WHO WAS FLANNERY O'CONNOR?

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. (Wikipedia)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FLANNERY!!!!!!
This spring, as part of my "Putting the FUN in Dysfunctional Families" Senior Seminar, I am teaching Flannery O'Connor's short stories, I have loved these stories since college, but other than one or two of them, I have never taught the majority of them. They are masterful and complex. They are unsettling and fascinating. Like the very best literature, the stories make us look at ourselves in new ways.


O'Connor was a keen observer of small town Southern life, and she understood the ways in which the people around her placed themselves in a human hierarchy based on race and class and land ownership. O'Connor wrote about people who wielded their Christianity both as  a shield  and as a weapon. The stories are filled with seemingly random acts of violence that cause us to question her characters' morality. Judgement arrives in the form of an errant bull, a wild-eyed Wellesley coed, a riderless tractor, etc. In one of my favorite stories, "The Comforts of Home," O'Connor describes a  thirty-five year old man who lives at home with his mother. The young man is mortified when his naive but kind mother befriends a wayward young girl who has been arrested for passing bad checks. In a classic contest-of-wills, the girl, Star, and the young man, Thomas, battle for supremacy. There are sexual undertones as well and Thomas's late father makes some ghostly appearances in the story too. Ultimately,
Thomas makes a decision to frame Star for stealing his father's gun in order to get her arrested and out of his house. When Star catches him red-handed, a tussle ensues and the gun goes off killing the mother.  This is how O'Connor describes the scene:
"Thomas fired. The blast was like a sound meant to bring an end to evil in the world. Thomas heard it as a sound that would shatter the laughter of sluts until all shrieks were stilled  and nothing was left to disturb the peace of perfect order."
As the story ends, the reader struggles to separate the heroes from the villains. O'Connor loved to show us worlds where people separated themselves into the righteous and the sinners and then she seemed to take great pleasure in  jumbling it all up. Finally, when the pieces settle, the new tableau looks very different. 


In most of O'Connor's stories, everyone is flawed. However, the people who proclaim their goodness from the rooftops, and see themselves as higher than their fellow humans, usually end up paying a huge price for their hubris. In her stories, if one is open to them, grace can be found in the unlikeliest places. While it took my students some time to figure O'Connor out, I think that ultimately, they were able to appreciate her unique Southern sensibility and to see the violence in her stories as the price humans pay for duplicity, arrogance and blindness.


If you have not yet had the pleasure to immerse yourself in The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connnor, treat yourself to 31 little gems!