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Abjection and the Grotesque in Flannery O'connor's

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Abjection and the Grotesque in Flannery O'connor's THE JOUISSANCE OF GRACE: ABJECTION AND THE GROTESQUE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S SHORT STORIES A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Catalina Carapia-Aguillon FALL 2017 THE JOUISSANCE OF GRACE: ABJECTION AND THE GROTESQUE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S SHORT STORIES A Thesis by Catalina Carapia-Aguillon Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet __________________________________, Second Reader Susan Wanlass ____________________________ Date ii Student: Catalina Carapia-Aguillon I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Doug Rice Date Department of English iii Abstract of THE JOUISSANCE OF GRACE: ABJECTION AND THE GROTESQUE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S SHORT STORIES by Catalina Carapia-Aguillon Flannery O’Connor uses satire and grotesque imagery to explore themes of gender and racial oppression in the South. The grotesque bodies and culture portrayed in O’Connor’s stories can be interpreted through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. In her 1982 essay Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines abjection as anything outside the self that threatens our very concept of selfhood. O’Connor’s grotesque characters confront the abjection of oppressive race and gender politics of the Old South within their own warped bodies and experience what Kristeva calls jouissance or the painful, yet ecstatic, fulfilment of unity with the abject. This leads to a painful, yet healing, realization that they have internalized the abject qualities they despise. Like O’Connor’s protagonists, readers also experience jouissance themselves as they confront the representations of race and gender oppression within the space of O’Connor’s fiction. This space ultimately functions as a site of psychological healing for the individual reader and leads to possibility of healing for society as a whole. _______________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet _______________________ Date iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this Master’s Thesis is due to the support of many wonderful people who I would like to thank: -To Dr. Nancy Sweet and Dr. Susan Wanlass for their support throughout my career. This project would not have been possible without their guidance. -To my parents, Patricia Carapia and Elias Aguillon, who motivated me to pursue my M.A. -To my dear friend, Som Sayasone, for all the kindness and encouragement she has shown me throughout our many years of friendship. -To my friend and colleague, Andrew North, for taking a genuine interest in my work. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments......................................................................................................... v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 2. THE ABJECTION OF SOUTHERN WOMANHOOD ....................................... 16 3. THE ABJECTION OF SOUTHERN RACIAL POLITICS ................................. 54 4. SAVING GRACE: JOUISSANCE FOR THE READER ................................... 84 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 93 vi 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Elation and horror are feelings frequently evoked by Flannery O’Connor both from her characters as well as from her readers. The fact that these feelings occupy the same space within O’Connor’s fiction initially seems like an absurd impossibility. How are we as readers to make sense of this horrific ecstasy? Let’s consider a scene from O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People.” In this scene, the one-legged protagonist Hulga-Joy experiences horrific ecstasy as she succumbs to Manley Pointer, the not so naïve Bible salesman. When he asks her to show him the place where her artificial leg meets her body, she is repulsed. The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her ... she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away (201). Hulga is shocked by Pointer’s request because her leg is an important part of her interiority that she herself finds horrifying. However, this horrific shock quickly gives way to pleasure. For Hulga-Joy, submitting to Pointer’s request “was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life, and finding it again, miraculously, in his” (202). Here, horror meets with ecstasy and signals something beyond mere sexual gratification. We are told that Hulga-Joy considers her artificial leg an essential part of her self-hood: something similar to her soul. In this short scene alone, we see binaries 2 emerge and dissolve into one another: interiority meets the exterior self; repulsion leads to ecstasy. How are we to make sense of this binaristic breakdown? I propose that Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection offers a language through we can explore the complexity of Hulga-Joy’s experience and that of O’Connor’s other protagonists. In her 1982 essay Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines abjection saying: “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to the I ... what is abject ... the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me towards the place where meaning collapses” (1-2). The abject, according to Kristeva, is something outside of the self that elicits disgust because not only it is not a part of the self, but also because contact with it creates a space where selfhood threatens to break down. I argue that in the scene above, Hulga-Joy exemplifies this confrontation with the abject in the form of her artificial leg. Her leg is at once foreign to her body, yet a close part of it. Although it is a physical object that comprises a part of her physical self, it also stands for a deeper internal sense of identity. The physical place where it joins with her own flesh can be interpreted as an external representation of the theoretical space Kristeva describes where meaning and self-hood itself threaten to break down. In spite of its unsettling implications, we see that Hulga-Joy is drawn to this space of break down. She is horrified at Pointer’s request to see her leg, but quickly allows him to remove it. As Kristeva explains, the abject draws Hulga-Joy towards “the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Before her encounter with Pointer, Hulga-Joy had successfully avoided confronting her own vulnerability. She had constructed a vision of herself as a strong intellectual warrior and resisted her mother’s attempts to make her a 3 normal young lady. Giving in to Pointer’s advances destroys this self-constructed identity and forces her to acknowledge that she is in-fact the vulnerable Southern damsel-type she detests. Thus, her passionate kiss with Pointer collapses her identity and her world as she knows it because ultimately, she is the naïve Southern belle and Pointer is the unfeeling nihilist. Nonetheless, the result of giving in to this self-destructive impulse is the ecstatic pleasure she experiences when she surrenders her identity only to discover it anew in Pointer. This can be interpreted as instance of what Kristeva calls jouissance, or the painful fulfillment of desire for the abject. Borrowing from Lacanian psychology, Kristeva explains that jouissance is a “repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence” (Kristeva 9). For Kristeva, submitting to the abject (or Other) does not mean losing the self, but paradoxically finding selfhood by succumbing to the desire for the abject. The selfhood that is discovered through jouissance is not a fixed uniform identity, but rather a complicated fragmented one that includes impulses and desires that are normally suppressed. This is the type of identity that Hulga-Joy finds when she allows Pointer to handle her artificial leg: a jarring version of herself that encompasses the painful, yet satisfying, union of her self-constructed identity and her hidden desires. Although the end of the story finds Hulga-Joy trapped up a hayloft, legless and disillusioned, I hold that there is a painful healing that takes place in this moment of jouissance. 4 It is this encounter with abject Southern culture and the painful healing it produces that I will investigate further in O’Connor’s short stories: “Good Country People,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “Revelation,” and “The Artificial Nigger.” I argue that what O’Connor describes as moments of grace1 can be interpreted as instances of Kristeva’s jouissance that occur when characters confront the grotesqueness of oppressive race and gender politics of the Old South. I posit that the physical grotesqueness of the characters represents this oppressive culture and that Kristeva’s concept of abjection can be used to describe the grotesque physicality and culture found in O’Connor’s stories. Finally, I argue that the significance of this reading comes from the fact that O’Connor’s readers experience jouissance themselves as they confront oppressive representations of race and gender within the space of O’Connor’s fiction. At the core of this reading and, arguably, of O’Connor’s fiction is the element of the grotesque in her work. The grotesque is a concept as elusive as O’Connor’s fiction. However, for the purposes of my argument I will use Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund’s definition, which accounts for this ambivalence: As a term, grotesque can thus never be locked into any one meaning or form, historical period or specific political function.
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