This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 68-8828 GREGORY, Donald Lee, 1938- AN INTERNAL ANALYSIS OF THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1967 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan (5) Copyright by Donald Lee Gregory 1968 AN INTERNAL AN ALTSIS OF THE FICTION OF PLANNER! O’CONNOR DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University Donald Lee G regory, B .A ., M.A. ****** The Ohio State University 1967 Approved by A dviser Department of Engli ACKNOWLEDGMENTS jMfcr greatest debt is to Professor Gordon K. Grigsby, who provided for many months a finely balanced combination of generous encouragement and incisive criticism —and who has provided for many years an ideal. I would also like to thank Dr. Alden E. Stilson, Jr. and th e l a t e 1 .0 . MacCrimmon f o r a d iv e rsio n when work bogged down. Finally, I would like to thank my wife: she endured. D.L. G. i i VITA January 20, 1933........................ Bom - Newark, Ohio 1 9 6 0 .... .......... ............................ .. B.A., Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 1960-1962. ....................... Graduate Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1 9 6 2 ... ............................ M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1963~1935........................................ Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio I 966-I 967 ......... .......................... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDT Major Field: American Literature Studies in American Literature and Cultural History. Professor William Charvat. Studies in the American Renaissance. Professor Claude Simpson. Studies in Twentieth Century Literature. Professor Claude Simpson. Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature (English). Professor Richard D. Altick. i i i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................... ...... .................................................. ± i VITA.......................... i i i INTRODUCTION......................................................... ........................................................... 1 CHAPTER I . WISE BLOOD.............................................. ............................... 6 CHAPTER I I . A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND........................................ 63 CHAPTER I I I . THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY. ....................................... 160 CHAPTER IV. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE......................... 210 CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................... 278 APPENDIX.............................................................................................................................. 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................... 289 iv INTRODUCTION In a perceptive study of Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood. Jonathan Baumbach observed that her fiction has been "overpraised and overdamned, without . being properly understood."^ Although the critical damning of O’Connor on the basis of the violence and grotesquerie in her works has virtually ceased, the praise continues, at times justifiably, but, unfortunately, often rather blindly. Certainly O'Connor deserves very high praise indeed for her craftsman­ ship—-her use of startlingly vivid imagery, her selection of finely descriptive details, and her evocation of the accents of common speech and hillbilly dialect. Similarly, her devastatingly acute satiric sense has produced a gallery of portraits of vacuous old ladies, phoney salesmen of all sorts (including bogus preachers), and intense young intellectuals which are authentic masterpieces. The bulk of the criticism and commentary on O'Connor's work, however, has been centered on content rather than form, specifically the Catholic point of view which O'Connor herself consistently claims as the basis of her fiction: I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is cen­ tered in our redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.2 Given this assertion of her Catholic view of the world, critics have, I think, been too hasty—and, at times, too un-critical—in celebrating O'Connor as Catholic writer par excellence. Indeed, there has developed from the pages of such journals as Renascence, Catholic World, X avier U n iv e rsity S tu d ie s , Commonweal. C h ris tia n C entury, and Thought a sort of standardized party line which praises O'Connor again and again for the pervasiveness--and the excellence--of her religious point of view. This party line has been generally accepted without serious question by non-Catholic (or even non-Christian) critics as well and has been enunciated most clearly and consistently in a volume entitled The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, published in 1966 by Pordham University, and in a special memorial issue of Esprit, a journal published by the University of Scranton. The praise in the pages of both works is exaggerated: O'Connor is called "the most important w riter America has produced since World o U War III|J and "the most gifted w riter of the mid-century" ; she is b rack eted w ith such names as F la u b e rt and James-5 as w e ll as Faulkner and Hemingway.^ O'Connor's own view of her writing was quite clear, in terms of both her object and her means: The novelist with Christian concerns w ill find in modem life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem w ill be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talk­ ing to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock— to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling pictures.''7 While this statement is in some ways quite clear and straightforward, it nevertheless poses some serious problems for the reader of O'Connor's work, lviy own first reaction to O'Connor's comments of this sort was to invoke D.H. Lawrence's warning concerning a w riter's observations about his own work, for it seemed to me from my in itia l reading of O'Connor's stories and novels that although some of them were explicitly religious in both c o n ten t and them e, many were n o t; in d eed , some seemed a n ti- religious. Thus I began to reread the fiction, assuming that in describing its "Catholicity" O'Connor had overstated her case, and believing that this overstatement had in turn been taken too seriously by over-zealous Catholic critics who were delighted to find an author who claimed to be one of their own. I was thus in turn delighted to find an ally in John Hawkes, who, like myself, was caught up by the power of O'Connor's work and, like myself, was either unwilling or unable to accept the pervasiveness of the Catholic view which she claimed. Indeed, in an article entitled "Flannery O'Connor's Devil," Hawkes asserted his belief that "the creative process threatens the Holy throughout Flannery O'Connor's fiction"® and that "throughout this fiction [this] creative process transforms the w riter's objective Catholic knowledge of the devil into an authorial attitude in itself in some measure d ia b o lic a l.In short, Hawkes believed as I did that at times O'Connor's fiction succeeded in spite of her faith rather than because of it. As I continued to read the fiction itself, however, I became increasingly aware that O'Connor's statements concerning her religious point of view and her works were to be taken quite seriously, and that the theory of Mr. Hawkes which I had so eagerly embraced was inadequate; whether the stories are explicitly religious or not, they reflect O'Connor's own Catholic view with great consistency. But in discovering this consistency, I also discovered another problem—a very serious problem which was either overlooked or ignored in the many critical essays on O’Connor. As I have suggested, most of these essays praise O’Connor for the Catholic doctrine that controls her fiction; but it is never suggested that such a doctrine may be a lim itation of her art rather than an "added dimension." Nor is it ever suggested that to write fiction is one tiling, and to attempt "to get pone’s] vision across to £a[] hostile audience" might well be something else indeed, preaching, for example, or religious propaganda. Thus I arrived at what seems to me to be the central problem in reading the fiction of Flanneiy 0 'Connor—-the problem of determining as precisely as possible the degree to which her fiction does succeed, not only as an expression of a particular religious point of view, but as convincing and enduring literature. The following internal analysis of the stories and novels— beginning with the fiction itse lf, apart from O’Connor’s comments about it—is an attempt to make this determination. 5 Footnotes—General Introduction Jonathan Baumbach, "The Acid of God’s Grace," The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel "(New York, 1965), p . $7. ^Flannery O’Connor, "The Fiction W riter and his Country," in The Living Novel, ed. Granville Hicks (New York, 1957)* p. 162, 3Ted R. Spivey, "Flannery O’Connor—A Tribute," Esprit. VIII (Winter, 1964), 48. ^Sr. M ariella Gable, O.S.B., "Flannery O'Connor—A Tribute," Esprit. VIII (Winter, 1964), 25. ^Caroline Gordon, "An American G irl," in The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York, 1966), p. 127. ^Melvin J. Friedman, Introduction to The Added Dimension, p.