What kind of genteel and educated Southern lady would write a story about a traveling Bible salesman who steals a girl’s wooden leg? About a polite murderer called The Misfit who executes a family of five, including children and a grandmother?

The Milledgeville home of O'Connor's maternal grandmother. It served as the governor's mansion
when Milledgeville was the Confederate capital of Georgia.

One of the best introductions to the mind and personality of Flannery O'Connor is The Habit of Being, her posthumous letters. We see her writing from her mother's farm, and, as lupus occupies her body, becoming less mobile but just as cheerful, funny, and gracious. She read the Atlanta Constitution and kept up with the world of the absurd: infants' names that had to be read to be believed, the attendance of Roy Rogers' horse at a church service in California, the award of first prize in an amateur talent contest to a beribboned seven-year-old singing "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." She could write a courteous but steely letter to a publisher when he proposed to "work with her" to change the direction of her first book. She could be appalled at an English teacher who laid an allegorical matrix on "A Good Man." One wise friend complained that "any nut could write her and get an answer." She wrote in a country idiom or in a more learned style.

To Robert Lowell: "I'm glad you liked the story. That is my contribution to Mother's Day throughout the land. I felt I ought to do something like Senator Pappy O'Daniels.* He conducted the Light Crust Doughboys over the radio every mother's day and recited an original poem. One went: 'I had a mother. I had to have. I lover whether she's good or bad. I lover whether she's live or dead. Whether she's an angel or an old dope head.' You poets express yourselves so well in so little space."

Here is a sample of her serious style:
" Recently I talked in Macon (where nobody had ever heard tell of me, of course**), and it was announced in the paper the next day that I was 'a writer of the realistic school.' I presume the lady came to the conclusion after looking at the cover of the drugstore edition of Wise Blood... I am interested in making up a good case for distortion [i.e., the grotesque], as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see."

In terms of her place in modern literature, she doesn't use stream of consciousness technique. Hers is always a straightforward narrative, no more modern than Stephen Crane's, who died in l900. She hasn't added much to literature in terms of different ways to tell a story, in the way that writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. have. She never uses first person narration self-characterization. She almost always uses third person omniscient. Her technique is simple-- her genius is in her subject matter, her symbolism, her satire, and her vision.

Familiar southern types, regional settings, mainly rural, with forays into the provincial city, the grotesque--these are some characteristics of Southern writing you have already seen in Welty. But O'Connor did not want to become a regional writer. "In almost every hamlet you'll find at least one lady writing epics in Negro dialect and probably two or three old gentlemen who have historical novels on the way. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious southern writer that he will become one of them." The great ones, most students of literature believe, work on mythic, universal levels. Kate Chopin, for example, transcended the milieu she wrote about, the wealthy Creole class in Louisiana.

As Barbara MacKenzie points out in her collection of photographs of O’Connor’s Georgia, O'Connor brings to mind two Georgias: the Georgia of ignorance, and poverty, and the Georgia of education and affluence. She grew up in the latter, but she wrote about the former. It’s very important, however, to understand that she never makes fun of poverty or class; she makes fun of secular pride, a sin that infects all classes.

She was from an old Georgia Catholic family, born in coastal Savannah. Then her parents moved inland to Milledgeville, the old Georgia capital before the Civil War, where she also went to college. After her father died young, she and her mother lived on a working dairy farm outside of Milledgeville. Wise Blood is dedicated to Regina. Later, O’Connor studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. The text was Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction; now her "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is included in the anthology. She died at 38 of a then incurable blood cancer, disseminated lupus, which she inherited from her father Edward O’Connor.

Combining the comic and the serious is a chief characteristic of O'Connor and one of the sources of the great tension in her plots, usually resolved by catastrophe or death. The Misfit amuses with his unexpected courtesy, but the threat he poses is very real. She says in the author's note to Wise Blood that all comic novels that are any good must be about life and death. Here are some manifestations of her duality. First, she raised peafowl. (As a child, she had a forwards-backwards chicken that was featured on Pathé newsreels throughout the country). The peacock’s tail is a glorious sight, a symbol in "Displaced Person" of the resurrection. In that story, the priest sees the "tiers of small pregnant suns" in "a green gold haze over his head." "Christ will come like that," he prophesizes. A telephone repairman, having waited at the farm a long time to see the tail, said, "Never saw such long ugly legs."

Second, O’Connor was a cartoonist in high school and college. Many felt she would be a professional. She is master of the quick brush stroke, the instant characterization like the "three youngish women dressed like parrots" in the opening scene of Wise Blood.

Third, her attitude towards her disease displays her ability to live with disease and ambiguity. Publicly, she downplayed her blood cancer. "I write from nine to twelve, and spend the rest of the day recuperating from it." She rarely complained, but the disease did reduce her output and she realized that her life would be cut short.

Partly because of her disease and partly because of her Catholic emphasis on the teleological***, Flannery O’Connor writes of omnipresent death and disaster. Her fiction is characterized by violence, anhilation, and, very importantly, the sober moment of the final crisis in which sometimes the character has a "moment of grace," as O’Connor said of the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find. " "I'm a born Catholic and death has always been brother to my imagination. I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or its foreshadowings."

O’Connor’s faith needs to be understood in order to understand her stories, but does a reader have to be a Christian to understand her vision?As an avowedly Christian writer, O’Connor is interested in faith, theology, and philosophy. Like many Christian novelists (Graham Greene, for example, in End of the Affair) she is also very interested in faith’s cousin, doubt. She used to read St. Thomas Aquinas for bedtime reading. On her bedside table in Milledgeville were a breviary, a missal, and a Bible. She wrote the way she did, she said, because she was a Roman Catholic.

What exactly does Wise Blood or the short fiction have to do with Catholicism? Where is the Pope, the priest, the Holy Eucharist, St. Lucy's Day, etc.? (Aside: O'Connor helped a convent in Atlanta founded by one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughters). In fact, the local people, most of them Protestants, got kind of grumpy when O'Connor started getting well-known as a writer. They said, if she wants to write about crazies, why doesn't she write about Catholics? Why make fun of Protestants? O'Connor does make fun of people, but not because they are Protestants. She writes about Protestants because they dominate the spiritual landscape in the South, and because she is interested in religious intensity, which she finds more among the store-front worshippers than First Baptists or Presbyterians. In fact, she even finds it among athiests. She is writing, she says, about Christianity to a post-Christian audience. The grotesque becomes one of her major techniques because she knows that shock, not sermons or theology, will move her audience.

O’Connor placed herself as a southern Catholic. Her Milledgeville home, purchased by her maternal grandfather in late 80's, was the governor's mansion during the Confederacy. The first mass in Milledgeville took place in her great-grandfather's hotel room; the land for the present church donated by an ancestor. Her faith was an intense commitment. On the eucharist, she commented: "If it were only a symbol, I'd say to hell with it." A more extended comment: "I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction." She adds, "I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery."

Her message is ecumenical, however. The old issues of sin and salvation, the apathy and pride which destroy the secular city, and the need for a transcendent vision. She said, "I will admit to certain preoccupations with belief and with death and grace and the devil."

Hulga Joy Hopewell, the Misfit, a one-armed carpenter, "blind" preachers, deaf philanthropists, a clubfooted child genius, a steward who moves "like a crow," three young women dressed like parrots: these are some of O’Connor’s grotesques. Asa Hawks has the expression of a grinning mandrill. Enoch looks like a friendly hound dog with light mange. A woman on the steps looks at Haze with "bright flea eyes." The museum guard, in a uniform like Haze's, looks like a "dried-up spider stuck there." Often bodily imperfection is a way of making moral deficiency more dramatic. O’Connor disliked the term "Southern gothic," insisting on a difference between the grotesque and the gothic: the grotesque makes a moral point; the Gothic simply entertains. The most important thing to remember about O’Connor’s grotesque is that it depends on the comic and the terrible–combining the monster and the clown. When the befuddled Enoch puts on the Conga costume, we see an example of the monster-clown, the fierce looking ape propelled by a country bumpkin.

Here are some more examples. On the gothic cathedral Notre Dame in Paris, the gargoyles grin. O’Connor’s Misfit amuses with his discourses on theology, but his threat is very real. The grotesque may produce the emotion of terror in the reader as we recognize our own potential involvement with evil, just as the gargoyles were meant to remind worshippers of their own original sin.

O'Connor has another take on the grotesque that is very important to understand. Many of her characters are grotesque in a Christian sense. These are everyday, middle-class people who are neither sinners nor saints. Their sins remain uncovered until a crisis effects exposure. Their initial fault is lack of faith. The actual grotesqueness is apathy. In "Greenleaf, " for example, O’Connor’s narrator describes a character: "She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe that any of it was true." This woman belongs to what the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard described as "Christendom," the culture of nominal Christians, which he contrasts to New Testament Christianity.

Many of O’Connor’s nominal Christians are quite satisfied with themselves because they believe themselves to be respectably pious. On the other hand, because of the world's apathy, those who are zealous are looked upon as grotesques by the world. Hazel Motes, is a prime example. Of course, the way hard believers express their commitment is often highly comic, as when Haze dons a preacher’s outfit but insists that he does not believe. His conversion comes after the destruction of his ridiculous car, a material icon that he thinks "justifies" him. O'Connor's ultimate finding is that we are all grotesque-we are all imperfect reflections of a divine ideal.

In Wise Blood you will encounter two seekers: Haze and Enoch. The first seeks religious truths, the second pleasure. The name "Haze Motes" suggests a dimness of vision. And both seekers encounter false prophets: Hoover Shoats, his prophet clone, and Asa Hawks. They also encounter the flesh in the persons of Mrs. Leora Watts and Sabbath Hawks. Further, they encounter the deadness of the world, the deadness of the City of Man, The Secular City. Enoch embraces the city; Haze despises it. Asa Hawks pretends to live in the City of God but in fact is a hustler in Taulkenten.

The waitress at the Frosty Bottle (an early version of Burger King-Carl’s Jr-- screams at Haze: "What do you think I care! Why should I give a goddam what you are!" Of the two, only Haze seems to understand the distinction Saint Augustine made between the deadness of the City of Man before the eternal City of God. Taulkinham symbolizes the deadness of the great modern creation, the city with its "white houses each sitting with ugly dog faces on a square of grass. "

O'Connor disparages two keystones of contemporary secular religion, or the worship of material possessions: the city and the automobile. Enoch thinks of the auto as a seduction aid--"You ought to paint you some signs on the outside it, like "Step-in baby."

Haze’s redemption begins in earnest when his Essex drowns.

O'Connor knew that she was writing to a post-Christian audience, one whose temple was to become the mall and the multiplex. (The Bakersfield Edwards Cinema, now in bankruptcy, is situated like a town cathedral in Mexico in the shopping mall called "The Marketplace": the structure features two or three stories and a huge steeple. Wise Blood was published in l952. The Korean War had been going on and the despairing WWI novel From Here to Eternity had been published a year earlier. Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano. Another first novel, Invisible Man. Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. All of these works questioned the values of a consumer society.

The Eisenhower-Nixon years are marked by a post-war prosperity and a national complacency typified in the wildly popular I Love Lucy, with national attention focused inward on zany and inconsequential family antics. O'Connor takes on the quietism of the 50's that was analyzed in such classics as the novel Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and in sociological studies such as The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man.

At the same time, Americans were apprehensive that the Cold War would shoot up in flames, a fear that reached its peak during the Cuban Missle Crisis. Her fiction never deals with politics directly, does not mention Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. At the same time, one of the pervasive archetypes in the fiction is the invasion, something that parallels society’s fear of an invasion from Mars or Russian submarines.This is the pattern behind "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "The Displaced Person," and especially "A Circle in the Fire."

In her preface to a second edition of Wise Blood, O’Connor writes that for some, Haze's "integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author [Flannery O’Connor] Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to." The ragged figure is the Christ who haunts Haze; secularists think that such "haunting" is physologically damaging. Unlike many modern writers who claim that God has turned his back on man, O'Connor believes that the opposite is true.

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** Milledgeville is only about fifty miles from Macon, a large city that served as the setting for the film version of Wise Blood.

Study Questions for O'Connor's Short Fiction

These questions apply to these stories: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "The River," "A Circle in the Fire," "A Late Encounter with the Enemy,' "Good Country People," and "The Displaced Person."

1. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The grandmother claims to be a religious person? Is she? Do her son and daughter-in-law make such claims? Are they religious? The Misfit claims to be religious. Is he?

2. A critic has suggested that the boy in "The River" is better off dead than living with his parents. What does the critic mean?

"Couple in Westchester County New York, l965," photograph by Diane Arbus. What is grotesque about this rather normal suburban set-up?

3. What does "Circle in the Fire" suggest about our romantic notions of childhood innocence? Are the three intruders Huckleberry Finns? Does O'Connor suggest that their behavior is socially induced or the product of sin?

4. Why should Mrs. Cope [what a name!] be singled out for such vicious treatment? Like O'Connor's own mother, she's just a widow trying to run a farm. What is Mrs. Pritchard's role in the story?

5. O'Connor obviously has in mind the Atlanta premier of "Gone with the Wind," published just ten years before her birth. Apart from a perhaps misguided pride in a mytholgical past, what kind of complacencies do the characters in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" exhibit?

6. Can you analyze the various episodes of violence in the stories? How do we know that the violence is purposeful rather than gratuitous?

7. Hulga is obviously possessed of an enhanced ego. Are the other characters also very satisfied with their own intelligence and kowledge? Analyze the "seduction" scene in detail. What is taken from Hulga besides her wooden leg? In orthodox Christian theology, pride (an over-abundance of self-esteem?) is a sin because it assumes that the sinner is superior to God and to people. How does O'Connor remind us of the sinfulness of pride?

8.A "displaced" family is brought to a Georgia farm by another foreigner, a Roman Catholic priest (this is the only work by O'Connor in which a priest appears). The family begins to displace the other characters in the story, even the farm owner. How do the other characters respond to this new, stange challenge? The glory of the peacock's tail is a symbol in this story; the spreading ring of suns is a kind of resurrection. What does the beauty of the peacock's tail contrast to?

Assignment. How does O'Connor portray the spiritual complacency of post-war America? Deal with both theme and technique (the grotesque, for example, symbolism, comedy, etc.).

O'Connor kept flocks of peafowl at her mother's farm outside Milledgeville.

Wise Blood--Study Questions