Lay Matthew H. Lay Professor Tubb English 102.

001 6 February 2006 Moments of Grace in Flannery OConnors Short Stories

Flannery OConnor, a devout Catholic, wrote many short stories. All of her short stories feature at least one grotesque character, which is a character that has either a spiritual or physical deformity. This deformity is used by the author as a tool to demonstrate moral seriousness or social commentary. OConnors characters usually have a spiritual deformity, rather than a physical deformity. In her stories these grotesque characters are all affected by acts of violence, ranging from the characters own death to the theft of the characters belongings. During these acts of violence, the grotesque characters are offered a moment of grace, a chance to recognize their grotesque flaw and decide how to continue living. However, not all of the characters are given the time to make a decision, nor does the realization of thier flaw and the decision to change always save the characters. The grotesque characters in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Revelation, Good Country People, and Everything that Rises Must Converge, all experience different acts of violence that are followed by moments of grace, which change their lives. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, OConnor tells the story of a family going on a vacation. The grandmother in the story is the grotesque character and the focus of the story. As Grimshaw states, The grandmother dominates the characterization and is the motivating force throughout the story (39). Her grotesqueness is a result of her spiritual deformity which is her inability to change her values with the changing times:

Lay Throughout her life, this woman has been struggling with the shift from the

antebellum values of lineage and gentility to those of a cash-oriented culture, and with the implications this shift has for the assumptions that underwrite her vanishing system of beliefs. While she does not accept or even fully comprehend these implications in her behavior she acknowledges them and attempts some adjustment. (Owens 143) However, the grandmother does have redeeming qualities which make her a more realistic character: Chiefly, she is the only one of the family who, in some way, expresses care: . . . (Orvell 131). The vacation is suddenly cut short when The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road (OConnor 124). Due to the grandmothers cat, the family crashed; however, no one was killed. As they waited for help, a criminal named The Misfit and two younger boys happened upon them: The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it (124). As the family is killed, one by one, the grandmother retreats back into her old values, ultimately failing to change with the times: The Misfits subsequent discussion of signature, coupled with his threat of murder, cause the grandmother to repeat this error; she retreats back into

Lay the assumptions whose erosion she has been attempting to deny, but the assumptions, which have been dismantled throughout the story, offer her no protection from her killer. (Owens 143-144) Throughout this moment of violence, the grandmother is given a chance at a moment of grace.

However, she fails to recognize her spiritual deformity and does not change, which results in her death at the hands of The Misfit: She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest (OConnor 132). However, Gary Sloan disagrees that the grandmother failed to change. Sloan believes that After momentary skepticism-Maybe He didnt raise the dead-she is primed for her moment of grace, connects with The Misfit, and dies redeemed (Sloan 198). Sloan believes that the grandmother is able to put aside her old values of lineage and connect with The Misfit as someone she cares about. The realization of her flaw, and the subsequent change, does not save the grandmother however, and she is still murdered. The grandmothers death, regardless of whether she reached salvation or not, is used by OConnor to show an example of moral seriousness: One must change his or her values with the times, or be swallowed up by an ever changing world. Another short story by Flannery OConnor, Revelation, tells the story of an uppermiddle class white woman named Mrs. Turpin. While in the waiting room of a hospital, Mrs. Turpins feelings of discrimination are shown: Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed peoples feet. The welldressed lady had on red and gray suede shows to match her dress. Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout

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shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them-exactly what you would have expected her to have on. (OConnor 490-491). A. R. Coulthard states that Mrs. Turpin judges the worth of the other women in the waiting room according to the kind of shoes they are wearing (63-64). Coulthard also explains that This kind of smug judgment is not limited to social encounters but is habitual: Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them-not above, just away from-were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged (p. 491). (Coulthard 64). Mrs. Turpins spiritual deformity and the object of her grotesqueness is her discrimination and need to place people into a social class system. This deformity, which is ever present in the entire waiting room conversation, soon leads to a supreme act of violence, which is catalyzed by a teenage girl: The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck her almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling (OConnor 499). While Mrs. Turpin is lying on the ground in pain and shock from the blow with the book, the ugly girl delivers a message Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog (500). Coulthard explains that Through the girl, symbolically named Mary Grace, OConnor had to knock Mrs. Turpin silly in order to knock her sane (65).

Lay This experience is the beginning of the revelation which gives the story its name. As

Coulthard shows Mrs. Turpins next step is literal. She climbs the hill to the hogpen, apparently considering it the appropriate place to reason out the meaning of being called a wart hog from hell (66). While at the hog pen, Mrs. Turpin has a vision: There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and a battalion of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those, who like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. (OConnor 508) Mrs. Turpin realizes from this vision that it is not her social hierarchy by which God judges. For God, the meek shall enter first, and Mrs. Turpin sees herself far in the back. This vision completes Mrs. Turpins revelation, and she realizes her deformity. Her change is evident: In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah (509). The act of violence in Revelation and Mrs. Turpins spiritual deformity are used in to provide social commentary. OConnor uses the story to demonstrate the errors society makes when attempting to classify people and discriminate against them. In the story Good Country People OConnor uses the grotesque character Joy Hopewell to show social commentary about judging people. Joy not only possesses the spiritual deformity of judging people based on their background, but also the physical deformity of an artificial leg. OConnor shows the social commentary through Joys interaction with her mother: Joy Hopewell, an unmarried, large blonde girl who had an artificial leg (170) and a philosophy

Lay PhD, is the most strident critic of her silly mother, Mrs. Hopewell and her equally silly friend, Mrs. Freeman (White 53). Joy criticizes her mother over her mothers belief in good country people. Joy believes that the country people her mother adores are ignorant, not special. OConnor shows this in a dinner between Joy, Mrs. Hopewell, and a traveling Bible salesman named Manley Pointer: Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear (OConnor 280). Despite Joys coldness towards Manley Pointer at first, she soon develops an interest in him. Joy plans to seduce Pointer for her own pleasure: During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the

storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse (284). The pleasure that Joy expects to receive from seducing Pointer is two fold. Not only will she receive the physical pleasure, but the mental pleasure of having bested another ignorant country person. This is especially seen in True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind (284) which shows that Joy believes herself to be much more intelligent than Pointer. However, while out with Pointer, Joy begins to believe in the goodness of Pointer, who is a good country person: Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. Arent you, she murmured, arent you just good country people (290). It is Joys trust in Manley Pointer that allows the act of violence to occur in Good Country People. Believing Pointer to be a good country person, she allows him to not only touch, but to take off her artificial leg. To Joy, her artificial leg is like her soul. As Joy soon finds out however, Pointer is not a good country person at all: He stopped and pointed, with a

Lay smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the

back of each card. Take a swig, he said, offering her the bottle first (290). Pointer is actually a complete moral void. In addition to the obscene cards and alcohol, Pointer steals Joys artificial leg: She saw him grab the leg, and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself (290). As Di Renzo explains The theft of her leg brings her in touch with her own infantilism, her own physical limitations (78). OConnor abruptly ends the story without offering Joy a moment of grace and without showing whether or not the act of violence changed Joys thinking and life. However, the act of violence is successful in showing the social commentary OConnor aimed for by illustrating that people are not always how they seem. The last collection of short stories that Flannery OConnor wrote is titled Everything that Rises Must Converge. In the short story by the same title, OConnor tells the story of a man named Julian and his mother, whose spiritual deformity is her inability to change with the times, especially in the form of her racist beliefs towards African-Americans. Much of her racism stems from her belief that . . . his mother even more certain that ones identity remains the same, regardless of circumstances (Prunty 153). The mother believes that all AfricanAmericans are poor, ignorant people because that is how she was taught. She believes that African-Americans are still this way because she ignores the change in their circumstances. It is this racism that leads to the act of violence against the mother. While on a bus to an aerobics class, the Julian and his mother encounter an African-American woman and her young son: The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the dark a large, gaily dressed, sullen-

Lay looking colored woman got on with a little boy (OConnor 415). During the bus ride, Julians mother plays with the child while the childs mother discourages the behavior: I see yoooooooo! she said and put her hand in front of her face and peeped at him. The woman slapped his hand down. Quit yo foolishness, she said, before I knock the living Jesus out of you (417). Despite the boys mother discouraging the behavior, Julians mother continues exciting the boy. Julian and his mother exit the bus at the same stop as the African-American mother and son. Assuming from her old fashion values that the little boy must be poor, Julians

mother gives the boy a penny: Oh little boy! Julians mother called and took a few quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost. Heres a bright new penny for you, and she held out the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light (418). The response of the young boys mother is sudden and violent: Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, He dont take nobodys pennies (418). Julians mother is caught by the full force of the blow and knocked down. Julians mother is not given any chance at a moment of grace or redemption however, as the blow kills her: One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed (420). Although Julians mother was not offered a chance at salvation, the act of violence and her spiritual deformity allows OConnor to illustrate social commentary on the effects of outdated ideas such as racism. In all of her stories, Flannery OConnor uses grotesque characters to provide both social commentary and moral seriousness. By combining these characters with acts of violence,

Lay OConnor is able to bring about moments of grace in which each character is able to analyze

himself and possibly have a chance at salvation by fixing their spiritual deformity. Although not all of the characters are offered redemption, OConnor effectively uses her tools to provide insight into some of the worlds most important issues. By offering readers the chance to recognize their own spiritual deformities without having to undergo an act of violence, OConnor gives both meaning and substance to her short stories, as well as profoundly impacting the readers lives.

Lay 10 Works Cited Coultard, A. R. From Sermon to Parable: Four Conversion Stories by Flannery O'Connor. American Literature 55.1 (Mar. 1983). 55-71. JStore. Louisiana Tech Library 26 Jan. 2006 <http://links.jstor.org>. Di Renzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery OConnor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1993. Gleeson-White, Sarah. A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (Fall 2003). 46-57 Project Muse. Louisiana Tech Library 26 Jan 2006 < http://ezproxy.prescott.latech.edu:82/journals>. Grimshaw, James A. The Flannery OConnor Companion. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1981. OConnor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. Flannery OConnor: The Complete Stories. Ed. Herb Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971. 117-133. - - -. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Flannery OConnor: The Complete Stories. Ed. Herb Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971. 405-420. - - -. Good Country People. Flannery OConnor: The Complete Stories. Ed. Herb Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971. 271-291. - - - . Revelation. Flannery OConnor: The Complete Stories. Ed. Herb Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971. 488-509. Orvell, Miles. Flannery OConnor: An Introduction. Jackson, MS: U P of Mississippi, 1991. Owens, Mitchell. The Function of Signature in A Good is Hard to Find. Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (Winter 1996): 101-106. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Janet

Lay 11 Witaleck. New York: Gale, 2004. Prunty, Wyatt. The Figure of Vacancy. Shenandoah 46.3 (Fall 1996): 38-55. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Janet Witaleck. New York: Gale, 2004. Sloan. Gary. OConnors A Good Man is Hard to Find. The Explicator 57.2 (Winter 1999): 113.121. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Janet Witaleck. New York: Gale, 2004.