SOURCE: "Flannery O'Connor and Southern Literature," in The World of Flannery O'Connor, Indiana University Press, 1970, pp. 147-51.

Hendin is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, she compares The Misfit to other violent characters in Southern literature.

While, from a statistical point of view considering annual income, national origin, and religion, some of O'Connor's heroes could wander into [Faulkner's fictional setting of] Yoknapatawpha, one senses they would find it totally alien. Faulkner and Styron build their countries out of the South's greatest literary virtue: its ability to lag behind the rest of America in giving up the romantic sense of the hero and of history. O'Connor and Capote have abandoned the South's most distinctive concerns. Whether by choice or default, they write out of the mainstream of the American consciousness, In their murder scenes, a framework of meaning, if it exists at all, has receded into...