Flannery O'Connor
LIFE
Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was an only child. She attended school in Georgia, but did not complete her high school education in Savannah because her family was forced to move to Milledgeville in 1938, after it was discovered that her father had contracted lupus. He died three years later. She attended Peabody High School, and then Georgia State College for Women. She dropped her first name, and became simply Flannery O'Connor prior to her writing career. Following her graduation in 1945, she moved to Iowa City, and then New York. It was here that two of the most important things happened in her life. She met Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, who introduced her to some of the more established members of New York's society (Browning, 3). She also met Robert Giroux, who later became her editor and publisher. In 1949, she once again moved, this time to Connecticut, to live with the Fitzgerald's, who she referred to as her adopted kin. She became seriously ill only a year later, and was diagnosed with lupus. She needed to get away from the fast-paced North, for it was too much for her to handle with such a debilitating disease. She moved back to Georgia, to a small town called Andalusia. This is where she completed the majority of her writing. At this point in time, she had quite a respectable correspondence, including Richard Stern, John Hawkes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Caroline Gordon. (Browning, 5) These people contributed a great deal to her writing. She was also influenced by Augustine, Aquinas, St. Theresa, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, John Henry Newman, Martin Buber, Maritan, Heidegger, Henry James, Richard Chase, and Teilhard de Chardin. As one can see, she did not limit herself to any certain style when in came to literature. In addition, she had extensive knowledge of the Bible.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Flannery adapted her well-known writing style at a very early age in her career, that which Joyce Carol Oates has referred to as "circ;&"grave";enigmatic, troubling, and highly idiosyncratic fiction. (Barrett and Cullinan, 532) In an essay she composed for HOLIDAY magazine in 1961, she explains how, at the age of five, she was filmed with a pet hen that was able to walk backwards as well as forwards. It was from there that her budding interest in the eccentric took off. Another example is found within the same essay, which was about raising peafowl, in which she explains how she ÔÓfavored those with one green eye and one orange...I wanted one with three legs or three wings but nothing in that line turned up. (Browning, 2)
Flannery's more serious writing career began in 1946, when THE GERANIUM appeared in ACCENT magazine. In her home in Connecticut, she began writing a series of short stories, which later became WISE BLOOD. This was published in 1952. At this point, six more stories, in addition to THE GERANIUM, had appeared in reputable publications. From 1952 on, many of her stories appeared in BEST SHORT STORIES and THE O. HENRY AWARDS. In 1953, she received a Kenyon Review Fellowship. In 1955, she had enough material to release her second compilation, A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND. The same year THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY appeared in NEW WORLD WRITING. In the final six years of her life, she produced "The Enduring Chill", "The Lame Shall Enter First", "Parker's Back", and "Greenleaf". All of the aforementioned stories appeared in EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, which was published posthumously in 1965.
* Wise Blood. Harcourt, 1952
* A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Harcourt, 1955. Published in England
as The Artificial Nigger. Neville Spearman, 1957
* The Violent Bear It Away. Farrar, Straus, 1960
* A Memoir of Mary Ann. (Editor and author of introduction), Farrar, O'Connor Bibliography (p3 of 12)
Straus, 1962. Published in England as Death of a Child. Burns
& Oates, 1961
* Three by Flannery O'Connor. Signet, 1964
* Everything That Rises Must Converge. Farrar, Straus, 1965
* Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, 1969
* The Complete Short Stories. Farrar, Straus, 1971
* The Habit of Being: Letters. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, 1979
* The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews. Edited by Carter W.
Martin, University of Georgia Press, 1983
* Collected Works (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge), edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Library of America, 1988.
AWARDS and ACHIEVEMENTS
* First Prize, O. Henry Memorial Awards
-- "Greenleaf, 1957
--Everything That Rises Must Converge 1963
-- Revelation, 1965
* Litt. D., St. Mary's College, 1962
* Litt. D., Smith College, 1963
* Henry H. Bellaman Foundation special award, 1964
* National Book Award for The Complete Short Stories, 1972
* Board Award, National Critics Circle; Notable Book citation,
Library Journal; Bowdoin College Award; Christopher Award; all for The Habit of Being: Letters, 1980.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
Browning best explains the criticisms on O'Conner's work; since her death, the critical interest in her work has grown at an astonishing rate, combined with a lessening of the widespread misunderstanding with which her fiction was originally greeted. (Browning, 10) Her literature was often dismissed because of itÕs gothic violence. Critics complained that it was just another work containing nonfunctional horror and violence. At the time much of her work was published, other prominent authors, such as Truman Capote and Carson McCullers were churning out Southern Gothic material full of freaks and violence, and O'Connor was given the misnomer of being placed into this category. The early critics did not realize the one thing the O'Connor had that the others did not, which was a revelation. O'Connor uses the surprising violence to instill a certain feeling in the reader, and a revelation in her characters.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre more thoroughly explains this revelation in her article "Mercy that burns: violence and revelation in Flannery O'Connor's fiction." The fiction of Flannery O'Connor reflects a Christian perspective on human behavior, as she often uses violence to portray evil and to emphasize the need for redemption. O'Connor's characters are odd and unsympathetic, but they tend to evoke an uncomfortable acknowledgment of the reader's own imperfections. In stories such as 'Revelation,' O'Connor calls customary social categories into question, leading to a renewed appreciation of life's essential mysteriousness. (McEntyre, 1) Of course, with such a widely read author, it does not come as a surprise that critics would come up with some obscure criticisms, as Lamar York explains Flannery O'Connor's stories and correspondences abound in references to fowls and breakfasts, which have a spiritual rather than a material connotation. The houses and the farms in which these elements occur belong to spiritual women. The meals at the kitchen table and the fowls at the farm are extraordinary ones, meant for sublime occasions. The hunger of the characters is beyond the capacity of ordinary food or drinks and reflects an insatiable longing for spiritual quests. (York, 1) This is not something the one might pick up in a first reading of O'Conner's material, or at all, for that matter. Some of the best examples of O'Connor's style and technique can be found in two of her short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and A View of the Woods. The first appeared in a compilation book of the same name, and the latter in her posthumously released collection, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE.
A Good Man is Hard to Find is a story about a family from Georgia, consisting of two children, mother, father, and grandmother, who brings along her cat. They are on vacation, driving to Florida. The grandmother, the central character of the story, is a bitter, close-minded old woman who does not desire to go to Florida, but rather Tennessee. The family turns off of the main road, because the grandmother demands that she must see a house that she is sure is right down the road. After realizing, a few miles down the road, that the house in question is in Tennessee, and not Georgia, the grandmother gets upset, the cat jumps up, and they end up wrecking the car. The grandmother insures their doom, when they are aided by a group of men which pull up, and she blurts out that one of the men is the Misfit, a convict with no regard for human life. The family is led into the woods in groups and killed. It ends up that only the grandmother is remaining, The grandmother tries to talk her way out of the situation, to no avail.
This is a story which examines religion, right and wrong, and society as a whole. The most profound point that this story makes is that while a good man is indeed hard to find, a truly evil one is just as rare (Browning, 58). The grandmother turn to religion to help her, in asking the Misfit to pray, rather than praying herself. Unfortunately for her, she does not realize that the spiritual is exactly the reason that the Misfit has no problems in killing people. As Terry White explains; O'Connor's story is the quintessential allegory because of the Misfit's roll in the grandmother's life; his "humanity" is depraved, malicious--he's that remorseless killer who kills for the pleasure of it, and his twice-uttered credo to his cretin sidekick Bobby Lee is that there is no pleasure in life except meanness. His own mean-spiritedness cannot accommodate his intellectual pretensions. He has made his choice to do evil, he tells the grandmother, and so shocking is the revelation that we may easily miss the "moment of grace" we expect in an O'Connor narrative; here, obviously, the moment is the grandmother's exclamation about the Misfit being one of her own "children"--mere moments in story-time duration--a single dramatic utterance before he shoots her three times (143) (White, 3).
In a second short story, ÒA View of the Woods, we see a similar act of violence leading to a shocking revelation. In this story, an old man, Fortune, lets his son-in-law, Pitts, (and the names are not coincidental) farm his land, which he is slowly selling off. Fortune's best friend, his young granddaughter Mary, are very close, until she realizes his notions of selling off the land directly in front of the house. They end up getting in a physical struggle (which he always condemned Pitts for), and he kills her, slightly before having a heart attack and dying himself. Browning explains how the girl's death symbolizes a violent extirpation of a part of himself and it is indeed his own conquered image which he beholds as he stares at his lifeless granddaughter. She often uses personification, for example in the description of the machinery "watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up." This story show how a materialistic man can easily be overcome by the allure of wealth, and in doing so destroy everything that he stands for. The bulldozer in the story, which represents progress is introduced in the beginning, as a huge yellow monster, and at the end, it is the last thing that Fortune sees, as is lies next to him, gorging itself on clay. Feeley explains; It seems clear that Mark Fortune's materialistic view of progress determines his view of reality. He, too, is gorging himself on clay, selling off his lots that border the newly created lake to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, every dog and his brother who will pay the price (Feeley, 127). She goes on to explain that the story is an illustration that the symbolic value of certain objects (i.e.; the bulldozer)Òin no way detract from the reality they possess (Feeley, 127).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Browning, Preston M. Flannery O'Connor. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press,1974.
Duncan, Danny Collum "Nature and Grace: Flannery O'Connor and
the healing of Southern culture"
Available http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/941214.html
Feeley, Kathleen Flannery O'Connor : Voice of the Peacock. New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1972.
The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin
Available http://peacock.gac.peachnet.edu/~sc/focbull.html
Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Foundation
Available http://www.ils.unc.edu/flannery/index.html
Flannery O'Connor Collection
Available http://peacock.gac.peachnet.edu/~sc/foc.html
Hendin, Josephine The World of Flannery O'Connor Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1970.
McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler Mercy that burns: violence and revelation in Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Theology Today, Oct 1996 v53 n3 p331(14).
White, Terry Allegorical evil, existentialist choice in O'Connor, Oates and Styron. The Midwest Quarterly, Summer 1993 v34 n4 p383(15).
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