SOURCE: Klug, M. A. “Flannery O'Connor and the Manichean Spirit of Modernism.” Southern Humanities Review 17, no. 4 (fall 1983): 303-14.

In the following essay, Klug maintains that O'Connor's negative attitude towards modernism and the modern writer “sets her at odds with the whole tradition of American fiction in this century and with the type of spiritual hero which that tradition has produced.”

Flannery O'Connor made no secret of her contempt for the modern age. Her antagonism to it goes far beyond the artist's conventional scorn of science, technology, middle-class values, “the smell of steaks in passage-ways.” She attacks the central assumptions of literary modernism as vigorously as those of our social and economic life and for the same reason. As O'Connor sees it, the modern consciousness in all its manifestations is corrupted by the Manichean predisposition “to separate spirit and matter.”¹ As her letters and occasional prose clearly indicate, she...