Why should you read Flannery O’Connor? - Iseult Gillespie
A garrulous grandmother and a roaming
bandit face off on a dirt road.
A Bible salesman lures a one-legged
philosopher into a barn.
A traveling handyman teaches a deaf woman
her first word on an old plantation.
From her farm in rural Georgia,
surrounded by a flock of pet birds,
Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales
of outcasts,
intruders and misfits staged in
the world she knew best:
the American South.
She published two novels,
but is perhaps best known
for her short stories,
which explored small-town life
with stinging language, offbeat humor,
and delightfully unsavory scenarios.
In her spare time O’Connor drew cartoons,
and her writing is also
brimming with caricature.
In her stories, a mother has a face
“as broad and innocent as a cabbage,”
a man has as much drive as a “floor mop,”
and one woman’s body
is shaped like “a funeral urn.”
The names of her characters
are equally sly.
Take the story “The Life You
Save May be Your Own,”
where the one-handed drifter Tom Shiftlet
wanders into the lives
of an old woman named Lucynell Crater
and her deaf and mute daughter.
Though Mrs. Crater is self-assured,
her isolated home is falling apart.
At first, we may be suspicious
of Shiftlet’s motives
when he offers to help around the house,
but O’Connor soon reveals
the old woman to be
just as scheming as her unexpected guest–
and rattles the reader’s presumptions
about who has the upper hand.
For O’Connor, no subject was off limits.
Though she was a devout Catholic,
she wasn’t afraid to explore
the possibility
of pious thought and unpious behavior
co-existing in the same person.
In her novel The Violent Bear it Away,
the main character grapples with the
choice to become a man of God –
but also sets fires and commits murder.
The book opens with the reluctant prophet
in a particularly compromising position:
“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been
dead for only half a day
when the boy got too drunk
to finish digging his grave.”
This leaves a passerby to “drag the body
from the breakfast table
where it was still sitting and bury it […]
with enough dirt on top to keep
the dogs from digging it up.”
Though her own politics are still debated,
O’Connor’s fiction could also be attuned
to the racism of the South.
In “Everything that Rises Must Converge,”
she depicts a son raging
at his mother’s bigotry.
But the story reveals that
he has his own blind spots
and suggests that simply recognizing evil
doesn’t exempt his character
from scrutiny.
Even as O’Connor probes the most
unsavory aspects of humanity,
she leaves the door to redemption
open a crack.
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,”
she redeems an insufferable grandmother
for forgiving a hardened criminal,
even as he closes in on her family.
Though we might balk at the price the
woman pays for this redemption,
we’re forced to confront the nuance
in moments
we might otherwise consider
purely violent or evil.
O’Connor’s mastery of the grotesque
and her explorations of the insularity and
superstition of the South
led her to be classified as
a Southern Gothic writer.
But her work pushed beyond
the purely ridiculous
and frightening characteristics
associated with the genre
to reveal the variety and nuance
of human character.
She knew some of this variety
was uncomfortable,
and that her stories could be
an acquired taste –
but she took pleasure
in challenging her readers.
O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39,
after the disease had mostly confined her
to her farm in Georgia for twelve years.
During those years,
she penned much of her most
imaginative work.
Her ability to flit between
revulsion and revelation
continues to draw readers to her endlessly
surprising fictional worlds.
As her character Tom Shiftlet notes,
the body is “like a house:
it don’t go anywhere,
but the spirit, lady,
is like an automobile:
always on the move.”
