as soon forget. As a result, Ms. Chestny regresses to
childhood calling out for Caroline and her grandpa to come get her (O'Connor 420).
And when she finally dies in his arms, the love he has been unable to express comes
out when he cries, "Darling, sweetheart, wait." For while his mother spent the last
moments of her life reverting back to childhood, Julian has been thrust into adulthood.
He is now left to fend for himself in a cold world he is no more prepared to handle
than a job in writing. O'Connor leaves the reader to guess whether or not Julian can
make it without the one person who has stood by his side all his life.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

• Click here for my brother Eric's interpretation of the story.

This story was the first I read by O'Connor and probably my favorite to date. Every
time I read it I catch myself laughing out loud at the grandmother who exemplifies
southern women to a tee.

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The story begins with the typical nuclear family being challenged by the grandmother
who doesn't want to take the vacation to Florida. She has read about a crazed killer by
the name of the misfit who is on the run heading for Florida. Unfortunately, she is
ignored by ever member of the family except for the little girl June Star who can read
the grandmother like a book. The morning of the trip the grandmother is ironically
dressed in her Sunday best and the first one in the car ready to travel as June Star
predicted she would be. Notice the grandmother's dress is very nice for a trip she was
horrified to take only a day earlier. This is the first of O'Connor's attempts to knock
the superficialness of southern culture. The grandmother was decked in white gloves
and a navy blue dress with matching hat for the sole purpose of being recognized as a
lady in case someone saw her dead on the highway. This logic may seem absurd to
anyone who is foreign to southern culture, but I can assure you there are plenty of
women who still subscribe to this way of thinking. The reader is now clued into the
grandmother's shallow thoughts of death. In the grandmother's mind, her clothing
preparations prevent any misgivings about her status as a lady. But as the Misfit later
points out,"there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip." The grandmother's
perceived readiness for death is a stark contrast to her behavior when she encounters
the Misfit; for she shows herself to be the least prepared for death.

As the trip progresses, the children reveal themselves as brats, although funny ones,
mainly out of O'Connor's desire to illustrate the lost respect for the family, and
elders.The reader should notice when the family passes by a cotton field, five or six
graves are revealed, perhaps foreshadowing what is later to come. Some interesting
dialogue takes place when John Wesley asks, "Where's the plantation", and the
grandmother replies, "Gone With the Wind." This is perhaps another statement by
O'Connor at the breakdown of the family and the subsequent absence of respect and
reverance for the family unit illustrated by the two children. Around this time, June
Star and her brother begin slapping each other and the grandmother keeps the peace
by telling them a story of a black child mistakenly eating her watermellon with initials
from a suitor carved in it reading E.A.T. Now here is where I think some of the
reviewers are mistaken on the grandmother's character. They claim her story was
racially motivated as well as her comment made about the "pickaninny" on the side of
the road. I have read reviews saying that the grandmother is a racist; but I think it is
important to make the distinction between a racist and a good-hearted ignorant white
woman. In order for her comment to be racist, there must be some intent to denegrate
blacks present-which there isn't. When O'Connor interpreted this story, she told of a
teacher she ran into who determined that the grandmother was evil, but that his
southern students resisted his interpretation. The teacher didn't understand why and
O'Connor explained to him that the students resisted because, "they all had
grandmothers or great-aunts just like her at home, and they knew, from personal
experience, that the old lady lacked comprehension, but that she had a good heart...the
Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from ignorance."

The family 's encounter with Red Sammy Butts serves as another outlet for O'Connor
to express how trust and respect have begun to wear away. The reader should note the
name of the town "Toombsboro" which the family passes through. It is then the
grandmother makes the mistake of telling the children about a house with secret
panels that is nearby. The children scream until Bailey concedes to visit the house.
But the newspaper concealing the cat moves causing Pitty Sing to lurch on Bailey's
shoulder resulting in the car being overturned. Just as everyone is getting there

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bearings, a car slowly approaches revealing three men. When the men get out of there
car, the grandmother recognizes the Misfit at once. Immediately he reveals himself to
be polite and sociable and even apologizes to the grandmother for Bailey's rudeness to
her. But he also doesn't waste any time as he asks one of his cronies to escort Bailey
and John Wesley off into the woods to meet their fate.

Now here is where the fun part begins. The grandmother and the Misfit engage in a
conversation which is supposed to convey a message which I believe no one person
besides O'Connor will ever fully understand. I will give it my best though. At this
point in the story, the reader should analyze what he knows of the grandmother's
character thus far. She will prove to be no match for the Misfit's quick wits. After the
grandmother tries to appeal to the Misfit by stating that he isn't a bit common, he goes
into a story about his family and how he was the type of child to question everything.
At every plead by the grandmother, he talks about different periods of his criminal
life. Nothing she has said up until this point has affected him. The Misfit's terse
responses to the grandmother's prayer advice reveal that these two individuals are on
two very different levels with concern to religion. The Misfit has a much deeper
understanding of religion and his belief system than does the grandmother. O'Connor
likens him to a prophet gone wrong. I prefer to liken him to the character of Kurtz in
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Both of the men have the potential for greatness but as
the result of seeing mankind at their worse, they have become jaded to individual
suffering. As the two continue in conversation, the Misfit asks the grandmother if it
seems right that Jesus was punished and he has escaped punishment. The grandmother
responds in the only way she knows how to by clinging to her superficial beliefs
about "good blood" and behaving as a gentleman would. She has a limited
understanding of religion and cannot even begin to connect with the Misfit who by
now has gone off on a tirade about how Jesus' raising of the dead threw the world off
balance. But then the grandmother observes the Misfit as he were about to cry. She
reaches out to him and remarks, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my
own children." The Misfit, who is obviously affected, rears back and shoots her three
times. I think O'Connor explains it the best when she writes,"The Grandmother is at
last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in
her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by
ties of kinship which have her roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling
about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, makes the right gesture..."

Over the past year many people have sent me their take on the Grandmother
and Misfit. Here are two of what I consider to be the best.

Ruben de Tal writes: I thought the conversation at the end had at its core the primary
discussion of animal vs. metaphysical human nature. In other words, when the Misfit
says of Jesus, "I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't..." and "It ain't right I wasn't there
because if I had of been there I would of known...if I had of been there I would of
known and I wouldn't be like I am now..." he is in effect expressing the basic plight of
human awareness: while we are conscious and aware of ourselves, we are also
basically animals with violent and primal drives at our cores, so part of that awareness
demands so rise above the animal. However we derive this, it must give us some
sense of value beyond the physical constraints of our bodies and world; otherwise, as
the Misfit puts it, "'...it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left
the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some

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othermeanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,' he said and his voice had become
almost a snarl."

However, the problem is that since no one has definite physical evidence of anything
beyond what we see around us (note the Misfit's observations: "'Ain't a cloud in the
sky,' he remarked, looking up at it. 'Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud neither...'"
and, "'Turn to the right, it was a wall,' The Misfit said, looking up again at the
cloudless sky. 'Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it
was a floor...'"), any belief in our metaphysical value as human beings--in the value of
human life--must therefore be just that: a belief, and nothing more. Even the
grandmother feels it: "Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost
her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her
but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her
mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying,
'Jesus, Jesus,' meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded
as if she might be cursing."

It is a leap of faith we must take, however we want to word it, whatever religious or
spiritual (or anti-religious, anti-spiritual) ideology we wish to use. And ultimately,
what the Misfit sees (and eventually the grandmother as well) is that when we live in
a world where the religious and spiritual dogma of yesterday are no match for the
scientific, coldly observation-based and amoral context of the modern world, and
when there are no other adequate answers to this question of how to place higher
metaphysical value on human life, we are left with nothing but what we can see
around us, and we have no means with which to answer the animal violence of
someone like the Misfit. His frustration in not being there to see whether or not Jesus
really did personify the metaphysical is the deep frustration and sense of loss that the
modern world feels in not having Proof, in not having something adequate with which
to approach these questions in the face of cold science and observation, and in being
asked to perform the quaint, somewhat silly act of simply putting faith in something
we cannot see with our own eyes. When the grandmother faces him for the last time
and makes one final attempt to answer him, the futility of this is demonstrated starkly,
coldly, and with all the animal violence and despair and nihilism inevitable in such a
world: "'I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't,' The Misfit said. 'I wisht I had of been
there,' he said, hitting the ground with his fist. 'It ain't right I wasn't there because if I
had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,' he said in a high voice, 'if I had of
been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now.' His voice seemed
about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's
face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, 'Why
you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and
shot her three times through the chest."

In the end, O'Connor is putting to us the same disturbing question the Misfit puts to
the grandmother: how do we answer this nihilism in a way that makes sense within
the context of the modern world? Judging by the state of affairs, I'd say we still have
not come up with anything much better than the grandmother's pitiful response, and
our society and world have the shotgun wounds to prove it.

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As an agnostic (that's about as much as I'll commit to any sense of "religious" belief) I
have struggled with this same question myself and have only come up with the idea
that there are expedients--some more worthwhile and valuable than others (art, love,
human interaction)--but that ultimately, there is no answer to O'Connor's question
other than to persist in asking it. I think it comes down to the sense that as long as we
keep asking the question, we maintain our value as humans because we not only
exercise our uniquely human ability to question, but we also keep some kind of hope
alive by simply implying that there is a question to ask and an answer to seek. When
the Misfit describes himself in the following, "'My daddy said I was a different breed
of dog from my brothers and sisters. "You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live
their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and
this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!"'"
He is making clear that there was a time when he WAS good--when he still did care
enough to ask the questions that matter, that make us human. But somewhere along
the way, something happened, and he lost that and became what he is today--not
necessarily a good man, not necessarily a bad man--just an amoral man, and that is the
worst kind of man of all, because that is not so much a man as an animal, with no
sense of value for human life and no possibility for redemption. The scariest part of it
all, of course, is that The Misfit is not a misfit at all--he is our world, he is a reflection
of ourselves--our own amorality, our own loss of humanity, our own spiritual
emptiness.

Nancy Barendse writes: The conversation between the grandmother and the Misfit
gets the grandmother to the point where she can see and accept the action of grace in
her own life and extend it to another. The Misfit gets her to the place where she *can*
be a good woman (as opposed to a lady), making him in a sense a good man. I think a
more obvious foreshadowing of the family's future than the graveyard is the
description of the grandmother's attire. She dresses so that anyone finding her dead on
the side of the road would know she is a lady.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

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If you're anything like me, The Life You Save... will leave you with an unsettling
feeling, but is nonetheless a good read.
The story opens with Mrs. Crater and her retarded daughter Lucynell being paid a
visit by the one and only Mr. Shiftlett. At first sight of Shiftlett, the old woman sizes
him up as a "tramp and no one to be afraid of." But from the onset, everything about
Mr. Shiftlett screams nastiness. Even his name conjours up the word "shifty,"
suggesting an evasive, deceptive personality. (The reader should note the names in the
story are packed with symbolism. The name "Crater" shared by Lucynell and her
mother suggests a giant hole. And in the case of the old woman, we shall see a gaping
moral hole in her personality as she later pawns her daughter off on Shiftlett.) Shiftlett
is a skinny, gaunt, one-armed man whose figure "listed slightly to the side as if the
breeze listed him." Shiftlett, like Mrs. Crater, is also a character of moral
weightlessness.

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Notice everyone in this story has some physical or mental abnormality: Shiftlett with
his arm, Lucynell with her mental limitations, and Mrs. Crater with her moral
bankruptcy.

O'Connor goes on to describe Shiftlett with almost animal-like features: "He had long
black slick hair that hung flat...his face descended in forehead more than half its
length...and ended over a jutting steeltrap jaw." And although Shiftlett appears as little
more than a well-scrubbed rube, O'Connor goes on to say, “He had a look of
composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.” Indeed, Shiftlett
is an extremely jaded man who has been around the block a few times and knows how
to get along in the world despite his physical deformity.

When Mrs. Crater greets Shiftlett, he throws his arms up against the sun and forms a
“crooked cross.” He later reveals his occupation to be a carpenter.
O'Connor is likening Shiftlett to a backwards Christ figure. Notice also that Shiftlett
talks in cliché about the evils of the world and evades Mrs. Crater's questions by
answering in non-sequiters.

Only a few minutes after Shiftlett arrives, he is scoping out the place. With his
“pale sharp glance” he notices the car, which might as well have been a
pot of gold the way he is mesmerized with it. And just as Shiftlett is eyeing the car,
Mrs. Crater has been sizing him up from the start as a potential son-in-law. Shiftlett
knows this, however, and plays it as his trump card for the rest of the story. So
throughout the story, Mrs. Crater and Shiftlett subtlety negotiate with each other to
achieve their ultimate desires: Shiftlett's car and a husband for Lucynell.

Shiftlett hangs around the place serving as a sort of Bob Villa, fixing things up and
sleeping in the car at night. Interestingly, Shiftlett teaches Lucynell to say the word
"bird." As a drifter, more than anything Shiftlett values his freedom, much like a bird
has to go anywhere it pleases. As we'll see, Shiftlett's conscience would probably way
to heavy on him if he couldn't just pick up and leave whenever he pleases. Mrs. Crater
witnesses this and suggests he teach Lucynell how to say the word
“sugarpie”-hint hint.

So as the story progresses, Shiftlett uses Mrs. Crater's desire for a son-in-law to get
money to fix up the car. And when Mrs. Crater finally comes out and voices her
desires for a marriage, Shiftlett becomes uneasy and jacks up his demands by using
the excuse that he doesn't have enough money to “take her to a hotel and treat
her.” Finally, Mrs. Crater gets fed up with Shiftlett's resistance and says,
“There ain't any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting
man.” With those words, Mrs. Crater has said the worst thing possible to Mr.
Shiftlett. He knows he has a disability, but has reasoned he is just as good as any other
man.

Mr. Shiftlett ,upon hearing the goodies he'll get in return for marriage, perks up a bit.
His smile, “stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.” This
man is a snake. All his life he has felt, and probably been treated inadequate. He's
learned to get along and make up for his inadequacies at the expense of others. Mr.
Shiftlett is really kidding himself with all of his moralistic sayings and tirades. As
Christ practiced what he preached, Shiftlett does just the opposite. And even though

10
he knows he's spewing out a bunch of garbage, Shiftlett has probably convinced
himself that taking advantage of others to get where he's going requires trickery and
deception. And that's why Mrs. Crater's words cut so deep into his ego: she calls a
spade a spade. Shiftlett knows he's the scum of the earth, but nonetheless, he doesn't
like to be reminded of it.

After the marriage, Shiftlett "looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted while
someone held him." And someone has. Shiftlett has been broken of his spirit and his
birdlike wanderlust has been halted for the time being. He now has responsibilities
tying him down-Shiftlett's worst nightmare. He tries to make himself feel better by
claiming that the ceremony wasn't a real marriage--just paper work and blood tests."

After the deal is done, and Lucynell's fate is sealed, Mrs. Crater has a tearful goodbye
with her daughter, still oblivious to her own fault in Lucynell's victimization. Shiftlett
stays in the car disgusted while his new traveling partner is unaware to what's going
on around her.

As Shiftlett and Lucynell drive, his daydreams about his new car are interrupted by
thoughts of depression everytime he looks at Lucynell, who is humorously picking the
cherries off her hat and throwing them out the window. As the day wears on, Shiftlett
stops at a greasy spoon and Lucynell dozes off on the lunch counter. The waiter
remarks that Lucynell “looks like an angel of Gawd.” The comment
resonates true, for Lucynell is the only innocent person in the story amidst the snakes
around her.

Shiftlett is meanwhile on his way-but not without feeling guilt. Whether or not the
guilt is over his actions we can only guess. He drives untill he spots a hitchhiker and
picks him up. The reader should note that Shiftlett feels right at home with aimless
people like himself. It is said that Shiftlett “felt that a man with a car had a
responsibility to others and kept his eye out for a hitchhiker.” Ironically,
Shiftlett feels no responsibility towards a helpless creature like Lucynell.

Shiftlett begins on another tirade, but only now Mrs. Crater isn't there to halfway
listen to him. The hitchhiker, who hasn't spoken a word, turns to Shiftlett, tells him to
go to hell, and then leaps out of the car into a ditch. Shiftlett is of course stunned at
the kid's rudeness and can't understand how someone could resist his attempts at
conversation. Two clouds appear the shapes of turnips descending in front and behind
of him. The turnips are tornadoes, and the reader senses that Shiftlett is going to meet
his fate as he “raced the galloping shower into Mobile."

.Nature and Grace Flannery O'Connor and the healing of Southern Culture. Danny Duncan
Collum.

Nature and Grace

Flannery O'Connor and the healing of Southern culture

by Danny Duncan Collum

11
All criticism is autobiography, one of the literary gurus said. So to declare the
hidden agenda right up front, I am a Southerner, from the deepest Deep South.
There I enjoyed the blessings and trials of a Southern Baptist raising, and later
chose to become a Roman Catholic. So it should be no surprise when I tell you that
Miss Mary Flannery O'Connor speaks to my condition.

"The two circumstances that have given character to my own writing have been
those of being Southern and being Catholic," O'Connor wrote in an essay titled,
"The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South."

"What the Southern Catholic writer is apt to find, when he [sic] descends within his
imagination, is not Catholic life but the life of this region in which he is both native
and alien." This she suggested was because the South is a culture, while the church,
at least in America, is not.

The South's identity, according to O'Connor, results from beliefs and qualities
"absorbed from the scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation: a
distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a
knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be
endured."

And so it is to this day. In 1989, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture suggested

that the best indicator of the Southern culture's geographic boundaries is the
preponderance of TV preachers and gospel music in the electronic airwaves. In
October of this year, a public opinion poll showed that the South is still markedly
more religious than the rest of the country.

The characteristics of Southernness to which O'Connor pointed are all clearly

present in her stories. In her two novels, The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood,
she expresses complete empathy and identification with her bizarre "mad prophet"
characters, the two Tarwaters and Hazel Motes respectively. She displays a deep-
seated hostility toward Atlanta and all its pomps. In her stories the prosperous and
sophisticated city is a place of estrangement and alienation. It sends emissaries into
the countryside to rape a young boy (The Violent Bear It Away) or steal the wooden
leg off of a crippled farm girl ("Good Country People").

Look, for a moment, just at The Violent Bear It Away. In this novel O'Connor
assumes that her backwoods moonshiner-visionary, Tarwater the elder, is a true
prophet, and that his bootlegging is no contradiction of his vocation. Evil, in the
story, acts through the big city schoolteacher, Rayber. Rayber's great sin is that he
"studies" people, when the point is to save them. That, and the fact that he
deliberately refuses to surrender to the oceanic love he feels for his retarded son.

O'CONNOR WAS a Southern writer, but she was every bit a Catholic writer, too.
She could not have understood and dramatized the things that she did about the
South without the critical distance of Catholicism (and yes, the geographic distance
of those years in Iowa and New York). Religion is the saving grace of the South,
but Southern religion has a tragedy of its own. That is the absolute dualistic split it

12
enforces between grace and nature, spirit and flesh, human and divine, between the
life of this world and the life of its Creator.

The South is home to a joyous biracial culture given to fried foods, funny stories,
and elaborate festivities of all sorts. The South invented Coca-Cola and the music to
which the whole world now dances. This culture is nestled, for the most part, in a
natural setting of unmatchable beauty, comfort, and fertility.

But Southern culture labors under the yoke of a religious ideology that insists,
against all this abundant evidence, that the things of this world are irredeemably
evil. The theology of mainstream Southern Protestantism is one in which the
incarnation, where flesh and spirit indisputably mix, is what sex was to the
Victorians, an unpleasant necessity not to be discussed in polite company. The real
Tarwater in today's rural South might well be both a moonshiner and a prophet.
Today he might even grow a little hemp, too. But he would feel guilty about it, and
O'Connor's character does not.

This cultural schizophrenia is a special torment to Southern artists. The artist has
nothing but the tools of nature-language, pigment, the banging of wood and steel,
the straining of a larynx, the swivel of a hip. And the artist is bound to suspect, no
matter what his or her theology, that these blunt instruments are, at least sometimes,
the vehicles of grace. Catholicism gave O'Connor, and convert Walker Percy, and
some of the Fugitive school of writers before them, a way to think through these
contradictions and emerge with some vision of wholeness. Faulkner struggled
toward such a vision, alone, in the dark, and sometimes thought he saw it in the
bottom of a bottle.

Southern working-class popular artists, deprived of the intellectual toolbox these

questions might require, are often driven crazy by them instead. Hence the deep
moral and spiritual derangement that afflicted Elvis, and Hank Williams before him,
and that still torments Jerry Lee Lewis, and cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart, too. The
Reverend Al Green has acted out a version of this struggle, as has Little Richard.
And don't forget founding bluesman Robert Johnson (the one of the postage stamp),
and his famous date with the devil.

As a Southern Catholic artist, O'Connor reached past this wrenching spiritual

division, and the healing of it was at the very core of her vocation as a fiction
writer. In the collection of essays titled Mystery and Manners, she writes, "Christ
didn't redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form."
And the fiction writer's main concern, she asserted, is with such mystery as it is
incarnated in human life: "The fiction writer represents mystery through manners,
grace through nature."

DANNY DUNCAN COLLUM is Sojourners' popular culture columnist (on

temporary leave) and a contributing editor. He is completing a master's in fine arts
in creative writing at George Mason University, where he also teaches writing. He
lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and is at work on a book about race and class for
Orbis Press.

13
 Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Flannery O'Connor is

considered one of America's greatest fiction writers and one of the

strongest apologists for Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century.

14
Flannery
O'Connor
Born of the marriage of two of Georgia's oldest Catholic families, O'Connor was a
devout believer whose small but impressive body of fiction presents the soul's
struggle with what she called the "stinking mad shadow of Jesus."

Life and Literary Education

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah on March 25, 1925, to Regina Cline
and Edward F. O'Connor. She began her education in the city's parochial schools.
After the family's move to Milledgeville in 1938, she continued her schooling at the
Peabody Laboratory School associated with Georgia State College for Women
(GSCW), now Georgia College and State University. When she was fifteen,
O'Connor, an only child, lost her father to systemic lupus erythematosus, the disease
that would eventually take her own life at age thirty-nine. Devastated by the loss of
this close relationship, O'Connor elected to remain in Milledgeville and attend GSCW
as a day student in an accelerated three-year program.

An avid reader and artist,

she served as editor of the Corinthian, GSCW's college literary

magazine, and as unofficial campus cartoonist. O'Connor provided
cartoons for nearly every issue of the campus newspaper, for the
college yearbook, and for the Corinthian, as well as for the walls of
the student lounge. Most significant, she contributed fiction, essays,
and occasional poems to the Corinthian, demonstrating early on her
penchant for satire and comedy. A social science major with a
number of courses in English, O'Connor is remembered by her
classmates as obviously gifted but extremely shy. Her closest friends
Flannery recall her sly humor, her disdain for mediocrity, and her often
O'Connor merciless attacks on affectation and triviality.

In 1945 O'Connor received a scholarship in journalism from the State University of

Iowa (now the University of Iowa). In her first term, she decided that journalism was
not her metier and sought out Paul Engle, head of the now world-famous Writers'
Workshop, to ask if she might enter the master's program in creative writing. Engle
agreed, and O'Connor is now numbered among the many fine American writers who
are graduates of the Iowa program. While there she got to know several important
writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn
Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Austin Warren, and Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many
years editor of the Sewanee Review, was one of the earliest admirers of O'Connor's
fiction. He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as
critical essays on her work. Engle years after declared that O'Connor was so intensely
shy and possessed such a nasal southern drawl that he himself read her stories aloud
to workshop classes. He also asserted that O'Connor was one of the most gifted
writers he had ever taught. Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial
drafts of what would become Wise Blood, her first novel, published in 1952.

O'Connor's master's thesis was a collection of short stories entitled The Geranium, the
title work having already become her first published story (Accent, 1946). Most
stories in this collection, however, are the work of an apprentice in search of her own
territory and voice; they suggest only faintly the sharp wit, finely honed style, and

15
spiritual scope of O'Connor's mature work. "The Turkey" most genuinely represents
the significant connection between language and belief that came to pervade
O'Connor's work. This story also reveals her ear for southern dialect and marks one of
her first attempts at the literary irony for which she later became famous.

Following the completion of her M.F.A. in 1947, O'Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa
Fiction Award for a first novel (for her submission of a portion of Wise Blood) and
was accepted at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she
continued to work on the novel and became friends with the poet Robert Lowell. In
1949, after several months at Yaddo and some time in New York City and
Milledgeville, O'Connor moved into the garage apartment of Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she boarded for nearly two years. In the
Fitzgeralds, O'Connor found devout Catholics who provided her with the balance of
solitude and communion necessary to her creativity and her intellectual and spiritual
life.

This stabilizing and productive time was interrupted in 1950, however, when
O'Connor was stricken with lupus, the incurable, autoimmune disease that was then
treated only by the use of steroid drugs. O'Connor survived the first life-threatening
attack, but she was forced to return to Milledgeville permanently. Remaining in this
historic central Georgia town for the rest of her life, from 1951 until 1964, O'Connor
lived quietly at Andalusia, the family farm just outside town. In spite of the
debilitating effects of the drugs used for treating lupus, O'Connor managed to devote
a good part of every day to writing, and she even took a surprising number of trips to
lecture and read from her works.

A prolific and devoted correspondent, O'Connor stayed in touch with the literary
world through letters to the Fitzgeralds,

Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, and others. It was, in fact, through

letters that O'Connor came to know Gordon, who offered invaluable
suggestions about her writing, especially about Wise Blood.
O'Connor also took time to respond to letters from younger writers,
to review works of theology for the Georgia Bulletin (a publication
of the diocese of Atlanta), to tend her growing number of peacocks,
and to receive visitors seeking advice on matters both literary and
spiritual. During this time, O'Connor won numerous awards, among
them grants from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Flannery
Ford Foundation, a fellowship from the Kenyon Review, and several O'Connor
O. Henry awards.

An early 1964 surgery for a fibroid tumor reactivated O'Connor's lupus, which had
been in remission, and her health worsened during the following months. On August
3, 1964, after several days in a coma, she died in the Baldwin County Hospital. She is
buried beside her father in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. At the time of her
death, the Atlanta Journal observed that O'Connor's "deep spirituality qualified her to
speak with a forcefulness not often matched in American literature."

In 1972 the posthumous collection The Complete Stories received the National Book
Award, usually given to a living writer.

16
The judges deemed O'Connor's work so deserving that an exception
was made to honor her lifetime achievement. In 1979 The Habit of
Being: Letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, was published to rave
reviews. These letters reveal a great deal about O'Connor's life in
Milledgeville, her writing habits, and most important, her profound
religious convictions. For the first time readers were able to see—
beyond the shocking stories—the warm and witty personality and
the incisive intellect of the writer. The collection of letters received
a number of awards, and Christian Century magazine named The The Complete
Habit of Being one of the twelve most influential religious books of Stories
the decade.

The Fiction and Its Concerns

O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, received mixed reviews. Even some of the
strongest commentators on southern literature seemed to be at a loss to describe this
dark novel.

While working on the novel in the early years, O'Connor had defied
an insistent and authoritative editor at Rinehart by stating that Wise
Blood was not "a conventional novel," so confident was she in her
intent. Scholars who have spent time in the O'Connor Collection in
the Georgia College and State University library know that even
O'Connor's juvenilia anticipate the relentlessly stark vision that
became the mature writer's trademark. The closest literary "kin" of
Wise Blood in American letters arguably is Nathanael West's Miss
Lonelyhearts; both novels are filled with black humor and written in
Flannery a sharply honed style. A novel of spiritual quest, Wise Blood
O'Connor presents the male "pilgrim," Hazel Motes, as inhabiting a sterile and
ugly modern landscape derivative of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land.

The publication of her first short-story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955), made O'Connor's Christian vision and darkly comic intent somewhat clearer
to readers and allowed them to more easily grasp the intent of her 1960 novel, The
Violent Bear It Away. A second collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must
Converge, published posthumously in 1965, contains some of O'Connor's most
popular short fiction, including the title story and "Revelation."

The body of O'Connor's work resists conventional description. Although many of her
narratives begin in the familiar quotidian world—on a family vacation or in a doctor's
waiting room, for example—they are not, finally, realistic and certainly not in the
sense of the southern realism of William Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell. Furthermore,
although O'Connor's work was written during a time of great social change in the
South, those changes—and the relationships among blacks and whites—were not at
the center of her fiction. O'Connor made frequent use of violence and shock tactics.
She argued that she wrote for an audience who, for all its Sunday piety, did not share
her belief in the fall of humanity and its need for redemption. "To the hard of
hearing," she explained, "[Christian writers] shout, and for the . . . almost-blind [they]
draw large and startling figures"—a statement that has become a succinct and popular
explanation of O'Connor's conscious intent as a writer.

17
O'Connor had read Faulkner and Caldwell, as well as Eudora Welty, Caroline
Gordon, and Katherine Anne Porter, among southern writers. Faulkner and Porter
were strong influences, as were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, and the French
writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac. These last four reinforced
O'Connor's emphasis on original sin, guilt, and alienation, especially as she focused
on the twentieth-century tendency to find in technology and in the idea of "progress"
the panacea to life's ills. Although O'Connor knew that she—like her early model T.
S. Eliot—was in the minority in her disdain for the increasing secularism of her time,
she refused to back down.

Flannery O'Connor was a painstaking and disciplined writer, devoting each morning
to her work and making great demands of herself even in her last years as she
struggled with lupus. She possessed a keen ear for southern dialect and a fine sense of
irony and comic timing; with the combination of these skills, she produced some of
the finest comedy in American literature. Like the comedy of Dante, O'Connor's dark
humor consciously intends to underscore boldly our common human sinfulness and
need for divine grace. Even her characters' names (Tom T. Shiflet, Mary Grace,
Joy/Hulga Hopewell, Mrs. Cope) are often ironic clues to their spiritual deficiencies.
O'Connor's recurrent characters, from Hazel Motes in Wise Blood to O. E. Parker of
"Parker's Back," are spiritually lean and hungry figures who reject mere lip service to
Christianity and the bland certainty of rationalism in their pursuit of salvation. These
same characters, usually deprived economically, emotionally, or both, inhabit a world
in which, in O'Connor's words, "the good is under construction."

O'Connor was a Roman Catholic in the Bible Belt South; her fiction, though, is
largely concerned with fundamentalist Protestants, many of whom she admired for the
integrity of their search for Truth. The publication of her essays and lectures, Mystery
and Manners (1969), and the publication ten years later of The Habit of Being
confirmed the strong connection between O'Connor's fictional treatment of the search
for God and the quest for the holy in her own life. Indeed, her life and work were of a
piece. She attained in her brief life what Sally Fitzgerald called (after St. Thomas
Aquinas) "the habit of being," which Fitzgerald describes as "an excellence not only
of action but of interior disposition and activity" that struggled to reflect the goodness
and love of God.

In 1992 O'Connor was inducted as an inaugural honoree into Georgia Women of

Achievement, and in 2000 she was inducted as a charter member into the Georgia
Writers Hall of Fame.

Suggested Reading

Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).

Robert Brinkmeyer, The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

Jean W. Cash, Flannery O'Connor: A Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,

2002).

18
John Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1987).

The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, vols. 1-26/27(1972-2000), and The Flannery

O'Connor Review, vols. 1- (2001- ), Georgia College and State University.

Melvin J. Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds., Critical Essays on Flannery
O'Connor (Boston: Hall, 1985).

Richard Giannone, Flannery O'Connor: Hermit Novelist (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2000).

Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2009).

Sarah Gordon, Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination (Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 2000).

Louise Westling, Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty,
Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1985).

Sarah Gordon, Georgia College and State University

Updated 3/3/2009

To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and
dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely
end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional
devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must
Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential
hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a
barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless
cruelty.

In reality, her writing is filled with meaning and symbolism, hidden in plain sight
beneath a seamless narrative style that breathes not a word of agenda, of dogma, or of
personal belief. In this way, her writing is intrinsically esoteric, in that it contains
knowledge that is hidden to all but those who have been instructed as to how and
where to look for it, i.e. the initiated. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her
work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all
good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her. Nevertheless, she achieves what
few Christian writers have ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both
literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both.

19
In this analysis, we will be looking at just how Flannery O'Connor accomplished this
seemingly impossible task, non-didactic Christian fiction, by examining elements of
faith, elements of style, and thematic elements in her writing. While secondary
sources are included for perspective, I have focused primarily upon Miss O'Connor's
own essays and speeches in my examination of the writer's motivations, attitudes, and
technique, most of which are contained in the posthumous collection Mystery and
Manners. Unlike some more cryptic writers, O'Connor was happy to discuss the
conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of her stories, and this candor is a
godsend for the researcher that seeks to know what "makes the writer tick."

Before examining the various elements that make up the remarkable writing of
Flannery O'Connor, a bit of biography is necessary. Mary Flannery O'Connor was
born in Savannah, Georgia on March twenty-fifth, 1925 to Catholic parents Edward F.
and Regina C. O'Connor, and spent her early childhood at 207 East Charlton Street.
Young Flannery attended St. Vincent's Grammar School and Sacred Heart Parochial
School. In 1938 her father got a position as appraiser for the Federal Housing
Administration, and the family moved to North East Atlanta, then Milledgeville,
where, three years later, Ed died from complications arising from the chronic
autoimmune disease lupus. Flannery attended Georgia State College for Women (now
Georgia College) and State University of Iowa, receiving her MFA from the latter in
1947. In 1951, after complaining of a heaviness in her typing arms, she was diagnosed
with the same lupus that had killed her father. She went on, despite the disease, to
write two novels and thirty-two short stories, winning awards and acclaim, going on
speaking tours when her health permitted, but spending most of her time on the family
farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, with her mother. She died of lupus on August third,
1964 at the age of thirty-nine.

Flannery O'Connor remained a devout Catholic throughout, and this fact, coupled
with the constant awareness of her own impending death, both filtered through an
acute literary sensibility, gives us valuable insight into just what went into those
thirty-two short stories and the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as
something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a
force for good. At first it might seem that these aspects of her writing would detract
from, distort or mar the fiction they are wrapped up in, but in fact they only serve to
enhance it, to elevate the mundane, sometimes laughably pathetic events that move
her plots into sublime anti-parables, stories that show the way by elucidating the worst
of paths. What at first seem senseless deaths become powerful representations of the
swift justice of God; the self-deluded, prideful characters that receive the unbearable
revelation of their own shallow selves are being impaled upon the holy icicle of grace,
even if they are too stupid or lost to understand the great boon God is providing them.
Note these last lines from "The Enduring Chill": "...and the last film of illusion was
torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes....But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice
instead of fire, continued to descend." 1

Elements of Faith

Flannery O'Connor put much conscious thought into her dual role of Catholic and
fiction writer, and reading her written reflections on the matter reveals that she had
developed a whole literary philosophy devoted to reconciling the two, nay joining
them into a single unified force to "prove the truth of the Faith." She was well aware

20
of the pitfalls of preachiness, and warned the would-be Catholic novelist that "when
the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated
or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have
already been defeated." She advised the writer that "he himself cannot move or mold
reality in the interests of abstract truth," but assured him that he would "realize
eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them." 2

One such limitation was the representation of nature. O'Connor observed a

Manicheism in the mind of the average Catholic reader, resulting from a conceptual
separation between nature and grace in considerations of the supernatural, thus
rendering fictional experience of nature as either sentimental or obscene. "He would
seem to prefer the former," she tells us, but he "...forgets that sentimentality is an
excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on
innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human
condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite." 3 In this way,
pornography can be seen as ultimately sentimental, as it is sex extricated from its
essential purpose, the pain of childbirth and the beginning of long, arduous life.
Therefore O'Connor utilizes nature as a tool, a hard, sharp tool with which to hew and
chisel her work from the living rock of the real world. Nature imagery is everywhere
in O'Connor, and it is often used to reinforce the negativity of the lives and mental
states of her characters. In "A View of the Woods" we read of trees that are described
as "sullen" and "gaunt ," of "threadbare" clouds, and "indifferent" weather. Elsewhere,
human beings are described by way of animal imagery such as "large bug," "wheezing
horse," "hyena," "sheep," "crab," "goat," "dog," " buzzard," "monkey," and the like. 4
Nature in O'Connor's stories reflects mankind, in all his/its base nature, and it is by
keeping nature constantly in view that the author avoids the sentimental, as well as its
flipside, the obscene.

The novice reader of O'Connor may well wonder how her work, grotesque and violent
as it is, would be considered "Christian" or "Catholic" writing. On first perusal, with
its horrendous deaths, it's empty, cruel, narcissistic characters and depressing,
seemingly unresolved endings, it seems rather the opposite. What confuses the reader
at first is what Miss O'Connor referred to as her "reasonable use of the unreasonable,"
and the assumptions that underlie its use. "About this I can only say that there are
perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none other by
which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that
makes perception operate." 5 As to the, at times, extreme use of violence in her
writing, O'Connor's literary philosophy allowed for the use of it in the service of some
greater vision of spiritual reality. According to this philosophy, the man in a violent
situation reveals those aspects of his character that he will take with him into eternity;
hence the reader should approach the story by looking to such moments as an
opportunity to peer into the soul of the character.

This approach also borrows from German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899-1976)
and his concept of Dasein, being-there, wherein death represents the moment when a
man's existence becomes complete, for better or worse. Heideger was a definite
influence on O'Connor, and ideas such as this, as well as his concept that essential
truth is a mystery that pervades the whole of human existence, dovetail perfectly with
the larger theological interpretation of reality seen in her writing. The Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was also an influence, with his "Concept

21
of Dread" which examines the whole complex of sin and redemption. His theory, that
man's attempt to replace the Absolute with himself makes him pathetic and comical
but never tragic (as the tragic is reserved for loss of the religious dimension) is also
influential. In O'Connor, the religious dimension is never far off, her stories being set
in the Christ-haunted south where religion, whether one is a true believer of not, is a
part of the very landscape. Her narrative treatment of this dimension is subtle,
however, and therein lies the liability to overlook it and derive a strictly existential
reading. Other philosophers who influenced the thought and writing of Flannery
O'Connor include Sartre, Pascal, Merton, as well as theologians Saint Augustine,
Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. 6

Veering our critical analysis back to Christianity, let us examine how such
fundamental concepts as compassion, mystery, and anagogy are handled in O'Connor.

At first glance, one might find O'Connor to be somewhat less than compassionate
toward her characters, yet this, like so many first impressions, is mistaken; while
considerations of authorial intent are often discounted or discouraged in literary study,
with O'Connor awareness of such issues is a prerequisite for understanding her craft
and, as mentioned earlier, we are fortunate to have plenty of her own candid
discussions to help enlighten us in our attempts to interpret her writing. For instance:

It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have

compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth and
which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his
finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use.
Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human
weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion
demanded of the writer now makes it difficult to be anti-anything. 7
O'Connor is compassionate to her characters in that she gives them the opportunity of
receiving grace, however devastating that might be to their fragile self-images, as well
as their fragile mortal frames, for in O'Connor, grace often comes at the moment of
grisly death. Thus, as the bitter Mrs. May is impaled on the horn of the charging bull
at the close of "Greenleaf," we are told that "...she had the look of a person whose
sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable" and that "...she
seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last
discovery into the animal's ear." 8 Likewise the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard
to Find," just before she is shot to death by the fugitive killer The Misfit: "...the
grandmother's head cleared for an instant...she murmured, 'Why you're one of my
babies. You're one of my own children!'" She attempts to touch The Misfit's shoulder
and gets three bullets in the chest, along with his observation that "She would have
been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her
life." 9 This seems hard, but in fact it's true; the character of the grandmother is self-
centered and morally platitudinous, completely unaware spiritually. O'Connor
provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to
deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the
characters that are allowed to live that are the more to be pitied, for they are
confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted
lives, which they can no longer deny. They are stripped bare and flogged by the Truth,
much like O.E. Parker in "Parker's Back," a rural loser who attempts to regain his
pious wife's love by tattooing a huge Byzantine Jesus on his back, only to have her

22
whip it savagely with a broom. The last image we are given is that of O.E. "leaning
against the tree, crying like a baby." 10

Unsympathetic characters are often revealed in an entirely different light at story's

close. This is due to the transformation grace brings, however dubious the blessing
might seem. For in fact, according to O'Connor, as well as the Roman Catholic
Church, God's ways are essentially mysterious. The idea of mystery, not as literary
genre but as spiritual principle, looms large in her writing, both in her fiction and her
prose. For O'Connor, the purely secular novelist that strives after truth in fiction will
ultimately come up with only a kind of tragic naturalism, having missed the
overarching mystery of existence; the Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of
life, that there are certain things we are simply not meant to know, certain workings of
the cosmic machine that only God understands. O'Connor utilizes this as a plot option,
this mysterious, unexpected turn. She is not satisfied with the limitations of purely
realistic prose, being rather of the opinion that her kind of fiction "will always be
pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery." 11 For O'Connor, "the
meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and
adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted." 12 This is
not to suggest a kind of Christian fantasy, with angels appearing before men and
Satan around every corner; however, O'Connor's methodology "will use the concrete
in a more drastic way...the way of distortion." 13 These distortions will most likely be
of a sudden or explosive nature, as with the college freshman Mary Grace (note the
name) who suddenly pounces on, and proceeds to strangle, the loud and house-proud
Mrs. Turpin in the doctor's waiting room in "Revelation." Nothing supernatural, just
pure mayhem, but it certainly comes out of nowhere and takes the story into a totally
new direction, causing a dark and subtle realization within the mind of Mrs. Turpin
that she may well be what Mary Grace called her during their brief encounter, a "wart
hog from hell." This is the type of distortion O'Connor is talking about, unlikely
occurrences, yet not wholly beyond the scope of possibility, realistic enough to be
justified artistically.

As mentioned earlier, the triumph of Flannery O'Connor's writing lies in the balance
between the realistic and the anagogical. When posed with the question of what
makes a story work, Miss O'Connor replies, "it is probably some action or a gesture of
a character...which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be
one that was both in character and beyond character." 14 Such an action, for
O'Connor, must be significant both on a literary, as well as anagogical, level, the latter
pertaining to some divine truth, while not being in itself allegorical. The key is to
create a situation that defies "any neat allegory that might have been intended or any
pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made
contact with mystery." 15 And thus, we've come full circle to mystery. But
O'Connor's brand of literary interpretation of Christian mystery is so stylistically
water tight that one is often hard put to extrapolate the anagogical significance. Take
for example the instance of the grandmother's gesture mentioned above from "A Good
Man is Hard to Find." At the moment when she realizes that she is tied to the Misfit
with a bond of mystery to which she has only ever paid lip service, she does the right
thing, she utters the first honest words she has said to him in their brief encounter, and
reaches out. However, the fact that this does nothing to save her, that she is
immediately shot for her trouble, is where the reader is likely to be thrown off. This is
Miss O'Connor's pride as a writer, for which she had been, in her day, criticized by the

23
more orthodox elements in the church who would, no doubt, have wanted a clearer
moral position to emerge from her work. This is a detail to keep in mind later in this
thesis, when we go into our examination of her treatment of the sin of pride.

Elements of Style

Having looked somewhat at the morbidly Catholic mindset that is the essential
infrastructure supporting the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, let us move on to those
techniques and idiosyncrasies that make up her writing style.

It should be said at the outset that O'Connor is not as "colorful" or "lyrical" as other
writers in the great Southern Gothic tradition, although she did share their fascination
with the grotesque. Along with her more conservative Catholic detractors (mentioned
above), who find, as critic Melvin J. Friedman puts it, "her brand of Catholicism not
orthodox enough," there are also the more "'textual' literary critics who find her
language too bare and her experiments with structure not eccentric enough." 16 This
last comment points to what I would refer to as a Cult of Eccentricity in literary
academia that obsesses on the obscure, the abstruse, the vague, and the confusing in
literature in what is, by now, a reflexive effort to legitimize literature study by making
it as difficult as possible to understand. It is reflexive, in that it is no longer necessary,
as it once was, some 100 years ago, when the study of literature still sought
legitimacy among the accepted academic disciplines. But nevertheless, the good news
is that O'Connor's genius is recognized and accepted by the bulk of the intelligencia,
proving the truth of the motto, "less is more." For this truly is the secret weapon in her
stylistic arsenal: a stark, spartan, perhaps dour, possibly mundane regularity, a
steadiness in the narrative that at times may seem plodding to the neophyte reader, yet
all the while something is bubbling beneath the lid; at any moment, the pot is likely to
boil over, even spew forth something unexpected and, usually, profoundly disturbing.

Also significant in the writing style of Flannery O'Connor is a tendency to take on the
character point of view in the narrative. However, it is done in such a way that
although the omniscient third-person narrator takes on the particular viewpoint of the
character in question while describing this or that, the effect is more of a mirror than
an advocate. For example:

He knew, of course, that his mother would not understand the letter at once.
Her literal mind would require some time to discover the significance of it, but
he thought she would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to
him. 17

When people think they are smart--even when they are smart--there is nothing
anybody else can say to make them see things straight, and with Asbury, the trouble
was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. 18

In these quotes from "The Enduring Chill," the use of "of course" and "literal" are
reflecting the point of view of the son, Asbury, in the first passage, and the business
about being smart is clearly the mother's opinion in the second, but within the context
of the story, as the description shifts democratically throughout, O'Connor's narrative
maintains it's impartiality while emphasizing the viewpoint of it's various characters.

24
This technique lends itself to greater economy of description and exposition, therefore
making it perfectly suited to the short story genre.

One feature of O'Connor's writing which is none-too-subtle on the Christian fiction

front is her use of character names. The worst offender seems to be the
aforementioned Mary Grace, the overweight messenger of doom that hurls a book at
the head of the pompous Mrs. Turpin and then proceeds to throttle her severely. Other
such tell-tale names include O.E. Parker (for Obadiah Elihue, a prophet and a friend
of Job respectively), Mr. Fortune, Mrs. Cope, Joy Hopewell (a 32-year-old embittered
Ph.D. with a wooden leg who changes her name to Hulga because it sounds uglier),
Sheppard, old Tanner, the list goes on. Most names are ironic rather than symbolic,
such as Sheppard, a naive man whose lack of judgement leads to the suicide of his
son, or Joy Hopewell, who is joyless, hopeless, and unwell. The fact that the names
are most usually a mockery of the characters adds to the cryptic Christianity that
characterizes O'Connor's work.

There is in O'Connor what I would term an exquisite gelidity, an icy quality that I
cannot help but attribute in part to her awareness of her own encroaching mortality.
From all accounts, her personality was laconic and droll, self-possessed. Her religion
gave her strength, but little joy. For O'Connor, salvation was ice, not fire, as is made
clear in "The Enduring Chill," a story that concerns a young intellectual named
Asbury who is convinced that he is about to die. Perhaps I've read too much into this
little story, but for me it resonates with a certain despair not present in the other works
I've read, which I attribute to the author's own despair at watching what was really
every writer's dream career (early recognition, critical acclaim, awards, speaking
engagements, readings) rapidly waste away from the lupus she'd inherited from her
father. For me, the most chilling aspect of the story is the description of a prophetic
water stain above Asbury's bed:

Descending from the top molding, long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and,
directly over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce bird with spread
wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak and there were smaller icicles depending
from its wings and tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always irritated
him and sometimes had frightened him. He had often had the illusion that it was in
motion and about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head. He closed his
eyes and thought: I won't have to look at it for many more days. 19

As the reader will recall from the beginning of this thesis, the same ice bird is recalled
at the end of the story, this time as the Holy Ghost, bearing down on Asbury in all its
fierce icy wrath.

Thematic Elements

Of the various themes of the writing of Flannery O'Connor, perhaps the most
fascinating and certainly one of the most discussed, it that of the grotesque. Critic
Gilbert H. Muller compares the grotesque imagery of O'Connor with that of the
Millennium triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, going on to state that "for these two
artists, the grotesque does not function gratuitously, but in order to reveal underlying
and essentially theological concepts." 20 Indeed, the various grotesque characters
serve both as an example of the folly of denying the true religion and as, in some

25
cases, Christ figures themselves. O'Connor rejoins with, "In any case, it is when the
freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some
depth in literature." 21

This concept of "displacement" runs throughout O'Connor's work, and it is essentially

a displacement from the world of the one true God, a theological displacement,
although within the context of the story it is more social, based on the nature of the
freak's position in the society. In the case of the Polish immigrant Guizac in "The
Displaced Person," it is his foreignness, the fact that he is an outsider perceived as a
threat by the various rural types in the story, that makes him a freak. Yet he winds up
becoming a kind of Christ figure when he is crushed by a tractor that is "allowed" to
roll over him, essentially crucifying him. Other freaks include the club-footed Rufus
Johnson ("The Lame Shall Enter First), the wooden-legged Joy/Hulga Hopewell
("Good Country People"), the nymphomaniacal Sarah Ham ("The Comforts of
Home), and the retarded and deaf Lucynell Crater ("The Life You Save May Be Your
Own").

Very often, the grotesque elements of O'Connor's stories are balanced out by
anagogical ones. Again, the latter are not specifically symbols, for symbols work
contextually to represent interactive story elements, whereas O'Connor's anagogical
elements are just there, they wander in and out of the action; they may have symbolic
significance, but it never comes directly into play as a plot element. They are there as
reminders of the presence of the unseen, mysterious God. "These liturgical objects,"
says Muller, "whether a peacock in 'The Displaced Person,' a water stain in 'The
Enduring Chill,' or a tattoo in 'Parker's Back,' permit Flannery O'Connor to neutralize
the world of the grotesque and to clarify those mysteries which serve as an antidote to
it." 22

Facing death is another thematic element that recurs often in O'Connor, for obvious
reasons, both personal and religious. Her "affliction, which she carried with her
during the major part of her literary career, forced a certain austerity upon her fiction;
inevitably she transferred personal agony and suffering to her work." 23 O'Connor
admits as much herself, in an essay in which she discusses "A Good Man is Hard to
Find": "The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position
life offers the Christian. She is facing death." 24 This last quote speaks volumes; it is
probably the single most significant and telling remark the student of Flannery
O'Connor can have in his attempt to understand her work. Clearly facing death as a
Christian was the motivational engine that drove her writing, and the theme that
emerged from it often, as is common in O'Connor, got turned on its head, becoming
stories in which people are facing death not as Christians. Perhaps this was
O'Connor's catharsis, her solace, that however terrified she was at the prospect of her
own looming death, at least she was prepared, at least she wouldn't wind up like the
grotesque wretches that peopled her stories.

In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor writes, "There is a

moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be
accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment." 25 We
touched briefly on the concept of grace earlier, and a more in-depth discussion is
necessary here, when considering thematic elements, because just as the idea of grace
figures prominently in Catholicism, so it does in O'Connor. Critic Carter W. Martin

26
notes, "Most of the short stories are constructed in such a way as to dramatize the
sinfulness and the need for grace..." and goes on to delineate two different kinds of
grace normally received by the characters, "prevenient grace- which moves the will
spontaneously, making it incline to God--and illuminating grace, by which God
enlightens men to bring them nearer to eternal life." That is to say either a kind of
spark that ignites a low smolder of realization, or full-blown revelation. Usually the
character "recognizes his need for repentance and either accepts or ignores the
opportunity. In a few stories there is no indication as to the response of the character
to his new insight." 26 The latter is the case in "Parker's Back," "The Enduring Chill,"
and "Good Country People" among others.

O'Connor is willing to go to draconian lengths to mete out her particular brand of

divine grace, utilizing such techniques as matricide, strangulation, suicide, impaling,
beating, shooting, and whipping, to name a few. "I have found that violence is
strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept
their moment of grace," she tells us. She goes on to explain that "This idea, that
reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is
seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian
view of the world." 27 To sum up, "I have found, in short, from reading my own
writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the
devil." 28

Notes

1 Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 114.

2 Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 145-6.
3 ibid., p. 147.
4Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (eds.), The Added Dimension: The Art
and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, p. 164.
5 O'Connor, op. cit., p. 109.
6 James A. Grimshaw, Jr., The Flannery O'Connor Companion, p. 96-9.
7 O'Connor, op. cit., p. 43.
8 O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 53.
9 O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, p. 29.
10 O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 244.
11 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 41
12 ibid., p. 41-2.
13 ibid., p. 42.
14 ibid., p. 111.
15 ibid., p. 111.
16 Friedman and Lawson, op. cit., p. 2.
17 O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 91.
18 ibid., p. 87.
19 ibid., p. 93.
20 Gilbert H. Muller, Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic
Grotesque, p. 5.
21 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 45.

27
22 Muller, op. cit., p. 111.
23 ibid., p. 2.
24 O'Connor, op. cit., p. 110.
25 ibid., p. 118.
26Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor,
p. 105.
27 O'Connor, op. cit., p. 112.
28 ibid., p. 118.

Bibliography

Friedman, Melvin J. and Lawson, Lewis A., Eds., The Added Dimension: The
Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, New York, Fordham University
Press, 1977.

Grimshaw, James A., The Flannery O'Connor Companion, Westport, CT, Greenwood
Press, 1981.

Martin, Carter W., The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor,
Kingsport, TN, Kingsport Press, Inc., 1969.

Muller, Gilbert H., Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic
Grotesque, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 1972.

O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Orlando, FL,
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanoivch, 1955.

O'Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rises Must Converge, New York, Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1956.

O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners, Fitzgerald, Sally and Robert, Eds.,
New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961.

©1996 Patrick Galloway

Pat's Lit Page

Flannery O’Connor: Heaven Suffereth Violence

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions;
there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the
angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the
treasuries of grace—all things are there.
—Psuedo-Macarius 1

28
 Years ago, an acquaintance made an interesting
statement: concerning one’s appearance, he said that it really isn’t so much a matter of
how good-looking one is as how distinctive are one’s features; to him, this was the
single most important ingredient for the power of attraction one holds over others.
The same could be said for the literary world, for while all good literature alike
embraces the universal truths of what it means to be a human being—to love, to hate,
to yearn, to hope, to live, to die—it is often the pieces with special distinction that
stand out most in our minds. 2 A case in point is the work of late American author
Flannery O’Connor.

O’Connor’s short stories, set almost entirely in the South shortly

after World War II, carry both distinction and memorability, easily bringing to mind
the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Much of Rockwell’s subject matter consists of
rough-hewn, backwoods people, would-be Southern belles, youngsters with knobby
knees and freckles—in a word, simple small-town folks—much like the characters of
O’Connor. Further, when Rockwell paints, he has the amazing ability to capture the
awkwardness of humanity in exaggerated yet convincing ways, as does O’Connor
with her verbal caricatures. Given that O’Connor never abandoned a long-time
interest in producing cartoon characters, such an analogous parallel is afforded further
warrant, Rockwell providing the near-perfect pictorial bridge between O’Connor’s
prints and her prose. Yet comparing Flannery O’Conner’s caricatures to Norman
Rockwell paintings is still a somewhat inadequate description. While some of
Rockwell’s characters had a grotesque quality about them, it is deathly paled to
O’Connor’s use of violence as a common motif within the so-called Southern Gothic
genre she embodied.

We said O’Connor was interested in creating cartoons: her preferred method was a
technique called linocut 3 in which an artist etches linoleum to produce a print relief;
she acquired this skill between 1939 and 1942 while attending the Peabody
Laboratory (High) School in Milledgeville, Georgia. She also served as the arts editor
for the school’s newsletter The Palladium, a publication frequently adorned with her
artwork.

It was apparently during this Milledgeville period that her first cartoons were
published, though she did not have much overall success with the medium. 4 Her next

29
cartooning stint came when she enrolled in Georgia State College for Women
(GSCW), where she was arts editor of The Colonnade, the bi-weekly newspaper that
featured her cartoons until her graduation in 1945. The professors at GSCW, however,
treated cartooning contemptuously, an irritation to O’Connor, who could see no
difference in the relative status between this medium, her painting, and her literary
endeavors. 5

Her senior year she was appointed as the features editor of GSCW’s yearbook The
Spectrum, a post in which she abandoned linocut methodologies in favor of
splattering pages with her more conventional charcoal or ink renditions. It was during
this same year that her role as author began to emerge to the fore, particularly when
she became editor of the campus literary magazine The Corinthian, though even here,
she could not resist the temptation to adorn the paper’s pages of poetry and prose with
linocut and spot illustration. The apex of her college career arrived when she was
inaugurated into the Phoenix Society, an honor conferred only GSCW’s crème de la
crème. 6 She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social science, a fitting field of
study for one soon to achieve such great renown for her clever caricatures of
humanity.

Moving on to the Writer’s Workshop at the then State University of Iowa (now the
University of Iowa), she dropped her first name, Mary, in favor of the shortened
Flannery O’Connor by which we know her best today. 7 Writing—short stories and a
burgeoning novel—was increasingly becoming her central focus, though even here
American political cartoons and advanced courses in drawing were a staple in her
curriculum.

In 1951, she was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the terminal disease that had
fatally smitten her father just ten years earlier. In light of this discovery, she
concentrated her efforts on contributing what she could to the world, knowing the
sword of Damocles hung precariously over her head by its proverbial thread. 8 On
August 3, 1964, the silver cord was severed, claiming O’Connor at the age of 39. 9, 10

The description of “Southern Gothic” applied to O’Connor’s prose is itself

interesting: she was born in Savannah, a town nearly 160 miles away from
Milledgeville, where the O’Connors lived until Flannery was twelve. The little town
with its “sloping trees draped with Spanish Moss that appear almost as ornaments”
and “its picturesque carriage rides” sports the skyscraping Cathedral of St. John the
Baptist directly across the square from Flannery’s childhood home. 11 Every day that
young Mary Flannery looked up, its lofty Gothic presence was certain to be there,
soaring high above in the Southern sky, a mental image further reinforced by the
family’s frequenting there and its centrality to her enrollment in parochial training at
St. Vincent’s and Sacred Heart. 12

That Flannery was a devout Christian of the Roman Catholic faith, seeing it as the
towering mystery overarching her Southern “storyscapes,” there is no doubt. Perhaps
the most widely quoted self-description of her own writing is from her essay “The
Fiction Writer and His Country”:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find modern life distortions which are
repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an

30
audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take
ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you
can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little
and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not,
then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you
shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. 13

An examination of O’Connor’s stories soon reveals many such recurrent themes:

disfigurement, shallowness, pettiness, naïveté, hypocrisy, and an overall ugliness,
badness, and meanness of character woven together into a sort of dark comedy.
Almost always, some shocking act of violence acts as the catalyst by which the
protagonists are forced to face their own inner poverty. In this regard, she has much in
common with Søren Kierkegaard, the late nineteenth-century Danish thinker hailed as
the father of existentialism.

Kierkegaard was especially drawn to themes of self-sacrifice and salvific suffering, in

no little part due to his Lutheran father’s own obsessions with the Christian faith.
Much like Flannery’s method of approach, his writings were not immediately obvious
in their orthodox underpinnings, for he employed what he defined as “indirect
communication”; that is, he painted predicaments that only the Christian answer could
satisfy fully rather than offering pious solutions. “An illusion can never be destroyed
directly,” he wrote, “and only by indirect means can it be radically removed.” 14 In
this way, he endeavored to indirectly point the reader toward Christ, the only answer
he believed would ever afford any lasting meaning or solution.

Like the Danish philosopher, on one level O’Connor was very adamant that her
stories function first and foremost as just that: stories. Her patience wore thin when
people tried to dissect her writing in order to condense it down into a fixed meaning;
much like Kierkegaardian existentialism, she maintained that the meaning of a story
was to be found in the story itself: in “an experience, not an abstraction.” 15 Yet on
another level akin to Kierkegaard the Christian theologian there was a deeper meaning
being conveyed: one that portrayed her world-view with startling clarity, once
understood.

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way,” she writes, “and
it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.” 16 Only after one has read
and enjoyed the story for the story’s sake can one begin to go through the process of
understanding, an act O’Connor saw as being far removed from understanding itself.
17
Such a process entails discussing the story and mulling over its particulars to be
certain, but it does not involve isolating a meaning apart from the story; rather the
meaning becomes the story’s natural extension just as we would lose something if we
crushed a flower to get at its fragrance; rather, we best enjoy its aroma—along with its
natural beauty—precisely because it is the flower that it is.

Yet not all is rose-colored in O’Connnor’s work. She describes her characters as being
so hardheaded that nothing short of an act of violence will give them pause to
critically examine their lives. Over and above this climatic use of aggression, violence
has its heavenly parallels as well, for, as she alludes to in the words of Jesus: “From
the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and
the violent take it by force.” 18 Such a mixture of ferocity and faith is O’Connor’s

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recipe for the distinction that makes her stand out from autres—her fellow men and
women of letters—whether we call her power one of attraction or its inverse.

Perhaps most interesting to O’Connor was the essential mystery of life, a theme
implicit in even the most grotesque elements of her tales. In “A Reasonable Use of the
Unreasonable,” O’Connnor speaks of her quest to understand the mechanism and
mystery behind a good story:

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and
I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is
unlike any other in the story, one which indicated where the real heart of the story
lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and
totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond
character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture
I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which
has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that
transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral
categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact
with reality. 19

In the same essay, she describes belief “as the engine which makes perception
operate”; seeing the world as she does through the eyes of Christian orthodoxy, the
temporal realm of man and the eternal realm of God are inextricably linked. This
union of earthly and Divine is to her an almost unfathomable enigma, and it is by the
light of this sacred mystery that she weaves her Southern yarns.

The shy, introverted Southern girl who died young and never married viewed life
through the peculiar child-eyes of faith, wonder, and mystery—and a strange twist of
macabre. When she cast her gaze about, she had an eye for the unusual and a gift for
being able to capture it, be that through her linocut, painting, or prose. Perhaps she
understood well what my acquaintance told me so many years ago: it isn’t so much
about pleasant appearances, but about distinction. Is this why her stories stick in one’s
mind so, troubling one, compelling one to pause and reflect on life from rarefied
angles of distinction only O’Connor could capture with her unique perspective of the
world, filtered through the shallow caricatured Southerners of her imagination with all
their many maladies and faith afflictions? Could there be something to this
Kiekegaardian idea of “indirect communication” after all? Is existence more
meaningful than the abstractions we supply it? is truth more than dogma? So many
mysteries ripped open, their innards spilling out, the blood-red sunrise casting its
ghastly hue on the reader’s face, twisted and contorted purple, looking for all the
world like a man gasping for his last dying breath, until at last falling upon his ears he
hears “the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting
hellelujah.” 20

Hellelujah to the Highest, indeed!

Endnotes:
1
Cited in: Norris, Kathleen. “Good Old Sin.” 125. The Cloister Walk. Qtd. in:
Knickerbocker, Eric. “Age of Auden, Part II.” 01 Mar. 2002. Mr. Renaissance. 20
April 2002. http://www.mrrena.com/2002/auden2.shtml.

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2
On this note, psychologists have explored many of the different ways in which
memory is encoded and recalled. Researchers Craik and Lockhart have developed a
“levels of processing theory” that speculates that the more deeply we digest the
sensory information around us, the more deeply embedded the memory of the
experience becomes in our minds. The more senses actively engaged in the process,
the more deeply is the “elaboration” involved. It is also believed that when we
sometimes fail to remember something, it is because we did not use effective retrieval
cues. The more unique a given memory is, the more likely it will be called to mind
with specific triggers. Blander and less memorable events tend to become
disorganized over time, their “cues” tangled in a mass of confusion. (Halonen, Jane
S., and John W. Santrock. Psychology: Contexts and Applications. Boston: McGraw-
Hill, 1999. 200–02, 210.)
3
“The Life of Flannery O’Connor.” Hogan’s Alley Online. 11 April 2002.
http://www.gographics.com/funnies/flann1.htm. (URL now obsolete.)
4
According to the entry “Linocut” from the Italian company Chalcos Arte:

Linoleum is made of a combination of linseed oil, ground cork, and gum spread on a
canvas or burlap backing, creating a smooth, compact surface that can easily be
engraved using gouges. This technique is not different from woodcut as the finished
prints have the same aspect, but linoleum is easier to work than wood, as there are no
knots and it is flexible, offering itself to fluid, spontaneous drawings. This material
was patented by F. Walton in 1863 and has been used to make matrices for relief
printing since the first years of this century.

See http://www.chalcos.it/technique/linocut.htm for additional information on this

technique.
5
“The Life of Flannery O’Connor.” Hogan’s Alley Online. 11 April 2002.
http://www.gographics.com/funnies/flann5.htm. (URL now obsolete.)
6
Ibid. http://www.gographics.com/funnies/flann3.htm. (URL now obsolete.)
7
Ibid. http://www.gographics.com/funnies/flann4.htm. (URL now obsolete.)
8
Damocles. Fourth century B.C. Greek courtier to Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of
Syracuse, who according to legend was forced to sit at a banquet table under a sword
suspended by a single hair to demonstrate the precariousness of a king’s fortunes.
(Entry: “ Damocles.” Dictionary.com.)
Other accounts picture him finally sitting in the seat he so covets; needless to say,
in these accounts, his delight is cut short when he happens to glance up and see the
instrument of death suspended precariously over his head. Never was there a happier
courtier that returned throne to rightful master than the moment Damocles’ agreed-
upon day of rule was ended, his pride perhaps the only thing keeping him from
relinquishing sooner. Humbled, he became one of Dionysius’ best courtiers.
9
Ecclesiastes 12:6.
10
“The Life of Flannery O’Connor.” Hogan’s Alley Online. 11 April 2002.
http://www.gographics.com/funnies/flann2.htm. (URL now obsolete.)
11
McGovern, Linda. “A Good Writer is Hard to Find: The Search for Flannery
O’Connor.” Literary Traveler. 11 April 2002.
http://www.literarytraveler.com/summer/south/oconnor.htm. (This article also offers
an interesting Jungian analysis of O’Connor’s use of violence—definitely a
recommended read.)
12
Ibid.
13
Qtd. in: Barnet, Silvia, Morton Berman, William Burto, et al. An Introduction to

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Literature. New York: Longman, 2001. 246–7.
14
Jacobs, Alan. “Auden and the Limits of Poetry.” First Things. 115 (Aug./Sept.
2001): 26–32. http://www.mrrena.com/2002/auden1.shtml.
15
O’Connor, Flannery. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” An Introduction to
Literature. New York: Longman, 2001. 248.
16
Ibid. “Writing Short Stories.” 248.
17
Ibid. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” 247.
18
Ibid. “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable.” 251. ( Matthew 11:12—KJV.)
19
Ibid. “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable.” 250.
20
Ibid. “Revelation.” 246.

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