Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters Author(s): Louise Westling Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.

4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 510-522 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441199 . Accessed: 21/08/2011 11:30
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Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters

LOUISE WESTLING

On first reading Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh remarked, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable."1 She would have been pleased with this reaction because she did not want to be easily identifiable as female. She seemed to think of her art as a force above or outside conditions of gender. When she spoke of "the writer," she always referred to an anonymous, rather objective intellect whose personal life was irrelevant to "his" work. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, she took her aesthetic from Aquinas. In "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" she explained, "St. Thomas said that the artist is concerned with the good of that which is made. . . . [This approach] eliminates any concern with the motivation of the writer except as this finds its place inside the work."2 Yet there is at least one distinctive element in O'Connor's fiction which ultimately calls attention to her motivation as a female and leads us outside the work for explanation. This is the repeated motherdaughter pattern which seems a disturbing force often at odds with the clear purpose of a story. The major elements of the pattern appear in "Good Country People." Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o'clock and lit her gas heater and Joy's. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated.3 In at least six of O'Connor's thirty-one published stories, the plot centers on a mother resembling Mrs. Hopewell and a daughter like Joy. The mother is a hardworking widow who supports and cares for her large, physically marred girl by running a small farm. The daughter is almost always bookish and very disagreeable. The mother is devoted to 510

O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS her nevertheless, but with an attitude of exasperated bafflement at her perversity and oddness. Variations and echoes of this mother-daughter motif appear in so many other stories besides those in which it is central, that the emphasis appears almost obsessive. Flannery O'Connor said that literary vocation "is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively. The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not." (M&M, p. 27) Her sour, deformed daughters and selfrighteous mothers certainly live, but we must ask why it is such characters whom she can invest with vivid being and why they appear so often. If we examine their characteristics I believe we will find that their distortions express a passionate but inadvertent protest against the lot of womankind. Flannery O'Connor can make these women live because she is one of them. Almost all of O'Connor's families have been truncated in some way. Often fathers or grandfathers or uncles have charge of children whose other parents have disappeared. Most frequently, however, the parent figure is a woman who has been left to raise truculent, unruly sons and daughters. These stranded women prove tough and resourceful in their dealings with the outside world, providing comfortable if modest homes for their children. The side effects of their struggle are a degree of stinginess and smugness, wariness of strangers, and determination to see things in a cheerful light. A clear example of the norm is Mrs. Cope in "A Circle in the Fire." As the story opens she is weeding her flower bed as vehemently as she attacks every problem on her farm. "She worked at the weeds and tiit grass as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place" (p. 175). Her constant companion is Mrs. Pritchard, the tenant farmer's wife, who delights in telling stories of horrible and lingering illnesses, calamities, and deaths. Mrs. Cope always tries to change the subject with cheerful cliches. She is profusely thankful for her blessings and proud of her accomplishments. "I have the best kept place in the county," she tells Mrs. Pritchard, "and do you know why? Because I work. I've had to work to save this place and work to keep it" (p. 178). Mrs. Pritchard, who says she has only four abscessed teeth to be thankful for, is wryly resentful and skeptical of such complacency. In other stories it is the children who cringe, glower, or make snide remarks when their mothers indulge in such platitudes. When a young Bible salesman calls on Mrs. Hopewell in "Good Country People," she
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exclaims, "Why, good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. That's life!" Her daughter's sardonic response is, "Get rid of the salt of the earth, and let's eat" (p. 279). O'Connor's widowed mothers care for their children, but neither sons nor daughters mature successfully. The sons grow up to be intellectual drones who live at home. In "Why Do the Heathen Rage," a son snarls at his mother, "A woman of your generation is better than a man of mine" (p. 485). He sees this as a shameful reversal of normal male superiority, and O'Connor intends it to demonstrate his bitter understanding of his own failure. Similarly, daughters fail to live up to their mothers' expectations or examples. They are socially crippled, being not only physically unappealing but also too intelligent, well educated, and sourly independent to ever assume "normal" roles as wives and mothers. O'Connor makes certain that we notice the younger girls' glasses, ugly braces, and extra pounds, the mature daughters' wooden legs, bad hearts, and tendency to wear ridiculous sweat shirts or Girl Scout shoes. In "A Circle in the Fire" we meet Sally Virginia Cope, "a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning squint and a large mouth full of silver bands" (p. 181). At one point in the story, we find her wearing a pair of overalls pulled over her dress, a man's old felt hat pulled down so far on her head that it squeezes her face livid, and a gun and holster set around her waist (p. 190). "Good Country People" provides a mature example of the type. At thirty-two, Joy Hopewell suffers from a bad heart and a resentful disposition which her mother blames on her wooden leg. In an act of typical perversity Joy changes her legal name to Hulga because of its ugly sound, and dresses "in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it" (p. 276). All day she sits "on her neck in a deep chair," reading nihilistic philosophy. "Sometimes she went for walks but she didn't like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity" (p. 276). What do Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Hopewell do with such daughters? Mostly they try to be understanding and patient, subtly suggesting more positive attitudes and manners. Sometimes, however, they explode in frustration. This happens when Sally Virginia dons her overalls and felt hat. Mrs. Cope watched her with a tragic look. "Why do you have to look like an idiot?" she asked. "Suppose company were to come?

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O'CONNOR'SMOTHERSAND DAUGHTERS When are you going to grow up? What's going to become of you? I look at you and I want to cry!" (p. 190) One interesting variation in this pattern appears in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Both mother and daughter are named Lucynell Crater, but that is their only resemblance. The mother is a hard-bitten, leathery, and toothless country widow, the daughter a moron who is beautiful in a grotesque way. She has long pink-gold hair and "eyes as blue as a peacock's neck." In contrast to most of O'Connor's daughters, Lucynell Jr. is absolutely docile and sweet, serving as a strange and distorted symbol of spiritual innocence. Lucynell's speechless imbecility is perhaps the reason for her sweet nature, whereas intelligence is a curse on the other daughters in the stories. Frustrated in a society of hillbillies, religious fundamentalists, and snuff-dipping tenant farmers, most of these bright fat girls snipe away at the pretension and stupidity around them. In "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," the ill-tempered twelve-year-old girl makes fools of her boy-crazy cousins by arranging dates for them with scrawny local hicks. When the boys arrive, she spies on the couples, fascinated but contemptuous of their antics. She refuses to eat with them because they are "stupid idiots" (p. 242). Her intelligence makes her proud and sour, preventing her from participating in normal adolescent life like her silly cousins. In "Revelation," this kind of superior intelligence and ability to see beneath appearances causes a rage of resentment verging on madness. In a doctor's waiting room a college girl grows more and more outraged at the self-satisfied remarks of the protagonist, Mrs. Turpin. Although her polite mother tries to placate her, the girl finally explodes, hurling her book across the room at Mrs. Turpin's head. Then she leaps after it and tries to choke her adversary. She has to be forcibly restrained and finally drugged. The girl is only a vehicle in the story, used to produce a humbling revelation for Mrs. Turpin. Yet the strange intensity of her hatred and the unexpected wildness of her action may leave the reader shocked and wondering about her fate. Intelligence seems a curse which has unbalanced her. Other problems these intelligent girls may face are predictable: misogyny and some confusion about sexual roles. Traditional contempt for women appears here and there in the stories, subtly, in chance remarks by men, but also in the attitudes of women. The ruffian boys in "Circle in the Fire" are disgusted by the predominantly female population of Mrs. Cope's farm. "I never seen a place with so many damn women on it, how do you stand it here?" one of them asks the

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hired man (p. 186). When this boy first notices Sally Virginia, he growls, "Jesus, another woman." Her reaction shows how this wounds her. "She dropped back from the window and stood with her back against the wall, squinting fiercely as if she had been slapped in the face and couldn't see who had done it" (p. 185). Some women respond by unconsciously absorbing the prejudice, becoming themselves antifeminist like the spinster writer Miss Willerton in "The Crop." She is depressed by the "trifling domestic doings" of women in grocery stores and thinks back disparagingly on her strictly female college experience. "Her teachers at Willowpool Female Seminary had been all right, but they were women. . . . She didn't like the phrase, Willowpool Female Seminary-it sounded biological" (p. 34). In a male-dominated culture, attitudes like Miss Willerton's are natural. It is also natural that bright, ambitious girls would find more interest in fantasies of male adventure than in imagining themselves as traditional women like their mothers. In both "A Circle in the Fire" and "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" the plump, bespectacled twelve-year-old protagonists imagine themselves as swashbuckling adventurers. When the child in "A Temple" describes for her giddy cousins the farm boys who will be their dates, cousin Susan asks, "How does a child like you know so much about these men?" O'Connor gives the child's response in a peculiar bit of interior monologue. I know them all right, she said to someone. We fought in the world war together. They were under me and I saved them five times from Japanese suicide divers and Wendell said I am going to marry that kid and the other said oh no you ain't I am and I said neither one of you is because I will court marshall you all before you can bat an eye. (pp. 239-40) The male world seems the only place these girls can imagine themselves finding the power and action they desire. In this case, the girl has the male role of military commander and is at the same time being fought over by Wendell and Cory as a desirable female. She is part of the world of adventure and action but superior to her male suitors, able to court-martial them at the bat of an eye. Such a "Wonder Woman" situation must be an ancient pattern of female wish-fulfillment, in which one is part of men's world and desirable to them but no longer at their mercy. In reality, O'Connor's daughters are powerless and passive. Their intelligent interest in the world outside their farms is expressed only in a voyeuristic impulse to watch other people from safe hiding places. In "A Temple," for instance, the child watches her cousins entertain their

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O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS dates on the porch by standing on a barrel in the bushes, her face on a level with the floor. When the boys mistake a Catholic hymn in Latin for "Jew singing," she stamps her foot on the barrel and gives herself away. "'You big dumb ox,' she shouted. 'You big dumb Church of God ox!' she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled up and shot around the corner of the house . . ." (p. 241). Similarly, Sally Virginia in "A Circle in the Fire" spends a whole afternoon upstairs peeking out of windows at the ragamuffin boys who have just arrived to visit her mother's farm. Ironically, this spying could be seen as the natural activity of the budding female novelist. The world is so inhospitable to the creative female intellect that her natural fascination with people turns furtive and resentful. An example of a woman who is not artistic or intellectual but who tries to escape the demands of the traditional female role is Ruby Hill in "A Stroke of Good Fortune." She sees her feminine heritage as horrifying, her biological destiny as death-in-life. At thirty-four, Ruby is smugly pleased to have avoided ruining her life with motherhood. Constantly she compares herself to her own mother, who at thirty-four was gray-haired, sour, "like a puckered-up old yellow apple." All those children were what did her mother in-eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with every one of them. (p. 97). By the end of the story, however, Ruby is forced to realize that her husband's birth control methods have failed and that she is pregnant, soon to share her mother's fate. Her palmist's prophecy of "a stroke of good fortune" now appears sardonic. Ruby sits on a step in the cavernous stairwell of her broken-down apartment building, stunned by her knowledge that the baby is just waiting to make her into an old woman. "Good Fortune," she said in a hollow voice that echoed along all the levels of the cavern, "Baby." "Good Fortune, Baby," the three echoes leered. Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time. (p. 107) The story ends here, with the leering mockery of the echoes in the stairwell. By now the title, "A Stroke of Good Fortune," has come to symbolize Flannery O'Connor's heavily ironic and perhaps even ambivalent attitude toward Ruby's situation. One wonders why she chose such a subject and what she intended to make of it.
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Both in the Church and in the wider secular culture, women are expected to see pregnancy as good fortune. Ruby's deviation from this norm and her smug belief that she has evaded her female destiny are punished in the story, but it is too easy to assume that here, as so often in O'Connor's work, "pride goeth before a fall." No sensitive reader can find either aesthetic or moral satisfaction in that kind of slick, superficial interpretation. No solution to Ruby's problem is offered; no clear religious symbolism is provided to suggest an alternative vision of her fate. Instead we leave the defeated woman slumped in her echoing stairway, her mind paralyzed by the ghastly vision of an alien being "out nowhere in nothing," patiently waiting its time to destroy her. Whether or not she intended to do so, Flannery O'Connor has made a vivid protest against sentimental stereotypes of motherhood, by presenting Ruby's horrified sense of the physical cost of reproduction and her awful realization that she has been tricked into paying it. Many of these stories share the same plot pattern: a competent and skeptical woman is tricked by an unscrupulous male. The man is usually a stranger who appears one day on her doorstep and appears to be a potential mate for her daughter. The daughter is always excited by his arrival. The man's seduction of these women is not usually sexual in a conventional sense; instead he plays on their vanity to trick them out of their possessions. In "The Life You Save," Mr. Shiftlet helps the elder Lucynell Crater by repairing broken-down structures on her farm. Though he has only one arm, as a man he is able to do the physical and mechanical labor which she cannot. All this is an elaborate con job, however, for he tricks her out of her dilapidated car by agreeing with ridiculous courtliness to marry her imbecile daughter. In these stories male courtliness is always the prelude to deceit. Mr. Shiftlet ends up robbing her of both the car and the daughter she loves. Then he abandons the helpless girl in a diner down the road. Two other stories focus more on the daughter's response. The girl seems to have had no significant contact with men, and the result of the encounter with the stranger is assault and violence. We see this in the experience of Sally Virginia Cope in "A Circle in the Fire." Three disheveled boys arrive at her mother's farm, and she watches them from upstairs windows and from behind bushes, at once fascinated and disgusted by their uncouth energy. Gradually the boys turn vicious and destructive when Mrs. Cope refuses them the freedom to roam about the farm as they please. When they insult Sally Virginia, she vows revenge and a few days later sets out to execute it. It is then that she pulls on the overalls, crams a man's hat on her head, and straps on the 516

O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS toy pistols. She stamps off into her mother's woods muttering curses and striking out at trees as she marches along. When she finds the boys, however, she is helpless and can only watch from behind a tree as they dunk themselves in a watering trough and run naked around a meadow, then run into the woods to do a wild sort of war dance and set the woods afire. In "Good Country People" the hulking daughter Joy-Hulga is deceived by a young Bible salesman. She thinks of him as an innocent awed by her atheism and plans to take advantage of his naivete to seduce him in the hayloft and ultimately give him a deeper understanding of life. For all her intellectual superiority and bitter cynicism, she cannot see that he merely plays on her repressed and naive sexuality in order to steal her wooden leg. His lust is grotesquely distorted, focused on female deformities. In an interesting twist of this pattern, in "The Comforts of Home" a depraved surrogate daughter destroys a woman and her son by playing on the kindly woman's motherly instincts. In all these cases femininity seems a source of vulnerability. However, the problems of women are not of central importance in Flannery O'Connor's view of her stories. She was not a feminist, and except in her fiction there is no indication that the position of women was of interest to her. Her concerns seem to have been focused on intellectual, spiritual, and artistic problems unrelated to sex. The ultimate purpose behind all the cruel tricks and violent twists in her stories is the humbling of pride, shocking her characters into a horrified sense of their helplessness before God. As she frequently explains in the essays and lectures collected as Mystery and Manners, her paramount purpose as a writer was the demonstration of God's mystery at work in the world. Even so, we must come to terms with the central figures of the widowed mother and her sour daughter who are so powerfully and bitterly presented again and again in the stories. The pictures O'Connor draws of these women are so vivid and centrally placed that they cannot be dismissed as mere devices used arbitrarily to achieve the larger purpose of religious revelation. They may serve such a purpose but they remain problematic for the attentive reader and in some cases confuse or negate the spiritual point O'Connor is trying to make. That is because within the religious context of the stories, there are no satisfactory solutions to the difficulties faced by widows like Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Hopewell and by daughters like Sally Virginia and Joy-Hulga. The widows can only try to live piously and hold tightly to their farms 517

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by struggling to perform a man's job. Although O'Connor seems to view farming as an unnatural role for a woman, at least it serves an active and productive function in society. For the daughters there seems to be no useful function and no hope. As fat, bespectacled girls or as crippled adults, they have none of the feminine beauty or charm which might have helped them find a normal place in Southern life. We see these women at two important stages in life-on the brink of puberty and well into young adulthood. They are usually either twelve years old or thirty-two. At twelve, they are precocious and terribly aware of the foibles of people around them. Already they are socially awkward, alien creatures who cannot act but only spy on other people. By the age of thirty-two, all chances of normal life have passed them by, and their frustration has turned into bitterness and perverse eccentricity. They are fascinated by men but unable to establish any normal relationship with them. In the end they are tricked, taken advantage of, jilted, misused. Joy-Hulga Hopewell is the clearest and fullest example of their plight. Throughout "Good Country People" she is contrasted to Glynese and Carramae Freeman, the teen-age daughters of her mother's tenant farmer. They are caricatures of normal girls who court young men, marry, and produce children. At eighteen Glynese has many admirers, and her sister, only fifteen, is already married and pregnant. But Joy has never known even the experiences of normal adolescence. Her mother thinks of her as a "poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times," and she feels her daughter would have been better off without her useless Ph.D. "It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other rude, and squint-eyed" (pp. people and more like herself-bloated, 274-76). When Joy-Hulga discovers that the young Bible salesman is intensely interested in her, she is not even vaguely aware of how fully she reciprocates or how vulnerable her sexual response makes her. She is completely unprepared for the emotional tumult of lovemaking. When he first kisses her, she feels an extra surge of adrenaline and believes herself clear-headed and ironically detached from the experience. In fact, she is gradually falling under his power, returning his kisses, and unaware that he has taken her glasses and rendered her practically blind. As they embrace in the hayloft, he asks her to prove her love by showing him where her wooden leg joins on. The artificial leg is like her sacred soul, private and secret, but he persuades her to let him take it off. When she agrees, she surrenders completely to him. 518

O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS "Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at" (p. 289). Indeed she is not very good at this function; she is completely disabled. When the salesman opens a hollow Bible to reveal a flask of whiskey, obscene playing cards, and contraceptives, Joy-Hulga registers shocked disillusionment. He is disgusted and departs with both her glasses and her wooden leg, leaving her completely devastated. Flannery O'Connor said that when the Bible salesman steals the wooden leg, "the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl's personality and has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time" (M&M, p. 99). This is true in part, but in the same commentary on the story, O'Connor insists on the primacy of the literal level of the plot. On that level, the Bible salesman uses sexual seduction to gain his perverse end, and Joy-Hulga falls prey to his advances. Actually there is no conflict between these two levels of meaning, but instead a rich integration of the literal and symbolic which goes far beyond the rather traditional point O'Connor understood herself to be making. She realized that, "If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader" (M&M, p. 83). What might have been a surprise to her was the profound symbolic material she provided in "Good Country People" for an understanding of rape. Joy-Hulga's sexuality is essential to her identity, though she is completely unaware of it. The part of her personality which the Bible salesman takes away by stealing her wooden leg is her sour independence as a female who refuses to accept the submissive role society has dictated for her. In trying to ignore her womanhood and be a free, asexual intellect, Joy-Hulga fails to realize the power of sexual differences and of her needs as a woman. Thus her apparent toughness is brittle and her wooden leg an apt symbol for her independence. Manly Pointer, as the Bible salesman is punningly named, seems to understand this at once. He is fascinated by her perverse uniqueness and tells her that the leg is "what makes you different. You ain't like anybody else" (p. 288). Joy-Hulga thinks he appreciates her bravery and her defiance of life's attempt to cripple her. "This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her" (p. 289). But we learn that his instincts are entirely predatory. He delights in sexual conquests of crippled women, snatching away as trophies their artificial eyes and legs-the manufactured props which 519

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make them whole. When he has persuaded Joy-Hulga to let him remove her wooden leg, she is overwhelmed by her helplessness and pleads to have the leg restored. "Leave it off for a while," he says. "You got me instead." So he says, but he will violate her trust and her physical and emotional integrity more completely by stealing her leg, than the normal physical rape could ever have done. O'Connor has taken the significance of rape to a symbolic extreme in the picture of this man who preys sexually on women and literally leaves them crippled. By now it should be obvious that the religious interpretations Flannery O'Connor intended for her stories do not provide a complete understanding of her work. It should also be clear that her artistic consciousness was neither objective nor neuter. Her attempt to avoid sexual identification made it impossible for her to understand some of her most profound insights or directly to confront some of the most obsessive themes in her stories. These themes nevertheless enrich the fiction, touching many painful areas of female experience. She explored the plight of girls too intelligent and defiant to accept traditional submissive roles. In the portraits of their mothers, she illuminated some of the problems and results of widowhood. With Ruby Hill, she presented a horrifying picture of the cost of reproduction. "Good Country People" is only one of several treatments of male exploitation of female weakness. Another is "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," in which Mr. Shiftlet is a robber bridegroom, stealing and abandoning the imbecile daughter in order to gain a car. In "A Circle in the Fire," a group of half-grown boys come from out of nowhere, without warning, to flaunt their maleness in destructive defiance of woman's attempt to order and control. They sneer at Mrs. Cope's authority and ask the male hired hand why he puts up with "so many damn women." They destroy what she will not allow them to rule. Sally Virginia, their contemporary, puts on what amounts to a male masquerade and stamps off in a fury to fight them. But her pistols are only toys, and the man's hat and overalls over her dress only make her ridiculous. She is outnumbered, and she is only a girl after all, frightened of male violence. Perhaps the difficulty in properly evaluating the function of all these "feminist" themes is illustrated best in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." Here the problem of sex appears in direct light for a moment, only to be quickly absorbed into a religious vision of the child protagonist. This girl, proud of her intellect and contemptuous of her boy-crazy cousins, is nevertheless fascinated by the story they tell about the hermaphrodite they saw at the county fair.4 Unable to understand
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O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS how a person could be both male and female, the child asks her cousins, "You mean it had two heads?" (p. 245). This sexual mystery is transformed by her imagination into a religious one. The hermaphrodite is a temple of the Holy Ghost: "God made me thisaway and I don't dispute hit" (p. 246). By the end of the story, the child has identified herself with the freak, assuming that God made her a kind of freak too, for His own purposes. She must accept her nature and use her life as a sacred vessel. The child's spiritual resolution of the hermaphrodite's nature leaves her sexual confusions unresolved. And this absorption of sexual questions into a religious vision which ignores them is typical of Flannery O'Connor's treatment of sex. Thus the reader must do some violence to the religious theme in order to assess the sexual problem, denying the rightness of the author's intended solution. This problem is particularly troubling in her handling of women. Her mind fastened intensely on painful experiences women endure, but her conscious effort was to ignore this whole area of experience and concentrate on what she felt to be wider, universal human problems. Almost all criticism of her fiction demonstrates that she was successful in engaging readers' interest in her vision of these profound spiritual problems. But I believe we fail to understand the full power of her work if we do not also recognize her absorption, conscious or otherwise, in social and personal problems which she was uniquely able to explore. The parallels between Flannery O'Connor's own life and those of the daughters in her stories are so obvious that they need hardly be mentioned. She was a rather acerbic and formidably intellectual person who spent most of her adult life as a semi-invalid cared for by her mother on a small Georgia farm. She scorned conventional Southern standards of feminine charm, quietly insisting on her own kind of individuality. "Joy-Hulga clearly represents one conception that Flannery had of herself, as she saw herself through the eyes of the 'normal' middle class people of her home town," says an old acquaintance and schoolmate from Milledgeville.5 Surely Sally Virginia Cope and the twelve-year-old in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" reflect Flannery O'Connor's image of her childhood self in much the same way. Years ago in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf first explained the distortions we should expect to find in the writing of women.6 Anxiety, shame, and buried confusion caused by the male domination of our culture make it very difficult for women to feel assured about discussing their own special experiences. Such attitudes result in portraits of women which are too strong or troubling or awkward for their assigned places in their fictional worlds. The writer is committed to 521

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them with an intensity which prevents full artistic control. Because Flannery O'Connor is not aware of how close characters like Joy-Hulga or Sally Virginia are to her own life and how deeply she is troubled by their problems as women, she does not confront and resolve those problems in the stories. Nevertheless, this failure does not alter their power as a turbulent undercurrent. Alice Walker has recently shown that O'Connor responded to the new understanding of Southern racial prejudice which the Civil Rights movement awakened in her. She changed a story twenty years old, to reflect justified Black rage and to punish the stupid prejudice of a senile white man.7 Old Tanner carries his Southern racism with him when he moves to a northern city to live in his daughter's apartment. He insists on calling the well-dressed Black actor next door "Preacher" and receives an ironic but appropriate "Judgement Day" when his neighbor crams his head between the spokes of a banister in the apartment stairway. Looking like a man in the stocks, Tanner has been dead for about an hour when his daughter finds him (p. 549). If Flannery O'Connor had lived long enough for the feminist movement to arouse her awareness of society's injustices to women and of her own repressed rage, surely she would have confronted these problems consciously in her stories as she did those of race. If old Tanner's experience is indicative, the result would have been violent. As her stories stand, however, perhaps her most effective summary of the proper female response to a hostile masculine world is the defiance she voices through Joy-Hulga: "If you want me, here I am-LIKE I AM" (p. 274). 1 Robert Giroux, Introd., The Complete Stories, by Flannery O'Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), p. xii. 2Mystery and Manners:Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald(New York: Farrar,Straus,& Giroux, 1957), p. 65. Hereafter all citations of this book will be presented in parentheses in the text as M&M, and page number. 3 Complete Stories,p. 271. Hereafter all citationsof the stories will be to this text and will be presented by page number in parentheses in the text. 4 This incident seems to echo the experience of Carson McCullers'Frankie in The Member the Wedding, which Ellen Moers discusses in Literary Women of (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 109. Moers's commentary suggests another aspect of O'Connors' women which would be interesting to examine-their place in the whole tradition of female gothic writing. 5 Conversation with Mimi Johnson, December 2, 1975, Eugene, Oregon. 6 (Middlesex, Eng.: 1965), pp. 70-75. 7"Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstructionof Flannery O'Connor,"Ms., Dec. 1975, p. 104.
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