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.
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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
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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. This means that any
attempt to locate the grotesque is by definition bound to fail. For if there is
1 O’Connor discusses grace in Mystery and Manner: Occasional Prose: “There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment” (118). 5
any one thing that defines ‘the’ grotesque it is precisely that it is hybrid,
transgressive and always in motion (Edwards and Graulund 15).
The defining characteristics of the grotesque are its fluidity and hybridity. Grotesque literature often blends juxtaposed binaries, which often result in absurd comedy, but which always result in horror. For example, Hulga-Joy’s artificial leg she uses as a source of strength is eventually stolen from her revealing the vulnerability she worked so hard to hide. Here, several juxtaposing binaries are present: flesh/prosthetic, strength/vulnerability, interiority/exteriority.
O’Connor reveals each of these binaries to be unstable resulting in the uncanny horror that occurs when seemingly irreconcilable binaries are blended together. As
Edwards and Graulund explain, “Grotesque figures can cause the dissolution of the borders separating the normal and abnormal, inside and outside, internal and external.
One extreme flows into another. Territories will not be bounded as clear-cut divisions are dissolved” (Edwards and Graulund 9). The transgression of norms and fixed boundaries is what makes the grotesque so horrifying because the reader is forced to question these very norms and boundaries resulting in an unsettling effect. In The Inhuman Race: The
Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture, Leonard Cassuto explains this phenomenon:
The grotesque disturbs particularly because categorization is the way in
which human being know the world and organize it. Categories define
individual human cultures as all humans recognize them. The organization
they provide lies at the heart of order (e.g. good and evil, us and them)— 6
the ones that give rise to further divisions—would not be possible
(Cassuto 8).
The disruption of order is then at the heart of the grotesque: it disturbs individual sensibilities because it disturbs the illusion of a larger order upon which our existence depends. These descriptions of the grotesque echo Kristeva’s explanation of abjection.
Like the grotesque, abjection is also “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”
(Kristeva 4). Both the grotesque and the abject have a destabilizing function, which lends itself for social critique within literature. O’Connor’s use of grotesque imagery is particularly formidable because it makes her social criticism as complex as the issues she broaches.
In “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” Flannery O’Connor describes her use of the grotesque:
In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some
experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which
the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life ... Yet the
characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their
social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social
patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this realism that I want
to consider (40).
Interestingly enough, O’Connor herself views her fiction as a form of realism, which is not typically associated with the distortion of reality typically attributed to the grotesque. 7
O’Connor’s cryptic definition of the grotesque in her own work opens up interpretive possibilities for her writing. It is interesting to note that O’Connor’s definition of the grotesque echoes that of Mikhail Bakhtin, who also refers to the grotesque as realism in his 1965 book Rabaleis and His World. Although Bakhtin primarily focuses on the medieval tradition of the Carnivalesque, his discussion of the grotesque bears an uncanny relevance to O’Connor’s fiction. Bakhtin explains, “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19-20). Bakhtin defines grotesque realism as the union between two contradicting extremes: the abstract/ideal and the physical state. This union between the abstract and the physical is a common element in O’Connor’s short stories.
Rather than examine the grotesque in theological terms as many critics have done, I propose that the abstract concept O’Connor’s protagonists encounter is the abject
Southern Culture they try to escape. The best way to describe this culture is as abject not only because its horrifying violent oppressive history, but also because it is an external force that O’Connor’s protagonists reject as repulsive, yet they inevitably discover the unity that exists between their sense of selfhood and the Old Southern culture they inhabit. This realization often occurs in a moment of physical collision where this culture comes into contact with their own warped bodies. The grotesque physicality of the characters themselves symbolizes the abject Southern Culture of which they are a part and demonstrates how inextricable they are from it. 8
My discussion of Southern Culture will primarily focus on the ways in which the gender and racial politics of the Old South are presented in O’Connor’s stories. I will begin with a close reading of gender in O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” These three stories all present female protagonists who reject the culture of Southern womanhood as abject. Interestingly enough, they all use their grotesque physicality to subvert the demands of Southern womanhood on their identities. In “Good Country People,” for instance Hulga-Joy takes pleasure in “stumping” about the house with her artificial leg as a way of thwarting her mother’s attempts to make her into a lady (193). Similarly, the pregnant Ruby in “A
Stroke of Good Fortune” uses her fat and good color to convince herself that she will not become the “dried-up [childbearing] type” her mother had been (73). Likewise, the nameless pre-pubescent female protagonist of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” also feels the impending threat of womanhood. Although she is not physically grotesque herself, she uses childish criticism about the grotesque sexual bodies around her to distance herself from her own physical transition into Southern womanhood. In these three stories, the protective grotesque becomes abject: Hulga-Joy’s leg is stolen by a Bible salesman who seduces her, Ruby realizes her swollen figure is the result of a pregnancy, and the female child in “Temple” comes to accept the beauty of the grotesque adult bodies around her, preparing her for her own pubescence. These female protagonists confront the abject culture within their own bodies and in this way, come to terms with their internalization of the oppressive culture they inhabit. Although this confrontation is 9 jarring, these female characters also experience a healing moment of jouissance when they become one with the culture they find so abhorrent.
The second portion of my argument will focus on the way in which the racial politics of the Old South are depicted through physical grotesqueness in O’Connor’s
“Revelation,” and “The Artificial Nigger.” Although the physical descriptions of African
Americans are grotesque caricatures signaling their racial otherness, O’Connor complicates the racial binary by depicting the white characters as equally grotesque if not more so. For example, Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” recoils from the dirty “white-trashy” woman in the waiting room who she regards as “worse than niggers any day” (194).
Similarly, Mr. Head, in “The Artificial Nigger” is described as having a long tube-like face” and “a long depressed nose” (104). My analysis of race will begin with a close reading of “Revelation” which will serve as a transition from gender politics to race. This story demonstrates the ways in which gender oppression is complicated by racial oppression.
Despite the fact that both race and gender oppression in the Old South stem from the same patriarchal hierarchy, race and gender often conflict within O’Connor’s fiction whose protagonists are often racist white women. As Sarah Gleeson-White explains in
“A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and
Flannery O'Connor,” “… ‘freakish women’ in … O’Connor challenge visions of
Southern womanhood while their grotesque bodies simultaneously, silently, partake in oppressive history” (46). Such a claim is particularly germane given O’Connor’s own paradoxical position as a Catholic Southern female author. Despite being marginalized by 10 her faith and her gender, she still occupies a position of privilege as a white woman.
Perhaps Alice Walker explained O’Connor’s conflicting position best when she describes her visit to O’Connor’s home:
What I feel at that moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take
care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that her house still ... stands
while mine—which of course we never owned anyway—is slowly rotting
into dust. Her house becomes—in an instant—the symbol of my own
disinheritance, and for that instant I hate her guts (57).
Walker’s indignation with O’Connor’s racial and socio-economic privilege demonstrates the ways in which as a Southern Women writer O’Connor was at once oppressed
(woman) and (complicit white) oppressor. In spite of this conflicting doubleness, Walker credits O’Connor with “destroy[ing] the last vestiges of sentimentality in White Southern writing; she caused White women to look ridiculous on pedestals, and she approached her black characters ... with unusual humility and restraint” (59). This is demonstrated in
“Revelation” where O’Connor shows the absurdity of the cult white womanhood. The efforts of the Mrs. Turpin to establish herself as a respectable land owning white woman by reinforcing the social hierarchy of the Old South are thwarted when she is attacked by the surly Mary Grace who calls her an “old wart hog” from hell (207). This violent encounter leads the protagonist to experience abjection of self when she discovers that she is in fact the thing she hates most: a poor dirty white woman. This realization culminates in a moment of jouissance through the holy vision she sees at the end of the 11 story, which reveals to both the reader, and Mrs. Turpin herself the instability of the social order she works so hard to uphold.
While O’Connor’s doubleness certainly complicates the racial hierarchy of the
Old South, I hold that it also makes it impossible to undermine it completely. In “The
Artificial Nigger,” O’Connor simultaneously reveals race as a construct while reinforcing it as a tool to mend the wounded white ego. Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson are grotesque doubles of each other despite Nelson’s disdain for his grandfather’s authority and the rural Old Southern order it represents. This disdain in reciprocated by Mr. Head who resents Nelson’s headstrong attempts at independence. The two experience abjection of self when Mr. Head denies Nelson to avoid a confrontation with the police, which results in a rift between him and his grandson. However, their conflict culminates when the two stop to look at a lawn ornament of a Black boy eating a watermelon and redirect their disgust for each other to the caricatured Black man. Although the negative implications of racism are clear, O’Connor demonstrates that racism has also conveniently functioned as a scapegoat to repair the wounded ego of lower class whites.
As Cassuto explains:
People identify with other people, and this is why objectification can never
be a casual act. Even when the would-be objectifier is enthusiastic, the
acknowledgement that human life is at stake is what gives the act its
import—and its complications (Cassuto 16).
O’Connor’s caustic image of the crumbling Sambo lawn ornament exemplifies the purposeful objectification of the African-American people. For Mr. Head and Nelson, the 12 decaying image of the caricatured Negro serves to negate the humanity of the African-
Americans they encountered throughout the city in order to hide the humiliation they suffered at the hands of city folk, Black and white.
Ultimately, it is this shared sense of racism that seemingly unites Mr. Head and
Nelson in the end giving them, what Kristeva and Lacan would deem, the illusion of complete selfhood. The moment of jouissance occurs for Mr. Head when the pair return home:
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but
this time he knew that there were no words in the world could name it. He
understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and
which is given in strange ways to children … He stood appalled, judging
himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered
his pride like a flame and consumed it (131-132).
Mr. Head likens his reconciliation with Nelson to the mercy of God. The resolution of the story is comical but unsettling because it satirizes, but does not quite overtly condemn, the preservation of white identity at the expense of racial oppression. In a 1955 letter to
Ben Griffith, O’Connor explains, “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all” (78).2 Even this explanation from the author herself is problematic since it implies, albeit unintentionally, a certain justification for the racial oppression of the African American community.
2 For a complete copy of this letter, see Sally Fitzgerald’s The Habit of Being.
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I hold that approaching this story in terms of abjection allows readers to grapple with the conflicting implications of the story because abjection is a liminal space of contradiction. The racial themes in this, and in other of O’Connor’s stories, illustrate the dynamics behind racial oppression in the South. That which the white lower class most detested in themselves (poverty, vulnerability, etc.) they projected onto African
Americans: the abject. As readers, O’Connor draws us into the core of the story’s conflict and makes us feel simultaneously comforted by the familiarity of racism’s function and shaken by the implications of that comfort: jouissance.
This leads into the final portion of my argument, which is that O’Connor’s readers experience jouissance themselves.3 Contemporary readers attempt to distance themselves from America’s history of racial and gender oppression just as O’Connor’s characters attempt to escape from the oppressive culture of the Old South. However, I hold that as part of the American gothic tradition, O’Connor’s fiction provides a space where readers can confront their own attitudes about America’s problematic history of oppression. As
William Veeder claims in the “Nurturance of the Gothic,” “Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform” (47-48). Thus, the Gothic genre creates a space of both personal and social healing where individual readers can confront their own
3 I am not the first to argue that readers are active participants in O’Connor’s fiction. Patricia Yeager’s essay “The Aesthetics of Torture” posits the analogy that readers are invited as sadistic torturers of O’Connor’s characters, but exit as tortured victims themselves. 14 fears and where society can collectively explore its own treatment of taboo subjects such a violence and sexuality. By including these topics at the forefront of its fiction, Gothic literature lets readers confront these impulses within themselves while creating a social space for this same exploration to occur on a larger cultural level.
I argue that O’Connor’s fiction provides this psycho-social healing because her grotesque characters and plots create an outlandish space where characters not only confront their own interiority and marred bodies, but also the grotesque society they inhabit. This is especially true in O’Connor’s work since her position as a Southern
American Gothic writer compels her fiction to include the gruesome history of the
American South. As Patricia Yeager argues in, “The Aesthetics of Torture,” “In Southern women’s fictions, the grotesque foregrounds social codes that are embarrassing, damaging, invisible: codes the status quo recognizes but is interested in hiding” (184).
Yeager goes on to explain that, “the grotesque offers a way to move back and forth between history and body...” (185). Just as in O’Connor’s fiction, the grotesque body cannot be separated from the culture of which it is part, so too O’Connor’s readers cannot completely detach themselves from their own relationship with our nation’s problematic history.
Ultimately, I hold that O’Connor’s grotesque fiction creates a space for contemporary readers to feel uncomfortable about race and gender in a fictional space that is at once private and public. America’s history of gender and racial oppression is just as abject to many contemporary readers as it is to O’Connor’s grotesque protagonists.
Although as readers it is tempting to distance ourselves from the real social implications 15
of O’Connor’s fictional world, it is impossible not to feel guilt and revulsion even as we
are amused by the horrifying consequences of race and gender oppression for her
characters. This moment of simultaneous enjoyment and shame is when we too
experience the psycho-social healing of jouissance. As readers, we become active
participants in the nurturing of O’Connor’s Gothic fiction by examining our own personal
reactions and experiences with our shared history as Americans. This examination is
where healing occurs and where we can begin to reconcile our traumatic history with our
individual and collective national identity.
Although the possibility of jouissance for the reader is not unique to O’Connor’s
fiction, her use gothic elements and grotesquerie is. Her use of the grotesque in particular
makes the possibility of jouissance more probable and perhaps even involuntary. After
all, as Cassuto explains“[the grotesque] encompasses not only cultural boundaries but also the frequently self-destructive forces of individual unconscious desire that draw
people to the edges [b]ut as … those edges are where the action is” (Cassuto 10). If we as
readers construct the meaning of the text by bringing in personal experiences and
attitudes, then we not only explore the edges of cultural boundaries but also of our own
individual suppressed desires. O’Connor’s fiction is especially poignant in capturing this
edge of personal and cultural boundaries. With this in mind, let us go “where the action
is” and begin with a discussion of gender politics in O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”
“A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
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Chapter 2
THE ABJECTION OF SOUTHERN WOMANHOOD
“‘Noooo,’ she said and leaned her round face between the two nearest poles. She
looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and
echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and
the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and
shut her eyes. No. No. It couldn’t be any baby. She was not going to have
something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not” (O’Connor 82).
This quote from Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 story “A Stroke of Good Fortune” is perhaps among the author’s most poignant depictions of women’s plight. The story follows Ruby Hill’s assent up the staircase into her apartment. On her way up, Ruby reflects on her current life in the city with her husband Bill and her successful escape from the impoverished rural setting of her childhood. However, her success is threatened by an unknown illness that causes her to stop and catch her breath. In the scene above,
Ruby is filled with dread as she realizes that her mysterious malady is a much-feared pregnancy, which she associates with her own mother’s bleak fate as a childbearing rural housewife. Again, we encounter the imagery of abjection in this scene. Recall, that Julia
Kristeva defines the abject as anything outside of the self that elicits disgust because it threatens the very notion of selfhood. The child Ruby is carrying is a part of her body, yet she feels it simultaneously threatens her existence, as she perceives that it as “something waiting in her to make her deader” (O’Connor 82). However, the tragedy of this scene is overshadowed by the comedy of the situation caused by what some scholars have deemed 17
Ruby’s absurd selfishness.4 As Margaret D. Baur notes, many critics see Ruby’s goal of
moving into a larger house and her disdain for her rural upbringing as snobbish and status
obsessed. 5 However, Baur asks an important question: “would readers have found
Ruby’s desire for a house more acceptable if she also wanted children to raise in that
house?” (Baur 44). By asking such a question, Baur acknowledges the patriarchal context
of O’Connor’s stories and invites readers to do the same. Although Ruby is arguably a
satiric character, her comedic absurdities should not overshadow O’Connor’s critique of
women’s roles in a patriarchal society, specifically a patriarchal Southern society. In order to understand this critique of Southern society through the tragedy of Ruby’s situation and that of her other female protagonists, it is important to understand Southern womanhood6 from a historical context.
In the antebellum South, white women held a complex position that was
invariably subordinate to men. As John Carl Ruoff explains in his 1976 cultural study of
Southern womanhood,7 “Out of this [late seventeenth century] ethos of leisure and
consumption arose a set of role expectations for southern white women of the planter
4 For example, in Flannery O'Connor's Religion of the Grotesque, Marshall Bruce Gentry dismisses the effectiveness of Ruby’s monologues within the story claiming that through them she does “little more than make herself ridiculous” (Gentry 92). 5 See Margaret D. Baur’s essay, “The Betrayal of Ruby Hill and Hulga Hopewell: Recognizing Feminist Concerns in ‘A Stroke of Good Fortune’ and ‘Good Country People’” where she responds to the caustic readings of this character by scholars including Marshall Bruce Gentry and Anthony Di Renzo. 6 My discussion of Southern womanhood and the plight of Southern women focuses on white women, not to diminish or ignore the plight of black slave women, but because O’Connor’s female protagonists are (for better or worse) white. 7 See John Carl Ruoff’s Southern Womanhood, 1865-1920: An Intellectual and Cultural Study for an in-depth cultural study of Southern womanhood. 18
class which stipulated that women should perform an essentially ornamental function in
society” (Ruoff 18). The role of upper class white women in the antebellum South was
fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, they were elevated as ornaments that spoke
to the grandeur of the family and by extension Southern society itself. On the other hand,
this very elevation served to secure their subservience to men.
Female subservience was a pillar of Southern society, which served to bolster its
values and maintain social order. In Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old
South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines women’s roles in relation to Southern notions of honor. As he explains, “Southern male honor required that women be burdened with a multitude of negatives, a not very subtle way to preserve male initiative in the never-
ending battle of the sexes. Female honor had always been the exercise of restraint and abstinence” (Wyatt-Brown 227). The entire social structure of the Old South was rooted in such notions of honor, which served to establish and enforce the patriarchal structure of the society as a whole. The home was a microcosm for social order, where male
authority reined “since the duties involved made any man a governor in his own small
province. These were essentials to community repute” (66). The home was thus equated
with a ‘small province’ over which the Southern male, as husband and father, was the
supreme authority and by extension, this authority gave him the right to exercise political
authority over his community. 8 This implies that women, be they wives or daughters,
were subordinate citizens in the “small province” of the household.
8 Wyatt-Brown cites a comment made by Virginia delegate, George Mason during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Mason argued that the mere act of being the head of a household entitled men to the right to vote “‘the married man, the parent of a number of 19
This subservient role mirrored the role of the slave over which the patriarch of the family also had ultimate control. As Ruoff explains,
the cult of Southern Womanhood was only an important constituent of a broader
cultural theme—social order—which was refined and renewed in the face of
attacks on southern society. Like the Happy Slave, the Southern Woman, satisfied
and submissive, confirmed the authority of the patriarch. Moreover, as an
ornament to his home, the Southern Woman served as a badge of his success …
Moreover, the cult of chivalry … underlined the strength and gentleness of
southern men as much as the virtue of southern women ... The patriarchal
realization required Southern Womanhood (38-9).
Through the culture of Southern womanhood, women were not considered social equals, but rather as subordinates (closer to black slaves than to their white male husbands) 9 who bolstered white male authority. At its best, the cult of Southern Womanhood elevated white women as objects of admiration deserving protection; however, this privilege came at the price of their autonomy.
In their roles as preservers of culture, white Southern women were primarily confined to the roles of wife and mother. As Lynn V. Kennedy explains in Born
Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South, “Domesticity
children whose fortunes are to be pursued in their own [country],’ should scarcely be seen a ‘suspicious characters’” (qtd. Wyatt-Brown 66). 9 That is not to say that white Southern women did not enjoy a higher legal and social standing than black slaves (male or female). Rather, this indicates that in terms of power dynamics, they were considered the inferior protégées of their husbands and fathers— much like black slaves. 20
and particularly motherhood, became the full flowering of the belle’s potential. Social
commentators tied the role of motherhood to additional ideas of womanhood including
virtue and piety” (Kennedy 10). If men’s principle duty was to care for those lesser
beings under his charge, women’s role was to contribute children who would carry on her
husband’s name and add to his prestige. However, the role of procreator was veiled under
a more palatable guise of honor and virtue. Kennedy quotes a passage from an 1849 issue
of the Southern Literary Journal, which describes the antebellum housewife as, “‘the
queen of the household; her diadem is the social affections; her sceptre love; her robe chastity, pure as the driven snow, enveloping her form, so that the imagination can find naught to blush at, even in the impropriety of attitude’” (qtd. in Kennedy 10). Such romantic language elevated the role of homemaker and ignored the trials of Southern domesticity.
In a society where women were disenfranchised and economically limited,
Southern women had few, if any, alternatives to marriage.10 Although marriage offered
women a certain degree of social and economic security, it did not offer protection from
the authority of her husband or the perils of childbearing and motherhood. As Wyatt-
Brown states,
10 As Wyatt-Brown states, “The difficulty was that if one did not marry, there were no appropriate alternatives … spinsters, unless milliners or dressmakers, seldom started a firm on their own. Unlike their Northern sisters of comparable education, Southern women could not even teach school without feelings of guilt and self-consciousness … With the alternatives non-existent or demeaning, Southern women strained for security in marriage” (229). 21
Southern white mothers, rich or poor, had reason for dissatisfaction with their fate
… these matrons had little conscious awareness of what should take the place of
their rounds of drudgery and their subservience first to father, then to husband.
Their little stage for life’s dramas was confined to the family circle. There was no
escape (126).
Although Southern women were responsible for running the household, they were still
subject to their husbands’ authority and caprices. This left them vulnerable to physical
violence.
Wyatt-Brown analyzes the 1834 case of fifteen-year-old Susan Foster of Natchez,
Mississippi who was beaten to death by her own husband, James Foster, Jr., when he
suspected her of being ‘unchaste.’ (Wyatt-Brown 462). Susan Foster’s case is significant because it demonstrates one extreme of patriarchal Southern culture, which rendered
Southern women helpless. Like many young lower-class Southern brides, Susan did not have the option to remain near her family after marriage, “because she came from poor or unsettled people. She brought to the marriage nothing but herself … she was particularly vulnerable to her husband’s whims” (Wyatt-Brown 481). The local community avenged
Susan’s death by forming a lynch mob. Just as Foster was leaving the court after being temporarily released, the mob (led by the prosecuting attorney of Foster’s case) whipped and tarred-and-feathered Foster—a horrific yet ridiculous scene that could be something straight out of O’Connor’s fiction.
However, as Wyatt-Brown explains the townsmen’s response was less an act of justice as it was a projection of guilt over their own vices: “Foster repelled other men 22 who were drinkers and gamblers themselves. His excesses caricatured their own inclinations in frightening ways. He was a mirror of what they might become. For these reasons Foster had to be transformed … into a creature with whom no one needed to identify himself” (Wyatt-Brown 489). Here, we see a clear example of the horrors of abject Southern culture. The townsmen own need to preserve their self-righteous image led to the even baser act of nearly torturing a man to death. It also offered an easy alternative to enacting real systematic justice. Instead of addressing the larger cultural and legal issues that enabled violence against Southern women, the male community merely pretended to address the issue through the seemingly chivalrous act of lynching the culprit, thus maintaining the pretense of justice while simultaneously protecting the social order. Susan Foster’s case shows the patriarchal society of the Old South at its worst and brings to light the unstable and contradictory nature of Old Southern society.
This broader social instability mirrors the contradictory nature of Southern women’s identity. For as much white Southern women were victims of their society, they were also victimizers. Their submissive role made them complicit in the oppression of the black slaves. Part of an upper-class Southern woman’s responsibilities as a homemaker was “clothing and nursing slaves” (Ruoff 22). While seemingly nurturing, this role indicates a tacit participation in the day-to-day oppression of black slaves. For instance, many Southern women conveniently ignored their husbands’ philandering and instead blamed these sexual liaisons on black women. Southern ladies were horrified at sexual transgressions of their husbands with black slaves, not because of the sexual violation of the latter, but because of the shame it brought to their own social status. In anger, these 23
white women often abused slave women and any children that resulted from the sexual
relationship with their husbands. However, as Kennedy explains, “black women in fact
were generally the victims of coercion, if not rape, rather than the sexual aggressors”
(Kennedy 121). Thus, black women did not seduce white men, but rather white men used
their authority to pressure black women into sexual liaisons, and even resorted to outright
rape if these women refused. However, white women not only ignored the sexual abuse black women suffered at the hands of white men, but they also inflicted further abuse
upon them using them scapegoats for their frustrations about their husband’s sexual
transgressions.
In contrast to the sexual abuse of black women, the pedestal of white female
virtue often came at the cost of black male lives. The lynching of black men accused of
raping a white woman was a common occurrence in the South. According to Ruoff,
“Rape, and fears of rape, of white women by black men existed in the South almost from
the beginning of importation of Africans into the colonies” (Ruoff 110). However,
lynching increased after the Civil War due to fear of black equality.11 During this time,
“arguments against a broad suffrage were replaced by justifications at the center of which
lay the sexual nature of the Negro and the necessity of suffrage restriction and
segregation for the protection of ‘white southern womanhood’” (Ruoff 117). The ideal of
white womanhood became an excuse to disenfranchise black men and even enact
11 As Wyatt-Brown states, “Between 1885 and 1903 there were 3,337 mob killings in the United States … 2,585 took place in the South (436). 24
violence upon them in the name of protecting Southern women.12 The violence enacted in
the name of white womanhood, made Southern women tacitly complicit in the oppression
of the black community. White womanhood thus rendered Southern women victims of
oppressive gender roles and victimizers of black men and women.
I argue that this contradictory role indicates the abjection of white Southern
womanhood. White Southern women simultaneously held two conflicting roles: oppressed female victim and racial oppressor. Recall, that Kristeva defines abjection as
something outside the self that elicits disgust because it threatens the very notion of a
cohesive and uniform identity. The cult of Southern womanhood results in the
fragmented sense of self that Kristeva describes. Within the identity of Southern
womanhood, women embodied a host of binaries: morally elevated/socio-politically
subordinate; nurturing wife/vindictive mistress; blissful mother/biological victim. The
binaries that define Southern womanhood also make the female identity unstable.
O’Connor’s fiction examines the effects of this legacy in a caustic and above all
satirically humorous way. Although Southern women of the 20th century had progressed
since the antebellum and reconstruction eras, the legacy of Southern womanhood
continued to haunt them. These women had to reconcile their own identities with the
remnants of the cult of Southern womanhood. I argue that this lead to what Kristeva
describes as abjection of self. According to Kristeva, abjection of self
12 This became part of the self-righteous platform for the Ku Klux Klan whose regalia included “white [robes signifying] ‘the emblem of purity for the preservation of the home and for the protection of women and children’” (Wyatt-Brown 454-5). 25
would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is
revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the
foundations of its own being. There is nothing like abjection of self to show that
all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning,
language, or desire is founded. (5)
Here, Kristeva refers to Lacanian psychoanalysis, which holds that self-hood emerges as a result of separation from the mother. Before this separation, the child was one with its mother and part of a primal system beyond language and social rules. However, while separation gives way to individual identity, it leads to a sense of loss, which is difficult to express because it precedes language. Kristeva explains that abjection of self is an expression of that loss upon which individual identity is founded. For Kristeva, abjection of self is a complex self-loathing that stems from the incomplete nature of selfhood. I hold that abjection of self can be applied to the Southern women in O’Connor’s fiction.
These female protagonists are born into a society still largely ruled by the legacy of the
Old South. In an attempt to assert their individual identities, they reject the cult of
Southern womanhood only to realize that this ideal, along with all of its violence and contradictions, is a part of who they are. This painful realization often occurs in a moment of contact between their own bodies and the culture they inhabit, revealing that their grotesque physicality is a symbol for the grotesque society to which they belong.
A close reading of O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “Good Country
People,” and “A Stroke of Good Fortune” reveals a sardonic critique of gender roles in the South. The protagonists in each of these stories represent a different stage of sexual 26
development beginning from pre-pubescence and culminating in motherhood. These women encounter abject gender roles at each of these distinct stages. For instance, the nameless child in “Temple” portrays the pre-pubescent anxiety of becoming entering
sexual womanhood, while Hulga-Joy in “Good Country People” demonstrates the
frustrations of sexual adulthood for independent women, and finally Ruby in “Good
Fortune” experiences the horrors of her newly discovered pregnancy. This progression
itself demonstrates the pervasiveness of oppressive gender norms for Southern women,
which are present since birth and reinforced through socialization.
The female child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” exemplifies the budding
anxiety of a young girl’s initiation into the culture of Southern womanhood.13 Although
the protagonist resists the rites of puberty through sardonic humor and elevated religious
imagery, she eventually experiences a moment of jouissance, or union with the abject,
where she comes to accept beauty of the body through the very spiritual ideals that serve
to protect her from physical demands of womanhood. The imagery of grotesque bodies
abounds in this story and signals the child’s impending pubescence and her struggle to
reconcile such a change with her identity. It is important to note that the protagonist
remains nameless throughout the story and is referred to only as “the child”—a term that
is telling in and of itself since O’Connor could have just as easily described her as the
girl. However, the genderless label suggests that she does not yet possess any feminine
13 I am not the first to interpret this story in this manner. Suzanne Allen makes a similar claim in her essay, “Memories of a Southern Catholic Girlhood: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost.’” However, unlike Allen’s reading which adopts a theological approach, my analysis examines the story through the concept of abjection. 27 qualities or any fixed form of identity that would be indicated by a name. Furthermore, we learn about her age only in comparison to her second cousins, Susan and Joanne, who we are told are “fourteen—two years older than she was” (O’Connor 85). Despite being twelve years old, the protagonist is not described as an adolescent, nor does she behave as one. Instead, she inhabits a liminal space between childhood and womanhood.
This liminality is problematic as it causes her to feel out of place. During her cousin’s visit, the child reflects that “If only one of them had come, that one would have played with her, but since there were two of them, she was out of it and watched them suspiciously from a distance” (85). Her feelings of suspicion and displacement lead her hide behind a veil of superiority and biting criticism about her cousin’s interest in boys and romantic relationships, which she deems absurd. For instance, she jokingly insinuates that Mr. Cheatam, the suitor of their boarder Miss Kirby, should take the girls around town. As she makes the suggestion, “She doubled over laughing and hit the table with her fist and looked at the two bewildered girls while water started in her eyes and rolled down her fat cheeks and the braces she had in her mouth glared like tin” (86). Her laughter is transgressive because through it she resists the norm of adult sexuality.
Throughout the story, her mother and their cook chide her for her rude remarks. The cook condemns her attitude by asking, “Howcome you be so ugly sometime?” (93). Although the cook is referring to her lack of manners, the ugliness takes a literal meaning as we see in the description of her laughter at the thought of Mr. Cheatam. The protective humor she uses to guard herself from the world of adult sexuality renders her physically as well 28
as figuratively ugly. Her liminal identity and mocking attitude render her a type of
grotesque misfit.
Her cousin’s behavior contrasts with the child’s genderless identity, and they act as a catalyst for her initiation into the culture of womanhood. Upon arriving, Susan and
Joanne “put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child” (O’Connor 85). In this way, they model
feminine behavior for the child who mocks them as vapid caricatures of femininity, but
observes them intently nonetheless. She intently scrutinizes not only their behavior, but
also their bodies. She observes, “Susan … was very skinny but she had a pretty pointed
face and red hair. Joanne had yellow hair that was naturally curly but she talked through
her nose and when she laughed, she turned purple in patches” (86). The child notices the
girls’ attractive features, but gives them a grotesque bent—she notices that Susan is “very
skinny” and Joanne’s completion is a patchy purple (86).
Other characters are also described as particularly unattractive. For example, the
child describes the local taxi driver, Alonzo Myers, as an “eighteen-year-old boy who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and worked for the taxi company … he had a round sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore. When he drove all the windows of the car had to be open” (87). Such descriptions of the adolescents and young adults around her signal the grotesqueness of the human body and the child’s aversion to the rituals of romance and adult sexuality. For instance, she also notes that
Mr. Cheatam, “was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust colored hair and his face 29
was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and
gullys” (87). The child compares Mr. Cheatam’s appearance to the physical landscape, signaling a connection between his grotesque body and grotesque culture of which he is part. As Patricia Yaeger claims in “Flannery O’Connor and the Aesthetics of Torture,”
“Southern literary bodies are grotesque because their authors know that bodies cannot be
thought of as separate from the racist and sexist institutions that surround them” (186).
This is particularly true of Mr. Cheatam, whose body not only bears the physical marks of the scarred Southern landscape, but whose name itself indicates his exploitation of the black community, as we learn that, “he arrived [to see Miss Kirby] every Saturday afternoon in a fifteen-year-old … Pontiac powdered with red clay dust and black inside with Negros that he charged ten cents apiece to bring into town on Saturday afternoons”
(86). It is telling that his courtship of Miss Kirby has the exploitation of the black community as a backdrop. The cult of womanhood itself was hinged on the oppression of blacks in the South. Thus, it becomes clear that the grotesque bodies the child notices are not just symbolic of the abject puberty, but of the grotesque social implications this entails: entering into the cult of Southern womanhood and participating in its oppressive legacy.
However, the significance of grotesque corporeal imagery becomes complex
because while it represents the abjection of puberty, which threatens the protagonist, it
also serves as a protective function—at least initially. In the eyes of the child, the body is
something comedically ugly. As Anthony Di Renzo claims in American Gargoyles:
Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque, 30
the grotesque’s ultimate purpose is therapeutic: it is a comic shock treatment.
Even at its most menacing, it seeks to liberate. It is a fusty-smelling carnival in
the midst of Lent, striving to free us from all the rubrics and pigeonholes that
oppress and alienate us (5).
The child’s grotesque view of the adult bodies around her allows her to cope with the frightening physical and social obligations that accompany sexual adulthood. She uses mockery as a way of safely engaging with the sexual being around her and distancing herself from them.
Much like her mocking laughter, imagining herself as a Temple of the Holy Ghost separates her from the reality of pubescence and puts her above the sexual and social demands of womanhood. The girls introduce the child to the idea of the body as a vessel, by calling each other “Temple One and Temple Two” (88). Between laughter, they explain, “Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what they should do if a young man should … ‘behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.’ Sister Perpetua said they were to say ‘Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!’ and that would put an end to it”
(88). Their explanation exemplifies the remnants of the cult of Southern womanhood.
Sister Perpetua’s warning echoes the restraints of the cult of womanhood on female sexuality. Much like in the antebellum South, women’s sexuality was still seen as a prize to be guarded rather than a source of enjoyment for women. As Virginia Wray argues in
“Flannery O’Connor’s Struggle with Patriarchal Culture,” “the Catholic patriarchy thoroughly understands the depth and power of young girls’ sexual curiosities and drives, 31
and charges the sisters at the convent school with controlling the girls and acculturating
them to the sexual message of the Church” (32). Like the child’s sarcastic mockery,
Susan and Joanne’s laughter indicates a subtle rebellion against such stifling moral codes
despite their adherence to gender roles. From her cousin’s and her mother, the child
implicitly learns that female sexuality must also be reined in through some type of
supervision, religious or otherwise. This might account in part for the sublimation of her
sexual curiosity. Although the child makes fun of her boy crazed cousins, Wray notes,
She is more sexually adroit and curious than she appears. Her repeatedly
expressed repulsion from Alonzo Myers’ physical person, her suggestion of the
Wilkins brothers as dates for the girls, and her fallacious description of the boys
to her cousins suggest an awareness of physicality and pop sexual culture beyond
her years (32).
While I agree that the child shows curiosity and even a subtle awareness of sexuality, I
disagree with Wray’s claim that the child shows awareness “beyond her years.” Instead, I
would argue that she shows the curiosity and awareness that are in accordance with a
twelve-year-old girl. However, her mother’s consistent criticism of the girls and her
concerns about their behavior might account for the child’s resistance to her sexual
coming of age. This suggests another form of initiation into the sexual propriety that must
accompany newly formed womanhood. In this sense, the child’s internalization of the
moral codes of womanhood has already begun.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that the child, fails to understand the humor of the explanation or the morally disastrous consequences of her cousin’s mockery, she is struck 32
by the spiritual implications of being a Temple of the Holy Ghost. She ruminates the idea
saying to herself, “I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost … and she was pleased with the
phrase. It made her feel as though somebody had given her a present” (89). Being a
Temple is “a present” which serves two functions: it gives her another form of protection
from the abject implications of womanhood and prepares her for the moment of
jouissance she experiences by the end of the story. She applies the term not only to
herself, but also to those around her. Thus, being a Temple of the Holy Ghost serves as a
protective function that guards her from the grotesque physical reality of sexuality.
Nonetheless, her idea of being a holy vessel takes a grotesque turn as she imagines herself a martyr who stoically submits to physical torture: “She began to prepare her martyrdom, seeing herself in a pair of tights in a great arena, lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire, making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions” (95).
Such fantasies indicate that she would rather die an untouched martyr, than become subjected to the social and physical demands of womanhood.
The figure of the hermaphrodite is also a powerful symbol of physical grotesqueness that mirrors the child’s own liminal state. After a trip to the fair, Susan and
Joanne tell the child about the “freak with a particular name” that they could not remember (98). Like the child, the hermaphrodite has no name and is instead labeled as
“the freak,” a label indicating physical and social abnormality. The freak, as Susan explains, “was a man and woman both” (98). They reluctantly go on to explain to the child that “The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women. The freak went from one side to the other, talking first 33
to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear” (98). The arrangement of the
show is a symbol of the hermaphrodite’s liminality. In the two socially established
categories of gender and sex, the hermaphrodite who possesses both male and female
organs does not belong to either group, but instead is free to move in between the two
categories. However, in the rigid order of Southern society this ability is not an
advantage, but a liability. The only place the hermaphrodite can reveal the nature of their
identity is as an attraction in a carnival freak show. Aware of this, the hermaphrodite
warns the audience: “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the
same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way. I’m
showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen” (98). The freak is a symbol of the abject because s/he is a physical symbol of the union of two binaries: male and female. The freak’s appearance in the tent indicates a moment of jouissance, or union with the abject, because s/he embraces their liminal condition as the will of God. The hermaphrodite does not recoil from their liminal physical state, but finds their own identity by embracing what most would deem a grotesque birth defect. By hearing the story about the hermaphrodite’s speech, the child participates in this moment of jouissance as well, which prepares her for her own moment of union with the abject.
This moment occurs when she attends mass at the convent cathedral when she and her mother return the girls to the convent. During mass,
The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the
‘Tantum Ergo’ before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she 34
was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically
… Her mind began to get quiet then empty but when the priest raised the
monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was
thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, ‘I
don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be (101).
It is significant that the child’s “ugly thoughts” stop during the Tantum Ergo, which is the hymn praising the Eucharist. This symbol for the body of Christ juxtaposes the previous grotesque imagery of the human body. Through the symbol of the body as a Temple, the child learns to negotiate her own identity with the expectations that accompany the impending stage in her life: womanhood. I hold that this is the protagonist’s moment of jouissance, or the painful fulfillment of desire for the abject. Recall, Kristeva defines jouissance as 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). According to Kristeva, jouissance is a moment where an individual loses the illusion of a uniform identity and simultaneously discovers a new complex and fractured identity. In this moment of mediation, we see the convergence of the abject and the holy: the cathedral merges with the fair tent, the ivory Host merges with the image of the freak, and the protective spiritual symbol of the Temple of the Holy Ghost becomes a vehicle for the protagonist to accept her transition into the realm of womanhood. Like the hermaphrodite, she acquiesces to God’s will, which is often evoked as justification for the norms and dictates of Southern womanhood. 35
The changes prompted by this experience of jouissance are demonstrated through
the subtle imagery during the child’s ride back home. She is still aware of the imperfect
bodies around her, but no longer resorts to snide mockery. As she sits in the back seat,
“The child observed three folds of fat on the back of [Alonzo’s] neck and noted that his
ears were pointed almost like a pig’s” (102). Even after her moment of jouissance, the child still observes Alonzo’s body as grotesque. She even attributes animal features to him, comparing his ears to that of a pig’s. However, she also notes the “three folds of fat
on his neck” are a subtle symbol of the holy trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost. This comical symbolism indicates the union between the grotesque body and the
spiritual, which she can now fully accept and thus no longer feels the need to ridicule.
Ultimately, it is she who has changed, not the grotesque bodies around her or the
grotesque culture of womanhood they represent.
The image of the sun indicates her transformation. On the ride to the convent, the
child observes the “ivory sun” through the protective framing of her own hair (100). The
ivory sun mirrors the ivory-colored Host of the mass and indicates the purity of Christ’s
body, which the child uses as a shield between herself and the terrifying reality of
puberty. However, it can also be a symbol for the child’s own body, which is not yet
initiated in the physical rites of puberty. On the ride home, “the sun was a huge red ball
like an elevated Host drenched in blood” (102). The symbolism of the bloody sun is two-
fold: it is the body of Christ drenched in his own redeeming blood, but it is also a symbol
for the child’s own body and menstrual blood, which signals her transition into
womanhood. The red sun becomes a symbol of the union between the child’s ideal of the 36
holy spiritual body and the grotesque reality of the physical body. Thus, the child’s own
identity and the abject puberty she disdains become one leaving her ready to enter the cult of womanhood.
Although the child discovers an identity that includes her sexuality, she is now subjected to the authority of patriarchal culture. Before her moment of revelation during mass, she is able to avoid the aggressive affection of the nun who greets them. However, as she exits mass, “The big nun swooped down on her mischievously and nearly smothered her in her black habit, mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt” (101). The humor of this scene does not quite mask the forcefulness of this encounter or the aggressive way in which the nun invades the child’s personal space. As
Wray explains, “The predatory swooping action, the near smothering, the mashing of the crucifix into the child’s face are all very unappealing images recalling the earlier claim that the sisters would control Joanne’s and Susan’s sexuality” (34). Ironically, she can only accept her own sexuality by entering a culture where religious and social mores will deprive her of agency over this element of her person. This oppressive contradiction is part of what makes Southern womanhood abject: it compels women to acknowledge the patriarchal authority over their sexuality while simultaneously denying these desires within themselves.
O’Connor touches upon the oppressive sexual mores for Southern women in her story “Good Country People.” The protagonist, Hulga, embraces the grotesqueness of her own body and uses it to protect herself from the demands of Southern femininity.
However, her attempt to explore her sexuality with a sense of agency fails. She ultimately 37
realizes that she embodies the very passivity and vulnerability she sought to subvert
through her transgressive use of the grotesque. Hulga’s identity is outside the norm of
expectation for women both in appearance and in conduct. At thirty-two, Hulga is unmarried and has a PhD in philosophy. More notably, however, she has an artificial leg as the result of a hunting accident that occurred when she was ten. Although, the loss of her leg renders Hulga physically and socially handicapped, she accepts her maimed body and uses it to construct a new identity that revels in its own ugliness.
The connection between her artificial leg and her identity is best understood
through Kristeva’s concept of abjection or the object outside of the self that elicits disgust
because it threatens the very idea of selfhood. Hulga’s leg is an external representation of
her identity as she perceives it. However, it is more complex than a mere symbol. Her leg
is a part of her physicality that makes her complete, but it is also artificial and, in that
sense, foreign to her body. This contradiction symbolizes many of the binaries in Hulga’s
identity. The leg is at once a grotesque strength and a weakness, a symbol of her
resistance to the culture of femininity and a point of existential vanity. These
contradictions become clear during her encounter in the hayloft with the Bible salesman,
Manley Pointer. However, before unpacking this abject symbol further it is necessary to
understand its role in her identity.
Hulga flaunts her leg as a defense mechanism against the socializing forces of her
mother, Mrs. Hopewell, and the ridicule of their tenant, Mrs. Freeman. For instance,
“Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the
awful noise but she made it—Mrs. Hopewell was certain—because it was ugly 38 sounding)” (183). Rather than attempting to diminish her artificial leg, she uses its grotesqueness to put off those around her (mainly her mother) and resist their influence.
We also learn that she legally changed her name from Joy to Hulga when she left home for college. For the protagonist, the name Hulga is,
the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her
mother had not been able to turn her dust in to Joy, but the greater one was that
she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga (182).
Her attitude regarding her name indicates the purposeful construction of an identity that directly counters the cult of femininity embodied in the name Joy. It also indicates that
“her dust,” or her essence, is not fixed but rather pliable and fluid, which negates the biologically essentialist assumption of the cult of femininity that all women possess an inherently feminine quality.
It becomes clear that Hulga has constructed this grotesque identity as a form of protection against her mother’s attempts to socialize her and perhaps even against her own transgressive desires. Mrs. Hopewell pities Hulga’s inability live up to the cultural standards of femininity: “It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she [Hulga] grew less like other people and more like herself—bloated, rude and squint-eyed” (184). To her mother, Hulga’s grotesque identity is a liability rather than a strength, which is why she attempts to initiate her into the cult of womanhood. Her well-meaning attempts to change Hulga’s behavior consist mostly of passive aggressive advice such as, “a smile never hurt anyone” (184). However, Mrs. Hopewell’s seemingly innocuous looks and comments threaten the sense of identity that Hulga has created for herself, which causes 39
her to respond with a violent outburst of quotes from obscure philosophers that
completely go over her mother’s head. Hulga uses her education and knowledge of
philosophy as much as she does her grotesque body and demeanor to protect herself from
the constraints of femininity. In a sense, her education makes her a type of grotesque
Other. Hulga’s PhD in philosophy “left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say
‘My daughter is a nurse,’ or ‘My daughter is a school teacher’ or even, ‘My daughter is a
chemical engineer.’ You could not say, ‘My daughter is a philosopher’” (185). Mrs.
Hopewell’s attitude demonstrates that higher education was still rather uncommon for
women aside from a few standard acceptable careers such as a nurse or teacher.
Moreover, the abstract field of philosophy has no place in Southern culture and is not a
study traditionally adopted by women. This leaves Hulga out of place within Southern
society, and Hulga embraces that alterity to the point of denying sexual or romantic
desires that she perceives as belonging to a culture that is beneath her.
However, Hulga is not devoid of vanity; rather her vanity takes a grotesque bent.
Instead of attempting to make herself feminine or conventionally attractive, she does the
opposite. We are told, “she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought it was funny” (184).
Her slovenly way of dressing is a way of subverting the beauty standards of Southern femininity that she cannot fit into (and does not consciously want to fit into) because of her artificial leg. She stubbornly embraces her grotesque Otherness, to the point that she denies any of her own sexual desires. She dismisses Manley Pointer as a bumpkin, but during dinner, Mrs. Hopewell notices Hulga “observing sideways how he handled his 40
knife and fork and he saw too that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen and
appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention” (190). This short
description indicates a subtle flirtation that is not entirely one sided. Although Hulga
feigns to notice only his bad table manners, she is intelligent enough to recognize that
Pointer is making romantic advances, which she is not immune to as she vaguely admits
to herself later.
Alone in her room, she remembers the conversation where Pointer asks her out
on a date: “She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a
great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it” (193). The fact that
she thinks about her exchange with Pointer throughout the night and her realization that it
has “profound implications” (193) is a cryptic foreshadowing of her moment of
jouissance. Since Hulga has embraced grotesque alterity, for her, the norm is the abject— that is, adhering to the cult of femininity in any way is repulsive to her. She sees the social rituals of courtship as something beneath her. She accepts Pointer’s invitation only by justifying it to herself as an opportunity to subvert the norm by seducing him away from what she deems his simpleminded Christian beliefs. She even allows herself to fantasize about their encounter:
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 … she imagined that
she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life.
She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful (196). 41
Her fantasy glosses over the physical details of how she would go about seducing Pointer, but she has a certain confidence in her ability to do so, demonstrating that not only does she possess sexual desires, but she wants to carry them out on her own terms with a sense of agency. However, her fantasy seems to be more focused on her ability to liberate him from the constraints of Christian mores, than on the details of their sexual encounter.
Thus, she can only allow herself to indulge the abjection of sexual desire if it subverts the culture rather than indicates that she herself is a part of it.
Hulga is able to remain in control during her encounter with Pointer until he gets her to agree that she loves him. The fact that she gives in to this request so quickly, indicates cracks in her seemingly cohesive identity. Although she shows mockery and disdain for courtship rituals, she quickly reveals her hidden desire for romantic affection by admitting that she loves Pointer after a few clumsy kisses. He is insistent that she admit this and ignores her confession about her age and level of education. Hulga’s education is part of her arsenal against oppressive culture, but Pointer is undeterred by this strength since he is smart enough to exploit Hulga’s vulnerability. By partaking in this cliché act of courtship, she participates in the patriarchal gender roles that render her even more vulnerable to male power. This is made clear when he asks her to prove her love by showing him the place where her mutilated leg joins her artificial limb. She is taken aback by his request because “[n]o 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 refuses because her artificial leg is a physical representation of her inner- most self that even she is scared of examining. I hold that Hulga fears examining this part 42
of herself because the physical place where her artificial limb meets the rest of her body
is a symbol of the abject. As Kristeva states, the abject is, “the jettisoned object …
radically excluded [that] draws me towards the place where meaning collapses” (2). Her leg is the jettisoned object, and the place where it meets her flesh and blood body is the place where meaning collapses in the sense that it is the place where foreign object becomes one with the rest of her natural body. I hold that this physical space is a metaphor for her relationship with the abject culture of Southern courtship.
When she is overcome by her desire and agrees to let Pointer handle her leg she
finds that “it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life, and
finding it again, miraculously, in his” (202). This is Hulga’s moment of jouissance where
meaning collapses and she loses her carefully constructed sense of self. In this moment,
she finds a more complex identity that embraces the sexual and romantic desires of
Southern womanhood that she finds so abject. As Kristeva explains,
in jouissance where the object of desire, known as object a [in Lacan’s
terminology], bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in
order to contemplate itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or
objectal to the abject. It is simply a frontier (9).
Jouissance is then a moment where the fluid nature of identity becomes evident and the
illusion of uniform identity is shattered. During this moment of union with the abject an
individual’s desire for cohesion is fulfilled by becoming one with their subconscious
desire for the object of disgust. In doing so, the boundary or frontier between self and
Other is lost: the two become one. This is what Hulga experiences when she allows 43
Pointer to handle her artificial leg. The moment when she teaches him how to remove it
has the intimacy and sexual charge of a love scene:
She took it off for him a put it back on again and then he took it off himself,
handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one … ‘Put it back on,’ she said. She
was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would
take the leg off and every morning put it back on again (202).
The sensual gestures and the language of this scene demonstrate Hulga’s surrender to the romantic fantasy of the cult of Southern womanhood. This encounter fits under the characteristics of jouissance because it is an intense moment of contradiction where
Hulga loses her agency, but gains the freedom to explore her own sexual desires. Pointer embodies the Other which Hulga finds so repulsive, she perceives him as good country people—an ignorant bumpkin who buys into religious ideology and the culture of
Southern courtship. Hulga’s submission to Pointer is a paradoxical submission to her own sublimated desire to be one with the Other or the abject, which she considers shameful.
However, as Kristeva explains, one revels in jouissance “Violently and painfully”
(9). Hulga’s moment of ecstasy is short-lived and she painfully discovers the violent implications of her romantic fantasy. When she insists that Pointer put her leg back on he replies, “‘Not yet’ … setting it on its foot out of her reach. ‘Leave it off for a while. You got me instead’” (203). Much like the culture of Southern womanhood renders women dependent on men, Pointer literally leaves Hulga unable to stand on her own two feet by taking away her artificial leg and leaving her trapped on the hayloft vulnerable to his whims. By removing her leg, he strips her sense of agency and reveals how fragile her 44 protective identity really is. There is a distinct shift in mood during the caresses that follow the removal of her leg:
Without her leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have
stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not
very good at … Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would
glance behind him where the leg stood (203).
Unlike the tender and passionate encounter of the previous scene, the language here is frantic and violent. Once Pointer has removed her leg, Hulga is no longer in control and cannot even reason through the situation. The other function her brain is attempting could be interpreted as her subconscious attempt to process her union with the abject and grapple with the implications of the terrifying position in which she finds herself. When it finally becomes clear Pointer was only seducing her in order to steal her leg as a grotesque trophy, Hulga must face another jarring contradiction: it is she who is naïve good country people and Pointer is the true nihilist.
Although O’Connor ends the story with Hulga’s failure to subvert the norm, the story is not a cautionary tale for independent, intelligent women—it is a critique of abject
Southern culture. This is particularly evident in the characters of Manley Pointer and
Mrs. Freeman. Both of these characters represent the cruel oppressive side of Southern culture, a side that truly revels in its own violence and appears to need oppressive control over Others in order to subsist. Both Pointer and Mrs. Freeman are drawn to the grotesque. Like Pointer, Mrs. Freeman is fascinated by the story of Hulga’s hunting accident because she “had a special fondness of the details of secret infections, hidden 45 deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable”
(183). This disturbing character trait, however, does not make her a freak in the culture she inhabits. Instead, Mrs. Hopewell insists that “Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet”
(178). Mrs. Hopewell’s assertion is wryly comical because Mrs. Freeman reveals herself to be a cruel, ill-mannered, busybody—the opposite of a Southern lady. O’Connor’s emphasis on the word lady is a tongue-and-cheek critique of the cult of Southern womanhood where being a lady meant keeping the socially accepted façade of morality, while protecting, and even embracing, the grotesque horror the society was built upon.
Mrs. Freeman raises her daughters Glynese and Carramae, to be good Southern women whose sole purpose is to attract men and bear children. She tells poorly veiled stories about Glynese’s sexual encounters with men and obsesses with the most abject details of
Carramae’s pregnancy, giving Mrs. Hopewell an unsolicited report of “how many times
[Carramae] had vomited” (178). Through Mrs. Freeman, O’Connor provides a grotesque caricature of the contradictions of the cult of Southern womanhood, which is founded on abject moral decay and sustained by the façade of wholesome cultural values.
Pointer is Mrs. Freeman’s male counterpart representing a grotesque caricature of the Southern male. Like Hulga, he also constructs his identity by choosing the name
Manley Pointer—a phallic, hyper-masculine alias he uses to prey on Hulga. Through
Pointer, O’Connor shows the extent of male cruelty towards Southern women. Much like
Mrs. Freeman, Pointer is also fascinated by Hulga. When he meets Hulga at the gate she notices, 46
He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a
new fantastic animal at the zoo … His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she
could not think where she had been regarded with it before (194).
Pointer’s admiration of Hulga is far from romantic and closer to that of a hunter stalking
its prey. Her artificial leg makes her a morbid fetish more like a zoo animal than a
remarkable woman. Although Hulga is unable to place it, his stare might be similar to
Mrs. Freeman, who also regards Hulga with a mocking admiration that reduces her to a
freakish Other. However, Pointer takes this mockery one step further by stealing Hulga’s
leg as a trophy of his power. Perhaps the most disturbing moment in the story is when
Pointer admits, “‘I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things … One time I got a woman’s glass
eye this way’” (205). The idea of Pointer as a Southern Jack the Ripper harvesting women’s artificial body parts is a macabre vision. However, this is the world that
O’Connor lays out with morbid humor. We do not have to dig too deep beyond the satirical hyperbole of the story to realize that although the characters are caricatures, the invisible system that seems to guide their actions is not. As we leave Hulga in the hayloft defeated and incomplete, we realize, perhaps along with Hulga herself, that she never really stood a chance of subverting the cultural norms. The impossibility of this undertaking is clear when we consider that the cult of Southern womanhood denied women the most basic form of agency: control over their own bodies.
Ruby Hill in O’Connor’s “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” experiences the trauma of losing this sense of agency, when she discovers an unwanted pregnancy. Like Hulga,
Ruby’s realization that she has fallen prey to the cult of Southern womanhood is all the 47 more poignant because she is convinced she has triumphed over the horrors of motherhood. Throughout her travail up the stairs to her apartment, she fears that her dizziness and fatigue are due to a terminal illness like cancer. However, she takes comfort in a prediction from a fortuneteller, who predicts that an illness will bring her good fortune and that fact that unlike her mother, “[s]he was warm and fat and beautiful” (73).
Her eventual knowledge of the illness as an unwanted pregnancy causes Ruby to experience what Kristeva terms abjection of self, which is a complex self-loathing that stems from the incomplete nature of selfhood.
For Ruby, this begins far before her pregnancy. As a child, she had an aversion for her impoverished rural hometown of Pitman and for her family, which she associates with the grimness of the town. As she reflects the possibility of a major illness, she recalls that her parents “had been the dried-up type, dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up. And she had come out of that! A somebody as alive as her!” (73). Ruby’s feelings about her parents and her impoverished origins resonate with Kristeva’s notions of selfhood. Like Lacan,
Kristeva holds that identity is based on the primal loss between an infant and its mother.
The sense of wholeness the infant feels being one with the mother is shattered when it realizes it is its own being. However, it spends most of its adult life longing for the unidentifiable wholeness it experienced before it knew language and consciousness. Like the infant, Ruby had to lose the connection with her family and the rural culture of the
South in order to reinvent herself as a modern city dwelling housewife. Ruby does not 48 consciously regret this loss, but rather she is proud somebody as alive as her escaped from the desolation of the lower class rural South.
Ruby’s feelings of disgust for her origins center on her mother and the eight pregnancies that ravaged her body and spirit. Ruby reflects,
her mother at thirty-four … had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple …
she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything … All those
children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the
first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with
every one of them (70).
For Ruby, childbearing and children are abject—she sees motherhood as the cause of her mother’s dissatisfaction and poor health. Childbirth, with all of its horrific imagery, is an abject contradiction: the mother risks death in order to bring forth a new life. The fetus embodies the contradicting nature of the abject because is foreign to the mother’s body, but it is also simultaneously a part of it as well. While Ruby’s view of motherhood might seem exaggerated or callous, the trauma she experienced witnessing these births echoes the real accounts of women during the Old South. According to Kennedy,
Southern women, black and white, were linked by the real and perceived pains
and physical dangers of childbirth. A woman’s ‘hour of trial’ put her in a liminal
position between life and death, and in the process other boundaries became
blurred. Women’s narratives touched on both a belief in the inevitability of pain
and a desire to ease this suffering. The Ladies’ Repository assured its readers that
‘the highest joy to the Christian almost always comes through suffering’ (68). 49
For women, childbearing was an abject process where they straddled the juxtaposition of
life and death as well as the contradictions of the ideology of Southern Womanhood—
Southern women had to reconcile the physical pain of giving birth with the emotional
fulfillment of motherhood.
Despite attempts to cloak the dangers of childbearing through Christian rhetoric,
many women shared Ruby’s resentment of the pain of birth. Kennedy includes the
account of one Southern woman Lizzie Neblett of Texas, who wrote in 1860: “‘I will never dread death as much as I dread the suffering of my coming confinement,’ … ‘for death pangs are, me thinks, as nothing compared with the pains of labor, and I look forward to a very tedious one and painful one, more than an ordinary degree” (68-9).
Neblett’s words indicate the horrifying situation of Southern women who were not only
“victim[s] of their biology” but also of their society, which encouraged, and even expected them, to give birth several times throughout their life (Kennedy 69). In addition to the physical rigors of childbirth, women had to endure the psychological burden of the tedium and strain of running a house-hold. This echoes Ruby’s description of her mother’s life as a rural housewife and indicates that the consequences of childbearing and child rearing are all too real.
Witnessing her mother’s births proves traumatic for Ruby, who is horrified at the thought of childbirth. She recalls the birth of her brother, Rufus:
She was the only one of the children who couldn’t stand it and she had walked all
the way to Melsy, in the hot sun ten miles, to the picture show to get clear of the
screaming, and had sat through two westerns and a horror picture and a serial and 50
then had walked back and found it was just the beginning, and she had had to
listen all night (70).
Her need to escape her mother’s screaming during Rufus’ prolonged birth demonstrates the fear and horror childbirth inspires in her. The child, which is the happy result that usually justifies a woman’s suffering, is just as abject to her. Although she loves her brother Rufus, she is ashamed that he has not outgrown his love of collard greens and the shiftlessness she associates with Pitman. She thinks about Rufus’ uselessness and “[s]he saw him waiting out nowhere before he was born, just waiting, waiting to make his mother, only thirty-four, into an old woman” (71). Ruby imagines Rufus’ lack of gumption and social stagnation as poisonous qualities he possessed even before being born, which resulted in draining the life from her mother. She also views Hartley Gilfeet, nicknamed by his doting mother “Little Mister Good Fortune,” as a violent brat (71). He bounds up and down the stairs carelessly leaving his toys strewn about. Ruby accidently sits on his tin pistol when stops to catch her breath, which foreshadows her impending realization of her pregnancy.
For all the imagery of grotesque childbirth, perhaps the most grotesque element in the story is laughter. Ruby navigates a world that feels no empathy for her trauma or her fear of childbirth. When she calls on her so-called closest friend Laverne Watts, Laverne dissolves into laughter while Ruby slouches at her doorway with a debilitating dizzy spell
(77). Rather than show interest in her well-being, Laverne mockingly calls attention to
Ruby’s grotesque appearance saying she is “swollen all over” (81). Even after seeing
Ruby’s distress at the thought of a pregnancy she teases, “‘I bet it’s not one, I bet it’s 51
two’ … ‘You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is’” (80). Laverne’s
laughter borders on cruelty. Ruby has nowhere to turn for support including Bill who she
trusted with the responsibility of helping her avoid pregnancy. Several times, she recalls,
“Bill Hill didn’t mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn’t know why. She
saw Bill Hill’s long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had
as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth” (81-2). Bill’s smile is closer to that of a predatory hunter nearing the kill, rather than a devoted husband. As Baur explains,
“Juxtaposed against the description of Bill’s recent smiling is Ruby’s sudden, seemingly unrelated thought, ‘He would never slip up’ (105), which reveals her desire to deny the evidence before her of her husband’s treachery” (47). I agree with Baur’s analysis because there are subtle indications that Bill purposefully impregnated his wife. Not only
does Ruby repeatedly reflect that Bill is inexplicably happy about her weight gain, but
she indicates that he controls major family decisions, such as moving to a bigger house.
In fact, the only way she thinks she can get Bill to move is if she is ill. When she first
starts up the stairs, she reflects, “Bill Hill couldn’t hold off [moving to a subdivision]
much longer. He couldn’t kill her” (69). The fact that it would take a serious illness for
Bill to agree to move says a lot about the power dynamic between Ruby and her husband.
From these minor, but pervasive details, we get the sense that Bill does not consider
Ruby’s needs. It is also likely that Bill is aware of his wife’s aversion to pregnancy. If so,
Bill’s smile at Ruby’s weight gain signals his selfishness, as he would place his own desire to have a child above his wife’s health and emotional well-being. The implication of Bill’s intentional contraceptive slip-up, demonstrates how little married life had 52
changed for Southern women, since they were still subject to their husband’s desires and
authority.
The grotesque humor builds up to Ruby’s ultimate moment of jouissance, which
occurs during the aforementioned scene where Hartley ruthlessly knocks her down:
“Noooo,” she said and leaned her round face between the two nearest poles. She
looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and
echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and
the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. (82).
In this moment, she realizes that the rolling pressure in her abdomen is in fact a
pregnancy. The green stair cavern, as O’Connor describes the staircase, can be
interpreted as a yonic14 symbol that has trapped Ruby making her a prisoner of her own
biology. The deep cavernous staircase resembles the vagina or the womb, which is telling
since Ruby peers into it at the exact moment she realizes she is pregnant. It is as though
she is enveloped in her own body, which confirms her worst fears of pregnancy:
She opened her eyes and gazed down into the dark hole, down to the very bottom
where she had started long ago. ‘Good Fortune,’ she said in a hollow voice that
echoed all the levels of the cavern, ‘Baby’/‘Good Fortune, Baby,’ the three echoes
leered (84).
14 According to W.J. Johnson’s A Dictionary of Hinduism, within Hinduism, the yoni is “a stylized representation of female genitalia, representing the Goddess and/or female power.” In literary analysis, the yoni is often used as the female counterpart to the male phallus—a symbol of female power, specifically reproduction, categorized by imagery that resembles the vagina or the womb (i.e. caves, tunnels, etc.). 53
The grotesque humor appears again when her own voice answers her cries with a leer
echoing the response she knew all along. Her collision with the abject literally occurs as
Hartley crashes into her. This violent encounter leads her to acknowledge that the abject
is growing within her and that the fat and good color she boasts of is a result of her
pregnancy. This realization also explains why despite her dizziness and nausea, “[s]he
felt the wholeness of herself, a whole thing climbing up the stairs” (73). As Kristeva
explains, during jouissance, “a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing” (10). Here, Kristeva explains that during jouissance the abject functions as a type of alter ego, or hidden version of the self, which reveals a fluid identity more cohesive than any previously imagined or constructed because it includes an individual’s subconscious desire, mainly the desire for the abject (or other) itself. Thus, Ruby feels whole, because her pregnancy unites her with the abject origins she lost when she re-
invented herself as an urban housewife. Pregnancy is the ultimate grotesque embodiment
of the abject culture of poverty she associates with her childhood home. This is why
unlike the female protagonists of the previous stories, her realization that it this culture is
literally a part of her is more painful than ecstatic. Looking down at the cavernous steps
is like looking inward. Ruby sees her long travail away from rural Pitman and the horrific
realities of motherhood and realizes that she has ended up exactly where she was always
afraid she would be: trapped in her own body.
54
Chapter 3
THE ABJECTION OF SOUTHERN RACIAL POLITICS
“How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” (O’Connor 215)
Ruby Turpin, the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 short story
“Revelation,” asks God these frantic questions after she is viciously attacked in the
waiting room of a doctor’s office. While waiting at the doctor’s office, Mrs. Turpin
interacts with the other patients and secretly categorizes them in a complicated social
hierarchy. Although black people are at the bottom of this hierarchy, she expresses a
strong disgust for those whom she describes as white trash. She likens them to hogs and
expresses gratitude for being a white middle-class woman. Her dislike of so-called white
trash is so strong, that she takes comfort in the fantasy that if God had asked her to
choose between being white trash and a decent black woman she would choose the latter.
However, her self-concept, and the hierarchy it is built upon, is quickly shattered by the
enraged Mary Grace, who attacks Mrs. Turpin and calls her an “old wart hog” from hell
(207). This seemingly unwarranted attack upsets Mrs. Turpin’s conception of the world
and of her place within it. Mrs. Turpin’s questions to God reflect Julia Kristeva’s
concept of the abject, which Kristeva defines as anything outside of the self that elicits
disgust because it threatens the very notion of selfhood. The abject for Mrs. Turpin is
white trash because she sees lower-class whites as something completely removed from herself, and this difference, in turn, defines her. This is why she is unable to fathom how she can be both a hog and herself: a respectable white woman. This moment of outraged 55
confusion, leads up to Mrs. Turpin’s moment of jouissance, or painful union with the
abject, where she sees her entire social order dissolve in the form of a holy vision.
This moment of existential crisis for Mrs. Turpin reveals the complex relationship between race, gender and social class in the South. Although Mrs. Turpin believes she is the model of benevolent Southern womanhood, her racist and classist attitudes reveal her to be the thing she hates most: an ugly woman with ugly prejudices. Through this story,
O’Connor unravels the myth of Southern womanhood and the social hierarchy of the Old
South itself by complicating it and ultimately showing it as an unstable construct. Despite its instability, the construction of race and racial stereotypes served an important function in Southern culture. It allowed whites of both genders and of all classes to bolster their self-righteous sense of identity and authority. Southern whites projected the violence, ignorance, and cruelty they hated and feared within themselves onto the black community making the latter the abject or object of disgust. This projection justified the systematic oppression of the black populace in the South and, arguably, in the U.S. as a whole. Thus,
Mrs. Turpin’s question can be applied to the real men and women of the South who committed horrible atrocities against the black community in the name of social order:
How can a landowning Southern man be a pillar of the community when he has built his livelihood on the abuse of black slaves? How can a Southern woman be both a respectable lady and a lynching advocate? As a brief historical overview of Southern racial politics reveals, the abject social order of the South thrived on these horrific and contradictory roles. 56
Racial hierarchy was one of the core principles that governed Southern life. The economic and social foundation of the South was based on black slaves. The work of slaves on large plantations accounted for a large portion of the Southern economy.
However, a relatively small number of wealthy white landowning families owned these plantations. In Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Bertram Wyatt-
Brown quotes the economic historian Gavin Wright, who found that “90 to 95 percent of all agricultural wealth was in the hands of slaveholders by 1860. Most of the rest of
Southern whites simply farmed or raised cattle and hogs” (qtd. in Wyatt-Brown 176). The most affluent Southern families were those who could afford to own slaves. Thus, the ownership of slaves in Southern society carried with it the mark of economic success and class distinction. Even poor whites who could not afford slaves benefitted from the slave system through a sense of racial superiority. In "An Old South Morality Play:
Reconsidering the Social Underpinnings of the Proslavery Ideology," Michael Wayne explains,
To define blacks as inferior was fundamentally leveling for whites. Since many
planters, especially those usually characterized as being part of the elite, had
conspicuous aristocratic pretensions, it follows that a defense of slavery based on
race served the ideological needs of the plain folk far more than those of the
planters (841).
The ideology of slavery was founded upon the inherent inferiority of black slaves, which gave even the poorest of whites a sense of social, if not economic, dominance. Although many lower-class whites were economically closer to black slaves than affluent slave 57 owners, “poor [white] folk were never supposed to identify their personal interests with those of the black underclass” (Wyatt-Brown 380).15 These attitudes of racial superiority across social classes persisted even after the abolition of slavery in the South.
The end of slavery in the South only increased racial tension in the region. After the Civil War, Southern society scrambled to stabilize and adapt to the radical change in its social and economic order. Racism in the form of Jim Crow laws and lynching became a way to re-assert white supremacy. As Steven Hoelscher states in “Making Place,
Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South,”
states like Mississippi systematically mandated “equal but separate
accommodations” in sleeping cars (1888) and trolleys (1904); Mississippi made
biracial education unconstitutional (1890) and closed polling places to blacks by
ostensibly legal means (1891); and, of course, the state made it unlawful for the
two races to intermarry or simply live together. Outside the boundaries of these
formal provisions for the recognition of caste, however, racial segregation in
Mississippi was largely based on custom (659).
Laws such as these sought to not only create a physical distance between black and white southerners, but also a psychological one. Jim Crow laws were a way of emphasizing the inferiority of blacks on a daily basis not only to demoralize the black community, but also
15 Wyatt-Brown explains that it was not uncommon for poor whites to trade with slaves for stolen goods procured from plantations. However, these white yeomen were often tried because the “Pursuit of individual interests rather than concern for civic order was deemed a public menace” (380).
58
to convince Southern whites of their inherent superiority.16 Hoelscher also emphasizes that Jim Crow laws were primarily based on and enforced through social customs of the old South. The official and implicit laws prohibiting black socio-economic mobility sought to re-establish the social hierarchy of the Old South despite the demise of slavery.
However, as Hoelscher explains, “White supremacy informed all aspects of post–Civil
War southern life, but its power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (659-660). Such resistance indicates cracks in the ideology of white supremacy whose underlying principle was the inherent inferiority of blacks. However, the defiance of the black community and its white allies suggests that the Southern hierarchy was anything but natural since it could in fact be challenged. Nevertheless,
Southern whites were undeterred by the obvious unravelling of white supremacy ideology. In fact, the more they felt that Southern order threatened, the harder they fought to keep it, not only through seemingly inane laws, but also through violence.
In the New South, lynching became part of the social tapestry that sought to restore social hierarchy. Accusations of rape involving a black male perpetrator and a white woman were often at the center of these acts of mob violence, although the
16 The Ku Klux Klan itself claimed to have supernatural authority, which it used to justify its terrorism on Southern minorities. However, as Wyatt-Brown explains, “For all the Klansmen’s bragging that they had ‘come from the moon,’ ridden with ghosts on the wind, and consumed gallons of water without a swallow, their truly fearsome aspect was the ethical certitude of divine command with which they meted out the Klan’s punishments” (457).
59
underlying causes were far more complex. In Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics
of Rape and Lynching, Crystal N. Feimster claims
Without question, the racial and sexual politics that made lynching a dominant
feature of the postbellum southern political landscape had deep roots in both the
slaveholding South and the white Southern imagination … white and black
Southerners understood perfectly that the institution of slavery had been built on
a foundation of racial violence and sexual exploitation (7).
Once again, Southern men used white female virtue as an excuse to enact violence among
the black community. In doing so, Southern men conveniently ignored their own sexual
abuse of black women and the oppression white Southern women suffered in their own
homes.17 Furthermore, it provided them with a righteous moral footing which to defend
their pervasive violence against black men. At the core of lynching, however, was the
white fear of black equality. In Southern Womanhood, 1865-1920: An Intellectual and
Cultural Study, Ruoff John Carl he posits, “[Southerners] saw blacks making an assault
upon the order of the south in both political and social areas and sought to return them to
their ‘proper place’” (118). Ruoff goes on to explain that once Jim Crow laws had
succeeded in disenfranchising blacks and poor whites, Southern whites became
concerned that black folks would develop social equality by marrying whites, which
resulted in a fear of miscegenation. Lynching black men was thus seen as a deterrent to
the threat of inter-racial marriage.
17 See Ch. 1 “The Abjection of Southern Womanhood” for a detailed discussion of the plight to Southern women.
60
Lynching also became a political tool used by Southern women and poor whites to gain social and political rights. Women in the Postbellum South were determined to secure a role of gender equality in the society of the New South, and they often did so by banking on Old Southern notions of honor and virtue. Feimster explains that the new
Southern woman, “Without regard to class or social status … insisted on her share of privileges in the New South. One major means to this end was to use the threat of black rape to make demands of white men and thereby achieve a modicum of political power”
(126). Thus, the women of the New South were no longer merely ladies on a pedestal, but active, if not direct, participants18 in racial violence. The struggle for women’s suffrage and gender equality in the South came into direct opposition with racial equality.
Similarly, the economic progress of poor whites also conflicted with racial equality during the Reconstruction period. As W. O. Brown explains in “Role of the Poor Whites in Race Contacts of the South,” “Slavery destroyed, competition was increased between poor whites and Negros … [poor whites] resisted the Negro when he ‘threatened their future work and income’ … Negros and Whites were members of the oppressed proletariat, but race consciousness created a gulf between them” (265). The white, upper
18 In Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, Crystal N. Feimster frames her study of gender and lynching politics by comparing the roles of Ida B. Wells, a black female anti-lynching activist, with the white suffragette Rebecca Latimer Felton whose fight for the vote was centered around a pro-lynching campaign. A key slogan from Felton’s campaign came from one of her speeches where she urged Southerners to “Lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary” (127).
61 class exploited racist sentiments among poor whites just as they had during the
Antebellum period. As Brown states,
In this development [of white supremacy], the poor whites played an important
role. Their prejudices reinforced the subordinations of the Negro … In a sense
they policed the Negro, aiding the upper classes to “keep the Negro in his place.”
Lynching, for example, while an aspect of the southern system of racial
dominance, has been largely executed by poor whites (266).
Thus, not only did poor whites refuse to unite forces with black Southerners, but they actively assisted in asserting social dominance through violence. In doing so, they secured social privilege for themselves as white Southerners while simultaneously securing economic and political privilege for wealthy whites and Southern women. Thus, in the New South, whites of all genders and socio-economic status were looking to secure social status economic advancement, and the black populace became the unifying abject, or object of disgust, that made this progress possible. However, this progress was illusory because no society can truly progress at the expense of human misery.
The abject nature of Southern racial politics quickly emerges when we consider how normalized racial violence was in the South. In a review of the photography exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” Grace Elizabeth
Hale explains that “spectacle lynchings—became very public events, and their victims were almost always black. White men, women, and children filled town squares and ate picnics as they waited for the show and later gathered or bought souvenirs as they headed for home” (991-992). The idea of a gruesome murder serving as a form of community 62 entertainment is unfathomable. Not only were lynchings an occasion for public holiday, they were commemorated in the form of postcards that were exchanged between loved ones. Hale describes one of these images:
A postcard of the corpse of a clothed black man, Lige Daniels, hanged in Center,
Texas, on August 3, 1920, includes a note: “This was made in the court yard. In
Center, Texas, he is 16 year old Black boy, he killed Earl's Grandma, She was
Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle (991).
The note on the postcard described above is perhaps as disturbing as the image itself, since it demonstrates a complete desensitization to such horrific violence. Lynching in the South was not merely a means of enforcing white supremacy, but a grotesque carnival where racial violence was openly celebrated. Ultimately, the result of this violence was a lawless carnivalesque society where chaos masqueraded as order.
I argue that the term “abject” applies not only to the violent nature of Southern society in general, but also to the black populace in the South. Recall that Kristeva defines the abject as anything outside of the self that elicits disgust because it threatens the very idea of selfhood. For generations, Southern whites have based their individual and collective identities in opposition to the black community. Southern society considered them innately different and inferior to whites. In order to define themselves as superior, Southern whites had to believe that blacks were less than human. In a society where race was defined in the binaristic terms of black and white, the black community in the South was the dehumanized Other. As Leonard Cassuto explains in The Inhuman
Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture, “Cultures define an ‘us’ 63 and a ‘them.’ The stronger group defines what is human and embodies that definition, while the weaker one falls short by design and is exiled to a category of indeterminate otherness” (XIV). In the South, whites were the dominant us while black folk were considered the abhorrent them. Everything that Southern whites despised in themselves they projected onto the black community. Thus, the black populace functioned as the abject within Southern society because not only were black Southerners the Other that defined white identity, but also acknowledging their humanity directly threatened white
Southern identity.
O’Connor’s short stories “Revelation” and “The Artificial Nigger” explore the complex relationship between white Southern identity and racial abjection. Although these stories are set in the 20th century, the protagonists continue to negotiate between centuries of racial oppression and the shift towards racial equality. I argue that these characters experience what Kristeva defines as abjection of self or a sense of self-loathing caused by the incomplete nature of self-hood.19 In both of these stories, the white protagonists exhibit racist and classist beliefs that define their sense of identity. However, they eventually discover that they possess the characteristics they attribute to blacks. In
“Revelation” O’Connor portrays the new Southern woman through Ruby Turpin, who considers herself a very moral and progressive middle-class white woman. However, it quickly becomes clear that she defines herself in relation to blacks and poor whites. She is forced to acknowledge these ugly prejudices when she is assaulted verbally and
19 See Ch. 1 “The Abjection of Southern Womanhood” for a detailed explanation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and abjection of self.
64 physically by the enraged Mary Grace who calls her an “old wart hog” from hell (207).
Ultimately, O’Connor demonstrates the complexity and instability of Mrs. Turpin’s imaginary social hierarchy during a moment of jouissance when the latter sees a holy vision where social order is turned on its head. Finally, in “The Artificial Nigger,”
O’Connor challenges the innate nature of race through Mr. Head and his grandson
Nelson. Although Nelson begins the story on a quest to separate himself from his grandfather, his day in the city becomes an initiation into the ideology of white supremacy, which unites them at the end of the story. Both stories demonstrate the way in which racism has served to heal the fractured identity of Southern whites. However, as a close analysis reveals, this critique is problematic because it subtly reinforces this function by positing Southern blacks as a kind of sacrificial Other who bear the noble, albeit unfair, burden of being social scapegoats.
In “Revelation” Ruby Turpin’s obsession with social hierarchy reveals the myth of strict economic and racial categories of the Southern order. The story opens in the waiting room of a doctor’s office where Mrs. Turpin immediately begins sizing up the patients according to class. Under the scrutiny of Mrs. Turpin, the waiting room becomes a microcosm of Southern society. She notices a “stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee” who pretends to sleep, a “well-dressed” lady and her ugly daughter, and finally a couple of “white trash” women and their equally unkempt child
(192-193). Mrs. Turpin identifies the class of her fellow patients based on both their dress and their performance of manners or lack thereof: 65
Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed
lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress, Mrs. Turpin had on her
good black patent leather pumps …and the white trashy mother had on …
bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded to them—exactly what
you would have expected her to have on (194).
This obsession with shoes indicates the connection between economic class and social class. The shabbier and poorer the dress, the cruder and more ill-mannered the person appears. For instance, she notes that the “blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady … but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to tell him to move over” (191). The connection between cleanliness, clothing, and the performance of manners indicates the classist ideology behind the Southern hierarchy to which Mrs. Turpin adheres. Although black folk are curiously absent from the group, this is not the case for long. Mrs. Turpin notices that
Mary Grace’s gaze is fixed on the “pale shadow through the curtains” (197). Moments later, one of the shadows is revealed to be a black delivery boy: “A grotesque revolving shadow passed across the curtain behind [Mrs. Turpin] and was thrown palely on the opposite wall. The door opened and a colored boy glided in … He was a tall, very black boy in discolored white pants and a green nylon shirt” (200). The descriptive details of the shadows and the delivery boy’s appearance are especially telling. The oxymoron
“pale shadow” indicates the instability of the black and white binary. Although the boy is described as “very black” his shadow is “pale,” which subtly complicates the order Mrs.
Turpin has established. Mrs. Turpin represents the Southern hierarchy because of the 66
concern she shows class and race. The ridiculous and downright illusory nature of this
hierarchy is foreshadowed by the description of Mrs. Turpin in relation to the room: “She
stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living
demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous” (191). The room, which
contains a representation of various social and racial classes is a microcosm for Southern
society. Mrs. Turpin’s physicality shows that the Southern social it is limited and
laughable.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Turpin is determined to see the world according to her
internalized notions of Southern social hierarchy, which collapses on its own complexity.
The narrator describes Mrs. Turpin’s imagined social order:
Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people.
On the bottom of the heap were most colored people … 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 Claude
belonged. Above she and Claude were people with a lot of money and much
bigger houses and much more land (195).
In this description, we see more indications of cracks in the racial and class hierarchy.
For instance, black folk are at the bottom of the social ladder, but white trash folk are not above them, but rather next to them. This is a crucial point because white supremacy is built upon the ideology of the innate inferiority of blacks. However, Mrs. Turpin’s system complicates the racial category of white by making a distinction between impoverished whites, or white trash, and middle and upper-class whites. Still, her order conceives that 67 there is in fact a situation where white and black folks can be equal, albeit separate. Her statement that blacks and white trash are “just away from” each other echo the New
South’s segregation laws, which attempted, but ultimately failed, to establish lasting notions of inherent white superiority. Mrs. Turpin’s hierarchy breaks down further as dozes off to sleep:
the complexity of [the social ladder] would begin to bear in on her, for some of
the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and
Claude and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had
to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as
well … Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were
moiling and rolling around in her head, and she would dream they were crammed
in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven (196).
Economic class clearly complicates notions of social class and race. Mrs. Turpin struggles to reconcile the ideologies of social and racial superiority with the economic reality of the New South where “common” whites were wealthier than those with “good blood” and more and more black folks achieved economic advancement. Not only does
Mrs. Turpin reveal the instability of this system, she also subconsciously acknowledges the toxicity of white supremacist ideology. The final image she conjures up is of all the castes being taken off to the gas chamber. Such imagery alludes to the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, which represent the ultimate horrific consequences of white supremacy.
Nonetheless, it is important to note that Mrs. Turpin allows her mind to acknowledge these complications only in the liminal stage between consciousness and sleep. 68
I hold that Mrs. Turpin’s social hierarchy can be interpreted through Jacques
Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic Order. As Doreen Fowler explains in “Aligning the
Psychological with the Theological: Doubling and Race in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction,”
“The Symbolic Order is Lacan’s jargon term for the order of language and culture; we enter the Symbolic when we learn cultural differences; and in the Symbolic we define a separate identity by polarization, that is, by attempting to disown (or, in psychological terms, repress) relationships with others” (79). The Symbolic Order is the social order imposed upon us by arbitrary cultural norms and values. I agree with Fowler’s claim that we enter the Symbolic Order when we are able to understand acceptable behavior and begin to internalize the cultural values that guide social norms. It is within the Symbolic
Order that cultural and individual identity form, resulting in a distinction between our own culture and that outside of it, which threatens it. Mrs. Turpin’s social hierarchy exemplifies the underlying Social order of the South, which is built upon the values of
white supremacy and classism. The hierarchy Mrs. Turpin creates attempts to uphold
these values, but it quickly dissolves into chaos brought on by its own contradictory
nature.
As mentioned above, the breakdown of this order occurs during the liminal space
between consciousness and sleep, which I argue is indicative of what Lacan calls the
Imaginary Order, or the stage that precedes the Symbolic Order. The Imaginary Order is
what we experience before we have a sense of individual identity or language to express
our experience. The murky and elusive nature of the Imaginary order is due to the fact
that this state precedes language and individual consciousness. Mrs. Turpin’s semi- 69 conscious attempts to create and uphold the social hierarchy result in a complete breakdown of Southern order as her dream ends with all castes being “crammed together in a box car” (196). Just like in the Imaginary Order, these semi-lucid visions create a space where strict categories and the language of class and racial superiority fail to describe reality. This indicates the artificial nature of Southern hierarchy and values.
However, Mrs. Turpin cannot acknowledge these complications when she is fully conscious because doing so would threaten not only her understanding of the world, but also her own sense of self.
Mrs. Turpin’s identity hinges on the notion of the racial and economic Other.
However, she attempts to disguise her racism through her classist prejudices. She continuously fantasizes about whom she would have chosen to be if she could not be a white middle-class woman. The narrator explains,
Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy
herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have
been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places
available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash” … and finally she
would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy
one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman,
herself but black (195).
Here, she seems to convince herself that she is a moral Christian woman because she values cleanliness and respectability over race. Again, the strict lines of the racial binary are blurred in the semi-conscious state between sleep and consciousness. In this liminal 70
state, Mrs. Turpin entertains the notion of a black version of herself. This fantasy
complicates the racial binary further by emphasizing class for both white and black folks.
As Fowler argues, “This image of a black Ruby Turpin inserts into the story her black double, an image out of the unconscious mind for what she is withholding, a contact zone
between black and white” (79). The contact zone Fowler refers to suggests the artificial
nature of the racial binary because if there can be a version of Mrs. Turpin that is “herself
but black,” then the entire notion of black folks as the inferior, dehumanized Other is
untrue. Furthermore, from this fantasy new categories emerge because she makes a
distinction between respectable and trashy black folks. This added categorization of black
folks mirrors her categorization of whites, suggesting that both categories are more
similar than they are different. However, because all of these binaristic breakdowns
occur at the unconscious level, Mrs. Turpin is never forced to encounter them. Doing so
would be a psychological shock since in her conscious mind, the binary categories of
black/white and white trash/good blood are fixed and absolute. Both blacks and white
trash are abject to Mrs. Turpin. These groups are the object of her disgust because they
embody every negative quality she denies in herself, and she defines herself in stark
opposition to both. It takes her violent run-in with Mary Grace to lead her to experience the abjection of self that results in her ultimate realization about the limitations of
Southern hierarchy.
Mary Grace’s verbal and physical assault forces Mrs. Turpin to acknowledge the abject within because the assault alters her physical appearance, making it outwardly grotesque. Prior to this physical encounter, Mrs. Turpin takes pride in her appearance and 71
good disposition. She fantasizes that “If Jesus had said, ‘You can be high society and
have all the money you want and be thin … but you can’t be a good woman with it,’ she
would have had to say, ‘well don’t make me that then. Make me a good woman and it
don’t matter what else, how fat or ugly or how poor!’ Her heart rose” (202). She tells
herself she cannot imagine being a better version of herself at the expense of her
morality. These characteristics reassure her of her identity as a good middle-class
Christian woman. However, Mary Grace destroys that in an instant, by attacking Mrs.
Turpin after the latter begins audibly praising God for making her a good Christian woman. When Mary Grace hurls her book at Mrs. Turpin’s eye,
There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some
intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. “What you got to
say to me?” She asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting as for a revelation.
The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell
where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered (207).
This physical encounter with Mary Grace is as psychologically jarring as it is physically violent. The attack forces Mrs. Turpin to confront the ugliness and instability of her core beliefs while she is wide awake. The union of the conscious and the subconscious is suggested by Mrs. Turpin’s certainty that Mary Grace knows her “beyond time place and condition” (207). Such a realization hearkens back to The Imaginary Order where the ideology of white supremacy and social class dissolve and render Mrs. Turpin’s poorly veiled prejudices exposed as ugly and ridiculous. This collision of binaries foreshadows
Mrs. Turpin’s moment of jouissance where she experiences union with the abject. 72
Mary Grace’s attack leads Mrs. Turpin to experience abjection of self because the ugliness of her hidden prejudices becomes physically visible through the grotesque welt on her face. At home, the girl’s words rankle in Mrs. Turpin’s mind as she fights [against them telling herself she is not a wart hog from hell. She reflects that “She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might have justly been applied. The full force of it stuck her only now ... The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman” (210). The image of a wart hog from hell is jarring to Mrs. Turpin because she associates that description with white trash, and she has always defined herself as the opposite of this group: a respectable, Christian woman. Her identity is struck a psychological blow that forces her to confront the fact that she is perceived as the abject Other by Mary Grace. As she grapples with the painful implications of this realization, she is unable to deny it because her face shows the ugly mark of her abject identity. Mrs. Turpin notes that “The dark protuberance over her eye looked like a miniature tornado cloud which might at any moment sweep across the horizon of her brow … She squared her massive shoulders …
She had the look of a woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle” (214). The bruised flesh on her face is likened to a storm that will spread and ravage her face just like the abject characteristics of white trash have ravaged the identity she carefully crafted for herself. We see that the plumpness she previously considered sweet has turned into a grotesque massiveness without her good disposition to transform it. Thus, she goes out to the hog pen to encounter the abject without the protection of her illusory identity as a respectable Christian woman. 73
The holy vision Mrs. Turpin experiences during her moment of jouissance shatters her remaining illusions of cohesive self-hood and dissolve the racial and social hierarchy of the Southern Order. Mrs. Turpin directly challenges the social order when she rails against God: “She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “‘Go on,’ she yelled, ‘call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll be a top and bottom! … A garbled echo returned to her … and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’” (216). Even when faced with the undeniable collapse of Southern hierarchy, Mrs. Turpin continues to fight for it as she questions God, the ultimate symbol of social order. A psychological reading of this scene reveals that
Mrs. Turpin is going head-to-head with the Imaginary Order in order to salvage her identity based on the structure of the Symbolic Order, which in this case would be
Southern hierarchy. Her insistence that “There’ll be a top and a bottom” suggests her defense of this hierarchy to which she receives “a garbled echo” as an answer, which could be the inscrutable response from the Imaginary Order, where there is no language to express hierarchy because such an order does not exist. This intense confrontation results in the holy vision she receives:
She saw the streak [of purple in the sky] as a vast and swinging bridge extending
upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls
were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean
for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and
battalions of freaks and lunatics … and bringing up the end of the procession was
a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those … like herself and Claude 74
… Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues
were being burned away (217-218).
In this passage, several binaries emerge and dissolve into each other signaling the moment of jouissance or painful union with the abject race and class. There is a union between the binaries of heaven and earth through the bridge of light where a grotesque procession marches upward. There is an order in the procession, but it is an inverted form of the Southern racial and social hierarchy. The white trash that Mrs. Turpin considers among the lowest tiers are first. She also notes that they are “clean for the first time in their lives,” which indicates that their physical and social griminess is not as inherent as she considered. Next, there are the group of blacks wearing white robes; the juxtaposition of their dark skin and white robes suggests that perhaps their souls, or innermost selves, are no different than those of the other white saints. Finally, the group of respectable middle-class whites, like herself, follow at the rear. However, the virtues that Mrs. Turpin defends and touts are being burned away and their faces are described as surprised and altered much like her own bruised face. This erasure of virtues by a holy flame suggests that these qualities were never innate since they can easily be wiped clean by God. Through this vision Mrs. Turpin sees the social order turned on its head and the key differences between herself and the abject Other dissolve, making her acknowledge the illusory nature of her own identity and world view.
Although O’Connor complicates the binaries of race and class through Mrs.
Turpin’s moment of jouissance, her critique does not dissolve them entirely. Ultimately,
Ruby’s vision still includes distinct categories of race and class even if the hierarchical 75
order is inverted. Here, her critique falls short of a fully undermining the racist and
classist Southern order. Perhaps, it is too much to ask of a 1950’s white Southern female
writer to imagine a space where distinct racial categories are nonexistent. Nevertheless,
her complication of these binaries is still significant as it dares to criticize racist and
classist ideology by demonstrating the constructed nature of both.
O’Connor further examines the construction of race and its social function in her
story “The Artificial Nigger.” Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson travel a relatively short
distance from their small rural town into the big city of Atlanta. Nelson is young and
headstrong; he wants to show his grandfather that he can make his own way in the world,
while Mr. Head wants to continue asserting his authority over Nelson by showing him
that the city is a dangerous place. Although Nelson begins the trip trying to assert his
independence from his grandfather, the trip results in a unification of the two and his own
initiation into the Southern order. Mr. Head and Nelson are grotesque doubles of one
another that represent the fractured identity of poor Southern whites. The narrator
describes the two: “They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had a youthful expression by daylight, while the boy’s look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it” (106). In this brief description alone, we see the blending of the binaries young/ancient since Nelson’s expression is likened to an old man, while
Mr. Head’s is described as youthful. Despite their physical similarities, Nelson and Mr.
Head represent two opposing orders. Mr. Head is entrenched in the Symbolic Order of
the Old South that relies on pre-established notions of innate racial superiority and social 76
hierarchy to make sense of the world. On the other hand, Nelson represents the
Imaginary Order, where such hierarchies are non-existent.
The two represent the psyche of poor whites who were caught between upholding
the order of the Old South or embracing progress after the Civil War. The protagonists are similarly at odds with each other because Nelson wants to escape the limited rural existence his grandfather represents, while Mr. Head wants to crush the boy’s defiance and make him understand his place in the within the Southern order. Mr. Head “had been thinking about this trip for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in the city” (105).
The tension between the agrarian Old South and the increasingly industrial New South are clear since Mr. Head takes offense at Nelson’s pride of being born in Atlanta. Still,
Nelson and Mr. Head are united by their ignorance and fear of the outside world. While the two explore the train, “Nelson felt a sudden keen pride in [his grandfather]. He realized the old man would be his only support in the strange place they were approaching. He would be entirely alone in the world if he ever lost his grandfather”
(114). This newly found dependence soon proves to be mutual. When he sees Nelson showing excitement and pride at the wonders of the city, “Mr. Head was dismayed but he only muttered ‘You’ll get your fill’” (118). Thus, they form two parts of a grotesque whole who need each other to maintain an illusory sense of stability.
Mr. Head attempts to draw Nelson closer to him by instilling in him a fear of the
city, which is largely based on bigotry. Mr. Head continuously warns Nelson that the city 77
is “full of Niggers” (107). Nelson’s first encounter with a black person is significant
because he does not recognize the wealthy “coffee-colored man” on the train as one of
the “niggers” his grandfather warns him about. Mr. Head anticipates that he will be
unable to pick out a black man, having never seen one, and goads him into admitting he
cannot tell a black man from anyone else. As the man makes his way across the car, Mr.
Head asks Nelson,
“‘What was that?’… ‘A Man,’ the boy said and gave him an indignant look …
‘What kind of man?’ Mr. Head persisted … ‘A fat man,’ Nelson said … ‘You
don’t know what kind?” Mr. Head said in a final tone. ‘An old man,’ the boy said
… ‘That was a nigger,’ Mr. Head said and sat back” (111-112).
This simple exchange demonstrates that race is a social construct that people learn and internalize. It reveals the innate nature of racial inferiority to be a farce since Nelson cannot readily distinguish a person of color from himself or any other white person.
However, Mr. Head is oblivious to the way in which Nelson’s inability to distinguish race undermines his entire racist ideology, and instead, he mocks Nelson’s ignorance as a shortcoming. Nelson reacts to this criticism with displaced resentment: “He felt that the
Negro had deliberately walked down the aisle in order to make a fool of him and he hated him with a fierce raw fresh hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them” (112). This sentiment poignantly illustrates Nelson’s initiation into the world of the Southern order. The boy instinctively blames the black man for making him feel foolish rather than his grandfather for putting him down. Here, O’Connor demonstrates the way in which poor whites project their internalized frustrations onto 78 blacks making them a scapegoat. Acknowledging his own ignorance and his grandfather’s bullying proves too jarring for Nelson, which is why he resorts to projecting his anger towards the black man. This transforms the black man into the racial abject. The black man is the new object of disgust because he threatens Nelson’s concept of himself and his grandfather. This scene foreshadows the final moment when both characters unite through their shared racism. However, before this can happen, the two must acknowledge the abject qualities within themselves.
Mr. Head and Nelson experience abjection of self when Mr. Head publicly denies
Nelson during a terrifying encounter with the police. When Nelson knocks into a woman on the street, she threatens both by calling a policeman. Mr. Head responds saying, “‘This is not my boy’ … ‘I never seen him before.’ … The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were so repulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him” (126). Afraid of facing the police,
Mr. Head denies Nelson and reveals himself to be a coward in the eyes of the crowd, and most importantly Nelson. Here, Mr. Head becomes the object of disgust to the crowd for lying so blatantly and abandoning his scared grandson to his fate. During this moment, both he and Nelson realize that Mr. Head is the most loathsome thing in the city, not the racial Other. Nelson ignores his grandfather during the rest of their journey through the city, and they become lost once more. As they walk, Mr. Head “could feel the boy’s steady hate, traveling at an even pace behind him and he knew that … it would continue that way for the rest of his life. He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before …” (128). Mr. Head is fully aware 79
of the impact his cowardice has on Nelson’s opinion of him, and it leaves him feeling
desolate not only because he needs the boy’s respect, but also because his action has
destabilized the order by which he lives his life. His display of fear destroys his own
identity as a supreme moral authority, which he sought to assert in Nelson’s eyes. He has
thus become the object of disgust to Nelson and to himself. This makes Mr. Head himself
the abject because his cowardice ultimately threatens his sense of self. On his part,
Nelson’s victory over his grandfather is bittersweet because he is able to prove him a
faulty authority figure, but is now left with the terrifying task of making sense of the
world alone.
The unity both long for takes place through their shared sense of racism that
allows them to project their self-loathing onto a caricature of the racial Other. As they wander through a suburb after being given directions to a nearby train stop, they encounter a life-size lawn ornament of a black boy eating a watermelon:
It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he
looked to miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth
was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at
gave him a wild look of misery instead (130).
The lawn ornament symbolizes the constructed nature of racial stereotypes. The image is supposed to be one of a happy slave, yet the weathered condition of the statue itself reveals the figure to be miserable. The fact that it is crumbling shows not only that it the image is constructed, but also that it is an unstable construction. Thus, the grotesque 80 description of the lawn statue mirrors the grotesque dehumanization of the black community by Southern whites in order to justify their own superiority.20
Nevertheless, Mr. Head and Nelson latch on to racist sentiments in order to mend the separation between them. They feel an overwhelming sense of unity as they look upon the statue:
The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle
and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands
trembling identically in their pockets … They stood gazing at the artificial Negro
as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s
victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it
dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. (130).
In this moment, both come to the painful realization that they need each other in order to make sense of themselves and the world around them. Mr. Head’s denial of Nelson causes a rift between them that neither knows how to repair. However, Mr. Head solves that problem when he says, “‘They ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one’” (131). Racism is the balm that heals their fractured relationship. In this moment, the two are joined in a mixture of shame, defeat, and victory. They feel shame at their own ignorance after getting themselves lost and defeated because of the abuse they receive by people in the city. However, they emerge victorious when they claim the
20 However, as Cassuto explains, “Frequently aided by atavistic descriptions of their bodies and facial characteristics, the slaves become domesticated wild things, savages tamed—and the objectification idea thus reasserts itself. But the treatment of the Sambo also shows that the perception of humanity is impossible to suppress fully—the attempt alone requires constant effort and vigilance, and is ultimately doomed …” (133). 81
privilege of white supremacy that is embodied in the black caricature. Nevertheless, this
so-called victory is just as pitiful are because they are both ultimately revealed to be ignorant and helpless.
This moment of unity with Nelson prepares Mr. Head to experience jouissance.
The experience of denying Nelson and being proved ignorant in the city has a jarring
effect on his identity that even the moment of reconciliation cannot repair. When he
arrives home with Nelson that night,
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this
time he knew there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood
that it grew out of agony … He stood appalled, judging himself with the
thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and
consumed it … He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own,
and since God loved in proportion as he forgave, he felt ready at that instant to
enter paradise (132).
Although this moment has a religious overtone, I propose that this is, in fact, his
encounter with the abject. The abject here is Mr. Head’s cowardice and ignorance, which
reveal that he is inferior to the racial Other, who he detests. In this moment, Mr. Head
experiences a profound sense of awareness and disgust for these qualities which he
characterizes as sins while simultaneously feeling clean and forgiven by God. By
encountering the abject within himself, he simultaneously discovers himself anew, not as
the ultimate authority figure he considered himself before, but as a flawed person who is
simultaneously made perfect by a higher power. 82
Ultimately, O’Connor demonstrates the way in which racism functions to mend the ego of poor whites who are ill equipped to adapt to the changes of the New South. By banding together against the racial Other, Mr. Head and Nelson achieve the illusory sense of unity they have been seeking throughout the story. Through the protagonists,
O’Connor depicts the need of Southern whites to achieve a sense of cultural unity in order to preserve the Southern order that provides an illusory sense of social stability. By demonstrating the social function of racism, O’Connor exposes the pitiful state of poor whites and evokes a sense of pity from readers as we are confronted with Mr. Head and
Nelson’s ignorance. However, even as O’Connor undermines racism by revealing it to be a construct, she appears to ultimately reinforce the social function of racism. Recall her statement in a 1955 letter to Ben Griffith where she explains, “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all” (78). While she acknowledges the suffering of the black community, she implies that this suffering is somehow necessary for social stability. At its best this statement reveals the problematic role of racism, at its worse it echoes the sentiments of white lynchers who felt, “The subject's death was supposed to mean something, solve something, sanctify something through the infliction of sometimes excruciating pain”
(Mathews 34).21 Even her portrayal of Mr. Head and Nelson as pathetic implies that their racism is innocuous since they are too insignificant to enact any real harm. This of course
21 In “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching in the American,” Donald Mathews explores the connection between racial violence in the South and Christianity. He posits that lynching in the South functioned as religious rite that purported to establish order. 83 is misleading because, although the protagonists are indeed pitiful, their racist attitudes create a society where racial discrimination and violence are acceptable. O’Connor’s problematic critique of race may be due to her own complex identity as a Southern female writer. She herself straddled the liminal identity of privileged white and oppressed woman. While it is most likely unfair and inaccurate to compare O’Connor’s views on race to that of a lynch mob, the ambiguity of her writing lends itself to the question: to what extent is O’Connor herself complicit, if only tacitly, in perpetuating racism? While this question is difficult to answer because it is impossible to know the authorial intent that guided O’Connor’s fiction, her stories themselves indicate that, much like her characters, she could also not be separated from the grotesque society she inhabited. As discussed above, a close reading of her fiction shows a subtle reinforcement of racist ideology. Nevertheless, her fiction leads to a more important question: to what extent are we complicit in perpetuating the oppressive ideologies presented in her fiction?
84
Chapter 4
SAVING GRACE: JOUISSANCE FOR THE READER
“I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.” ― Donald J. Trump
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” ― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
While it might seem an odd non-sequitur to begin this closing chapter with quotes from Donald Trump and William Faulkner, grappling with the statements above sheds light on the importance of examining Flannery O’Connor’s literature. The first quote from Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy speech in 2015 references his now infamous promise of building a massive wall on the U.S. border with Mexico in order to prevent illegal immigration. As of now, Trump has failed to fulfill his promise of a building a literal wall, but he has succeeded in erecting a symbolic wall of sexism and xenophobia in U.S. culture and politics. While it is unfathomable to many that such extreme sentiments could exist in the present-day U.S., to those of us aware of America’s horrific history of racial and gender oppression, these feelings are sadly unsurprising. It would seem that as Americans we have forgotten what William Faulkner so succinctly states in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past” (Faulkner 85).
In 2017, it seems that our collective American past has indeed come back to haunt us.
This leads many of us to grapple with the painful question: how do we move forward from here?
I propose that reading and analyzing literature that examines America’s history of racial and gender oppression is one way to confront our personal and collective past. 85
O’Connor’s fiction is particular adept at creating a simultaneously jarring and healing
effect for her readers. On one hand, O’Connor’s surprisingly beautiful descriptions of
grotesque landscapes and characters are a pleasure to read, but they also produce the
unsettling effect of confronting readers with the horrific consequences of gender and
racial oppression. This grotesque violence and imagery in her stories have the power of
confronting the readers with their own views on race and gender within the context of our
larger shared history of oppression. I argue that, like her protagonists, as readers we also
experience jouissance through her fiction because it compels us encounter the abject
oppression of racism and misogyny within ourselves.
Although jouissance for the reader may seem like a stretch, O’Connor’s
discussion of grace within her fiction can be readily applied to the readers of her fiction.
During a 1962 speech delivered at Virginia’s Hollins College, she stated,
I have found violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality
and preparing them to accept grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing
else will work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned
at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it
is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world” (112).22
Here, O’Connor posits violence as a means for her characters to accept grace, which she implicitly connects to a return to reality. The connection between violence and
O’Connor’s concept of grace echoes Julia Kristeva’s notion of jouissance. Recall that
22 See Mystery and Manner’s: Occasional Prose edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald for a full transcript of the speech.
86
Kristeva defines jouissance as the painful yet ecstatic union between the individual and the abject. Similarly, O’Connor holds that the ultimate result of grace “transcend[s] any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery” (O’Connor
111).23 Although O’Connor refers to grace in terms of Christian theology, this explanation opens the possibility of examining grace through a secular lens because she describes it as a complication of simplistic morality and a moment of contact with a greater mystery. I argue that what O’Connor describes as grace can just as easily be described as jouissance since both involve a violent encounter that ultimately results in a transformed individual.
Nevertheless, the disruptive nature of grace, or jouissance, makes it difficult for individuals to embrace it. The hardheaded resistance to grace that O’Connor attributes to her own characters can easily apply to some of her readers, who may approach
O’Connor’s fiction with a sense of detachment to the grotesque world she presents. As
O’Conner explains in a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, “There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment” (118).24 Here,
O’Connor recognizes the possibility of her readers themselves experiencing grace even though they might be unaware of this possibility. I hold that the same could be said about jouissance for O’Connor’s audience. While we as readers may want to insist that we are
23 See Mystery and Manner’s: Occasional Prose for a full transcript of the speech. 24 See Mystery and Manner’s: Occasional Prose for a full version of the letter.
87 not complicit or directly involved in the horrific world O’Connor depicts, it is difficult to read her fiction without a pang of shame at our enjoyment of her grotesque narratives, which may remind us of our own encounters with racism and misogyny. As O’Connor herself explains in a 1958 letter to Cecil Dawkins, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful” (O’Connor 307).25 Here,
O’Connor attributes the possibility for personal growth to grace and explains that the pain of growth leads people to avoid it. I argue that this same explanation of grace applies to jouissance, which is equally jarring and ultimately results in a more complete and fluid identity that encompasses the abject within the reader. The destabilizing effect of
O’Connor’s fiction thus has the capacity to make readers question their own relationship with America’s abject history and in this way, begin the process of personal and cultural healing.
As part of the Southern Gothic tradition, O’Connor’s fiction creates a safe space to confront the terrifying reality of race and gender oppression. In “Nurturance of the
Gothic,” William Veeder connects psychology with the social function of the Gothic literary tradition. As he explains,
Societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop
mechanisms to help heal these wounds, Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century
to the present is one such mechanism … Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social
function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform (47-48).
25 For a complete copy of this letter, see Sally Fitzgerald’s The Habit of Being.
88
Here, Veeder explains that societies experience communal trauma in the form of violence and oppression and that one way to heal the wounded social psyche is through Gothic literature, which performs a nurturing function on the individual level and on a larger social scale. He claims that “Through its insistence on the forbidden, Gothic acts as a counter-discursive formation that releases repressed affects and explores foreclosed topics” (48). Thus, by focusing on socially taboo themes such as violence and sexuality,
Gothic fiction provides a personal and socially acceptable space to examine these issues.
As a Southern gothic writer, O’Connor examines issues of race and gender in the
South that are uncomfortable and embarrassing to acknowledge. Her work, like that of many of 19th century American writers, captures the language and sentiments of
America’s past including its racist and sexist history. According to Rod Dreher’s 26 article “Banning Flannery,” in 2000, Opelousas Catholic High in Lafayette, Louisiana banned O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Nigger” for its use of the racial epithet and
“Bishop O'Donnell, in ordering the elimination of O'Connor's volume, directed that ‘no similar books’ replace it” (Dreher). While the removal of O’Connor’s fiction from the high school’s curriculum shows sensitivity to the concerns of parents of color, it also indicates the taboo that continues to exist around our nation’s history of racism.27 For
26 In his 2017 book, The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher calls for Christians to create insulated communities where they can focus on practicing Christian values. According to Emma Green in “The Christian Retreat from Public Life,” “The book seems to suggest that mere proximity to people with alternative beliefs about sexuality, and specifically LGBT people, is a threat to Christian children and families” (Green). 27 O’Connor is not the only author whose work was censored due to its use of racial epithets. According to Julie Bosman’s New York Times article “Publisher Tinkers With Twain,” in 2001 NewSouth Books, an Alabama based publisher, published a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in which the word ‘nigger’ is replaced by ‘slave.’ 89
many people of color, the pain of confronting racism from the not-so-distant past, and the
fear that it may seep into our current discourse is at the heart of literary censorship. The
flip-side of the coin reveals the shame and guilt many white readers experience when
confronted with racial epithets in canonical literature. For instance, Alan Gribben, who is
an English professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, pushed for a new edition of
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, “‘I found myself right out of graduate school at
Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry
Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’… ‘And I don’t think I’m alone’” (Bosman). Gribben is certainly
not alone. For many white readers who encounter themes of racism in literature, it is tempting to distance themselves from the racism portrayed in this fiction. Many approach these texts with an attitude of superiority over the white oppressors depicted therein because they feel that they themselves are not complicit or involved in the oppression that took place in the past. Such distancing is another way to avoid the discomfort of confronting the abject history we all share as Americans. Ultimately, the feelings of readers, of all races, are different facets of the same communal trauma Veeder describes.
I argue that by allowing ourselves to feel the discomfort caused by the vivid references to our oppressive history rather than avoiding them through revisionist history, we can engage in self-reflection and eventually a larger social dialogue that will allow us to acknowledge the past and avoiding its mistakes in the future.
I hold that O’Connor’s fiction functions as a space of psycho-social healing
though jouissance. Despite their resistance, O’Connor’s protagonists confront the horrors
of the Southern order through their equally grotesque bodies. As Patricia Yeager argues 90 in, “The Aesthetics of Torture,” “When a southerner writes in the mode of grotesque realism, the body is metaphorized in a way that expresses a character’s or author’s troubled relation to his or her social formation” (184). While I agree with Yeager’s assertion that the body functions as a metaphor for the cultural grotesque in O’Connor’s writing, I would extend her argument further by claiming that just as the protagonists are unable to extricate themselves from the grotesque society that they inhabit, readers of
O’Connor’s fiction cannot separate themselves from the grotesque realism they encounter in her work.28
Her writing skillfully draws readers in through the satiric humor she employs to examine these social issues that underscores the horrific reality of grotesque ideologies.
For instance, it is easy to laugh at Ruby’s predicament in “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” since the protagonist is not presented as a martyr, but rather as a pretentious housewife obsessed with social mobility. However, when we consider the story through the historical lens of gender oppression in the South, we find that there is an underlying horror in her seemingly trivial problem. Ruby’s unwanted pregnancy echoes the voices of women in the Old South who suffered through the social and biological expectation to bear children regardless of their own feelings towards motherhood. The humor O’Connor employs intensifies the grotesque ideology she exposes. As readers, we can laugh at
Ruby’s comeuppance, but there is a sense of shame when we consider that her plight is
28 Yeager also posits the idea of readers as active participants in O’Connor’s writing. However, while I claim that they experience jouissance along with the characters, Yeager argues that readers are invited as sadistic torturers of O’Connor’s characters, but exit as tortured victims themselves.
91 not all that exaggerated from the reality faced by women in the Old South or today for that matter. For female readers, there is an added element of fear in this laughter when we consider that Ruby’s predicament could very well be our own since access to contraceptives and abortion services is under vigorous attack even in 2017.
Similar feelings arise in O’Connor’s stories satirizing racism. Although
O’Connor uses humor to reveal racism as a ridiculous construct, such humor is juxtaposed by the violent consequences of this ideology. In “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr.
Head and Nelson are laughable characters who are presented as ignorant and powerless.
However, the racism that served to heal their identity and their relationship with each other has violent consequences for the black community. O’Connor’s “The Artificial
Nigger” is arguably one of her most cringe-worthy texts not only because of its use of racial epithets, but also because of its tacit justification of racism as means to unify whites. As readers, the story’s resolution is at once satisfying and unsettling because, while it is comforting to see Mr. Head and Nelson reunited at the end, it is disturbing to think that such unity comes occurs through a shared sense of racial superiority. This makes us question how much of the privilege we enjoy today comes at the cost of
America’s ongoing history of racial oppression. It also puts us in the precarious position of evaluating O’Connor’s problematic legacy, and examining our own reaction to the story and its ultimate message. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from the horrors the communal traumatic history that O’Connor presents.
Despite its complex and painful implications, distancing ourselves from our problematic past will not erase history, but rather force us to repeat it. Perhaps much of 92 the sexism and xenophobia we see unfolding in the present-day U.S. is a result of our complacency as a nation. By refusing to acknowledge the wounds of our past, we have allowed them to fester and erupt into the regressive society we inhabit today. Despite popular opinion, Trump’s presidency is not the cause of this cultural shift, but rather the symptom of a much larger socio-cultural issue. I would argue that this shift is partially the result of a traumatic communal history that was never fully addressed. However, even in the midst of such a disheartening social climate, it is not too late to acknowledge and work through the problematic legacy of our oppressive history. Change can happen now, and it begins with the individual. Literature is one of the many places the cultural battles take place and often we find that we are battling ourselves—our own ignorance, our own fear, our own shame. I posit that through fiction that focuses on our oppressive history, such as O’Connor’s, readers can begin to examine their own relationship to our shameful history and its effect on contemporary culture. This examination is where healing begins to take place and where we learn to reconcile our traumatic history with our individual and collective national identity. Ultimately, I would argue that this capacity for social and psychological change is what makes O’Connor’s fiction significant and relevant to contemporary audiences.
93
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