Summary:
Biography, works and themes of Flannary O'Connor and a literary analysis of her short story "Good Country People"
1. - Introduction.
The biographic features of a writer usually have an influence on the development of his or her literary creation. The biographic influence is especially strong on the literary work of Flannery O'Connor. Her life and experiences are reflected through her work in themes, characters, descriptions and style. There are two important features of her life, which had marked the short stories and novels of Flannery O'Connor: The South of the United States and her religion, Catholicism. These two aspects are reflected in her vision of life, society and above all in the vision of the human race.
"Question: To whom or to what do you attribute your view of human being"
Flannery O'Connor: Probably to being a Catholic and a southerner - and a writer." 1 [Flannery O'Connor from Magee, R. M., Conversation with Flannery O'Connor, 1987: 58]
2. - Flannery O'Connor's biography.
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah (Georgia) in 1925. Her family was deeply Catholic. The Catholicism in the South of the United States, a minority religion, is called "Old Catholic." She spent her childhood in this important city of Georgia. But in 1938 the Flannery's family had to move to a town called Milledgeville because of the illness of the father, lupus. He died some years later.
O'Connor was the only child of the family, and also she was very shy and introverted. She always had a great difficulty in order to mix with people. When she finished her degree course of Social Science, Flannery O'Connor started her independent life. Firstly, in 1947 O'Connor joined the camp of Spencer Trask for writers in New York. Finally she moved to Connecticut with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. But in 1951 Flannery was diagnosed as having lupus, the same illness of her father. Lupus is an incurable and occasionally mortal illness which attacks skin, articulations and internal organs. This illness affected her legs and her hip, so she used crutches all her life.
Flannery O'Connor had to back to Milledgeville and leave her previous independent life. She and her mother started to live in a farm called "Andalusia." Her mother, Regina, was a very important figure in Flannery's life and especially during the hard process of her illness. Her mother had a tough and domineering personality. O'Connor usually describes Regina in her short stories; for example Mrs. Cope ("A Circle of the Fire") or Mrs. May ("Greenleaf") are very active and self-confident widows.
O'Connor kept working despite of her illness. She was a very perfectionist writer and she rewrote many of her stories. When medicines seemed to stop the ailments of her illness, O'Connor started to accept invitations in order to give some lectures in universities and congresses.
O'Connor was totally dedicated to her literary work until the day of her death. Flannery O'Connor died in 1964.
3. - Literary creation of Flannery O'Connor.
The literary creation of Flannery O'Connor is not lengthy because of her short life and her difficult conditions to write with her illness. Her works is principally formed by short stories; she only wrote two novels. Her first short stories were "The geranium", published in literary magazines in 1946, and later in her Master's Thesis "The Barber", "Wild Cat", "The Crop", "The Turkey", "The train." The most important characteristics of these first stories are the strong sense of humor and irony in her style, her initial social perspective that will develop to a more religious tone in her later works, the use of realistic characters and there is no presence of violence. In 1951 O'Connor published her first novel Wise Blood in which start to appear her tendency to the grotesque characters and situations. In 1955 Flannery O'Connor recollected some of her short stories to create a collection called A Good Man is Hard to Find. This collection includes many of Flannery's best known works like "Good Country People", "The River", "A Good Man is Hard to Find", "The Artificial Nigger", ect... The most relevant aspects of this literary compilation are the presence of grotesque characters who are injured physically and mentally and there is a verbal and thematic violence. Her next and last novel will be The Violent Bear Away published in 1960. There is a posthumous work Everything that Rises Must Converge, a recompilation of her last short stories, edited in 1965. This last creation maintains the principal characteristics of her whole works. The most part of her short stories were recollected in The complete stories of Flannery O'Connor in 1971.
4. - Themes in the works of Flannery O'Connor.
The main themes of her short stories and novels are closely related to some relevant conditions of O'Connor's life.
Firstly, she lived almost all her life in the South of the United States. The fact of being a southern writer has influenced all her literary creation.
"Southern writers are stuck with the South and this is a good thing to be stuck with." 2 [Flannery O'Connor from Magee, R. M., Conversation with Flannery O'Connor, 1987:108]
Flannery O'Connor placed the most part of her stories in a Southern social context. The use of the South as setting is due to the fact that O'Connor needed to locate her characters in a particular social context in order to show their global meaning as individuals; Flannery said: "But the fact is that you can't cut a character off from his society and say much about him as an individual." 3 [Flannery O'Connor from Magee, R. M., Conversation with Flannery O'Connor, 1987: 40.]
In her stories Flannery O'Connor showed the South which she lived in Georgia, called "Deep South", its costumes, characters, dialectic English and its old complexity as forgotten region of the United States. The concept of one of the main pillars of the Southern society, family, is modified by Flannery O'Connor according to her vision of family. The families in O'Connor stories are usually monoparental, like her own family, mainly widows or divorced people have to take care of their relatives.
The other important element of her life which had a great influence on O'Connor writing is her deep Catholicism. This kind of religion has a minority but recognized community in the South of the United States, where the dominant religion is Protestantism. Thus O'Connor joined two contradictory elements in her society: She was a Southern and a Catholic writer.
Flannery O'Connor did not send a moralist Catholic message in her stories. She just tried to expose the ideals of her religion. But as a Catholic writer, O'Connor shows some preoccupations according to her religion in her works. We can frequently find themes like death, the idea of repentance of sins and confession. But above all there is a main Catholic theme, which is the idea of revelation of the truth, which implies a personal encounter with God. In O'Connor's stories, the moment of God's grace is often fleeting and comes as a moment of stupefied shock in the main character. O'Connor always includes in the story an agent of this grace, another character. However, though the purpose of this agent is to awaken the protagonist to the mystery of Christ's grace, the agent is not a good-willed Catholic soul and frequently it is just the opposite. These kinds of characters often have demoniac features and very bad intentions. The characters need to experience violence in order to experience conversion. The encounter with truth, with grace leaves the soul illuminated and the character can see now the real meaning of his or her life. The characters who receive this revelation of God are people who feel self-satisfied, self-righteous, usually with a superiority complex, but they are blind to the truth.
The use of the grotesque in order to create a violent situation is a typical aspect of Flannery O'Connor's style. This special characteristic can be due to her conditions in her life, especially her illness. This is a very important aspect that will be studied in the second part of our work.
To sum up, there are three main characteristics in the whole literary creation of Flannery O'Connor: Her deep and practicing Catholicism, her geographical situation in the "Deep South" of the United States and her tendency to a grotesque style. These characteristics are much related with some important circumstances of O'Connor's life.
5. - Themes in "Good Country People."
The short story "Good Country People" is a very good example which shows us the main themes of Flannery O'Connor's literary work.
In "Good Country People" Flannery O'Connor presents us with a third person narrator the monotonous lives of various women; Mrs. Hopewell, Joy Hopewell, and Mrs. Freeman and her daughters, in a rural environment in the South of the United States. There is no masculine figure in this family because Mrs. Hopewell is divorced since long time ago.
Joy, Mrs. Hopewell's daughter and the main character of this short story, has a wooden leg because of a terrible accident when she was ten years old, and she also suffers a heart disease. At the age of twenty-one, Joy changed her name into Hulga.
Hulga is always trying to escape from the Southern social conventions and stereotypes in which her mother and Mrs. Freeman are immersed. Hulga is self-assured about her self and her vision of life and people from a nihilistic and atheist point of view; as she says in this story: "If science is right, then one thing stand firm: Science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing." 4 [O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find - "Good Country People", 1980: 176].
She is also very pride of her education with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Hulga rejects any possibility of mixing with the people around her. She creates a condition of self-isolation in her life.
One day in their lives, a young Bible salesman called Manley Pointer arrives at the house of the Hopewells. Pointer quickly introduces himself into the house through his conversation with Mrs. Hopewell. Manley has a heart illness, which is coincidentally what Hulga has.
Mrs. Hopewell thinks about this young man that he is a member of what she calls good country people, the poorer and less lucky people around her. After this conversation, Manley Pointer is invited by Mrs. Hopewell to return any time he would like. Later he starts to talk to Hulga. In this first encounter Manley asks Hulga for a date with her the next day. This invitation is accepted by Hulga.
In their first date they go to a hayloft where Hulga has the intention of seducing him. But finally Manley Pointer is the character who seduces Hulga. When she is opening her heart to a possibility of finding love, he steals her wooden leg and leaves Hulga alone and totally defenseless in the hayloft. The good country boy is nothing more than a thief with a strange fetish for women's artificial body parts. In spite of being a brief short story, there are many relevant themes in "Good Country People."
Perhaps one the most important themes is the use of façades with very different purposes by the two main characters of this story: Manley Pointer and Hulga Hopewell.
Manley Pointer uses the facade of a Catholic young Bible salesman with the aim of hiding his real and evil personality. Pointer uses Mrs. Hopewell's weakness, her conventional vision of life and people, in order to introduce himself into the Hopewell's house.
He also employs his appearance of country simpleton with Hulga. He knows the weak point of Hulga: her complex of intellectual superiority. Manley Pointer puts Hulga into a position where she feels in control. She thinks that she is manipulating Manley, but he is who is doing the manipulation. Hulga lets down her guard because she feels in such great control and becomes comfortable with Manley. As soon as she admitted her love for him, Manley steals her leg, because that is his real purpose. This character uses this façade consciously. Mainly is the only character in the story that has not apparent weakness, and he seems to be almost an omniscient character because he sees though the appearance and attitude of the rest of the characters.
Hulga uses a façade of unattractiveness and superior intellectuality involuntarily in order to avoid contact with the people around her. She uses her deformed body and emphasizes her ugliness to build a wall between her and society. Hulga has very little interaction with anyone at all, besides her mother and their tenant, Mrs. Freeman. That is the point where we find another important theme of Flannery O'Connor's story. This theme is the isolation of Hulga. This is a recurrent theme in Flannery O'Connor's works, the conflict between individual and society, which will be studied in the second section of our work.
Another important point for the thematic structure is the relation of Hulga with her mother and with Manley Pointer.
The relation with her mother, Mrs. Hopewell, is the base for the idea of conflict between society and individual. Mrs. Hopewell represents the integration in a society. But Hulga does not want to belong to this kind of society that she considers inferior for her.
The relation between Hulga and Manley Pointer is treated by Flannery O'Connor grotesquely. A good example is how our author describes the love scene between them, where there is no romantic or emotional elements. Flannery uses a very cold and technical style: "The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodologically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish." 5 [O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find-"Good Country People", 1980: 190.]
The Catholicism has also an important influence. In "Good Country People" the Catholic theme is about the revelation of God in Hulga's character. O'Connor sees Hulga's belief system (Nihilism, Atheism) as her great handicap. Hulga does not accept any kind of communion with God because she is morally smug. She thinks that she has inside herself everything she needs to be a complete person.
Essentially this theme sums up the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestantism defends that each individual determines his own belief and the salvation comes from a personal relationship with God. And Catholicism maintains that salvation comes in the course of a good and appropriate connection with God following the traditions and sacraments of His Church.
The shock of Hulga when Manley steals her wooden leg gives her an awareness of her inadequacy in the eyes of God. The shock seems violent and cruel. Flannery O'Connor thought that anything that knocked the unbeliever's mind was completely justifiable.
All the text is structured for this moment of revelation. Flannery uses the technique of epiphany, where a single moment of illumination reveals the deeper meanings of the text to the main character.
Another interesting theme is the double personality Hulga-Joy, who experiments a complete change throughout the story. Joy changes her name to Hulga, an ugly name, to reflect her feelings about her deformed body and mind. The name is opposite to her real name Joy, with Catholic features. Hulga is the character who rejects society, Catholic religion and any human contact. But Joy is the personality inside Hulga who wants to mix with people. When she is with Manley in the hayloft and he has her wooden leg, Joy-Hulga dreams about the possibility of staying with him the rest of her life: " "Put it back on," she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and every night he would take her leg off and every morning put it back on again."
6 [O'Connor, Flannery: A Good Man Is Hard to Find- "Good Country Peole", 1980: 193.].
The most part of the main themes of Flannery O'Connor are shown in "Good Country People": The reflection of Flannery O'Connor's Southern society, the Catholic vision of human being and her tendency to the grotesque and violent situations.
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