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The author has gpnted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Libmy of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfonn, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d' auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. To Bruce and Bronte. Your love and patience have made this possible. Flannery O'Connor was plagued with a chronic inflammatory disease of the immune system called systernic lupus erythematosus. She was diagnosed at twenty- six and died of renal failure as a result of the illness thirteen years later at the age of thirty-nine. This thesis explores the positive effects of the increasingly debilitating disease on the young writer and her career. With the exception of the six stories that constituted her Master's Thesis at Iowa and early parts of Wise Blood, her first novel, al1 her published work was completed in Georgia between the onset of lupus and her death. Her opinions about illness and suffering are taken from the uIntroduction" she wrote to A Memoir of Mary Ann. Characters' reactions to defomity and imperfection are discussed in detail in such stories as "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "Good Country People," and "Parker's Back." Her own reactions to the lupus are revealled in The Habit of Beinq, a posthumous collection of letters written by O'Connor to her friends. O'Connor's waning energies were focused on producing powerful short stories. Her illness aided considerably in her development as an artist; it intensified her creative ability to portray illness and suffering. Characters in her stories are at various stages of coming to ternis with their own imperfections. Hope of change through Christ's suffering is implied in almost every story.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Theodore Colson for his supervision, especially for his encouragement, patience and insight. Without his assistance, my thesis would probably still be a crumpled bal1 of looseleaf. I am also grateful to Dr. Daniel Doerksen for his provoking questions about my work that has made me think and think and think. . . . A special thank you is in order to Dr. Cheryl Gibson for acting as my reader. As well, the title for this thesis was inspired by the poignant comments of Edie Colson who so graciously took the tirne to read my work and bring me back to its focus.

Thank you to Keith and Marguerite McCormick for allowing me to subject thern to thousands of questions on the mysteries of Roman Catholicism. You got me over the hump. I would like to express my gratitude as well to Father Stan Paulin for his insights and beautiful rendition of the "Tantum Ergo."

I cannot forget my sister Amy (Howe) Smith and rny friends Barb McNaughton, Todd (the Red Kimono) Gallagher, Sheena Comeau, Charlotte Belleville and Jason Keays who have provided endless hours of comic relief.

I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Ed and Val Howe, for making me believe that I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I would also like to Say thank-you to my parents-in-law Dr. Rick and Sheila Thomas for their love and encouragement. As well, their countless hours of babysitting have been invaluable.

Of course, I cannot begin to describe how much my husband Bruce has contributed to this work. His endless hours of love, support, patience, housework and child-rearing have truly made this possible. CONTENTS

1 . 1 Have Never Been Anywhere But Sick ...... 1

II. The Struggle to Accept ...... 20

III. A Force of Redemption...... -36

IV. Who WiII Remain Whole ...... 54

V. Blind Men Cured ...... 68

. . VI . The Long Tnp 1s Over...... 81

. . Bibliography...... **M Chapter 1

I Have Never Been Anywhere But Sick

1have found it out, Iike everybody else, the hard way and only in the last years as a result of I think two things, sickness and success. One of them alone wouldn't have done it for me but the combination was guaranteed. I have never been anywhere but sick In a sense sïckness is a place, more lnsttuctive than a long trip to Europe, and iKs always a place whefe there's no companyl where nobody can follow. . . . We are al1 tather blessed in our depnvations if we let ourselves be, 1 suppose. -Flannery O'Connor e Habit of Beina 163)

Systemic lupus erythematosus is a chronic inflammatory disease of the immune systern. Because of its varying combination of symptoms, it has been câlled the disease with a thousand faces or "the wolf." It produces an excess of antibodies that instead of fighting sickness actually attack the kidneys, heart, lungs, blood vessels, and joints. Recurring symptoms include extreme fatigue, weight loss, joint pain, swelling, hair loss, sensitivity to light, and a loss of appetite. It affects wornen, particularly adolescents and young adults, eight to ten times more often than men (Hole 731, 740). An article in Women's World magazine describes a young woman diagnosed with this disease: It came without waming. I was at work and suddenly my fingers wouldn't move. When 1 tried to flex them, the pain was excruciating. As the day wore on, 1 was overcorne with exhaustion. . . . By the next day, the pain had moved into my wrists, elbows and shoulders. . . . 1 was 21, but it was as if I'd aged decades ovemight. . . . One day, I felt a terrible pain in my chest. It was pericarditis: fluid buildup around my heart. The condition wasn't life threatening, but for the first time I understood what it means to have lupus: you never know what part of your body the disease will attack. Or when. (Women's World 30) Flannery O'Connor suffered numerous unexpected side effects from the time of the disease's appearance, at the age of 26 in 1950, to her death thirteen years later on August 3, 1964; she was thirty-nine. This study will explore the positive effects of an increasingly debilitating disease on a young writer and her career. Letters she wrote to friends found in The Habit of Being will be examined as a source for her attitude toward the disease. The second chapter will concentrate on the various critical opinions about the relationship of her disease to her stories. The "Introduction" to A Memoir of Man, Ann will be studied as an overview of O'Connor's own views on suffering. The final three chapters are detailed examinations of O'Connor's characters and their reactions to suffering and imperfection in an attempt to determine the effect of O'Connor's own suffering that she fused into their personalities. Despite the unpredictability and inconvenience she suffered, there is little evidence in her letters about the pain she must have endured. Instead, her depleting energies were focused on producing some of the finest short stories ever written. In appears that the disease did little to hinder her from fulfilling her writing career. In fact, it may be argued that her illness aided considerably in her developrnent as an artist. O'Connor's adaptability to the dreaded symptoms is extraordinary; throughout the years, she battled popping jaws (Habit of Being henceforth m397),porous bones (m397), Sun intolerance (W322)' kidney failure (m584), anernia (HB 564), and many flus and colds; but she seemed to be most affected by her lack of energy, something from which she got little relief. To "A" (a correspondent who rernains anonyrnous), she writes: Your visit was thoroughly enjoyed by us and is always good for me though 1 may look tired. The truth is I am tired every afternoon and tnere's nothing to be done about it. It's the nature of the disease. A lot of people decide I am bored or indifferent or uppity but at a certain hour of the day my motor cuts off autornatically. (m252) Not only did she battle depleted energy and unexpected symptoms; O'Connor was also faced with fluctuating medical advancements and conflicting opinions about the nature of the disease. ln December 1957 she writes: I have lately been getting di- because I am taking a new medicine and have got an overdose of it. . . . It takes some time for the dose to get regulated. Every time something new is invented, I get in on the ground floor with it. There have been 5 improvements in the medicine in the 7 years I've had the lupus, and they are al1 great improvernents. (m257) In another instance, she writes from the hospital: I am still here--into the third week. 1 had a transfusion Sareday & another Sunday. I don't get any information out of them that I particularly understand, but then I'd have to study medicine if I wanted to keep up with rnyself with this stuff. I don? know if I'm making progress or if there's any to be made. Let's hope they are leaming sornething anyhow. (m582) [Spelling in O'Connor's letters is often facetious.] She spent most of her later life on crutches because of a deteriorating hip bone, which, besides her physical pain, resulted in much inconvenience and isolation from her friends; she writes to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in 1955:

This would be a fine time for me to corne to ltaly if it were not for the fact that I have just been put on crutches. It requires some decision for me at this point to cross the room much less the ocean. . . . 1 am real awkward and there is always a crash going on behind me, but I am leaming . . . . Crutches make a big difference in the tempos you live at. Mine was always slow, but now! (m 108- 9) Nevertheless, her adaptability is evident in the instance when she writes to Elizabeth McKee a few months later: "1 am fine and get about on crutches now as if I had been born on them" (HJ 128). The lupus would also periodically go into remission; the symptoms would disappear, and then she could cheerily write: "The trip to the Lourdes has effected some irnprovement in my bones. Before we went they told me 1 would never be off the crutches. Since last week I am being allowed to walk around the house without them as the bone is beginning to recalcify" (m306). Often these periods were short-lived, however. Only eighteen days after the writing of this, she wrote to "A" that she coughed and broke several ribs (u306). Her ability to endure the effects of the disease was essential in creating an amazing body of fiction.

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia. When she was thirteen, the family moved to her mother's childhood home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Here, O'Connor enrolled in the English Department at Georgia College, hoping to become a fiction writer or a cartoonist. She became the art editor of the student newspaper, The Colonnade, the editor of the literary quarterly, The Corinthian, and feature editor of her senior yearbook (Getz 13). During these early years it appears that O'Connor was more interested in drawing than writing. She sent her illustrations to The New Yorker in April, but the magazine showed no interest ("Chronology" in Collected Works 1240). Moreover, she was not always ill, and the time from her birth to the publication of The Geranium was particularly rewarding, creatively instructive, and healthy. She wntes to "An about her childhood: "1 am wondering where you got the idea that my childhood was full of "endless illnesses." Besides the usual measles, chicken pox and mumps, I was never sick" (m379). A new professor of the Georgia College, George Beiswanger, encouraged O'Connor to pursue the graduate writing program at the State University of lowa. It was here in 1945 that she gained admission to Writer's Workshop. A few years later she accepted an offer to spend tirne at the artist's colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga, New York ("Chronology" 1242). The program consisted of seminars, exams, and a creative dissertation (Getz 13). Here she became acquainted with such established Southern writers as Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, and Caroline Gordon. With the critical aid of these people, the young writer's career became confirmed as her stories began to be accepted for publication. In 1947, she combined such early stories as The Geranium," "The Barber," "Wildcat," "The Crop," ''The Turkey," and "The Train" to form a collection entitled The Geranium, which she submitted as her thesis for the Graduate College of the State University of lowa. Here she made many literary contacts. It was also in this year that she obtained a literary agent, Elizabeth McKee, and published The Woman on the Stairs" (later retitled "A Stroke of Good Fortune"), 'The Heart of the Park," and "The Peeler." The last two stories were intended for part of her novel, Wise Blood. There are no recorded manifestations of the disease up to this point. ln 1947, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1949, she left Yaddo to join Robert and Sally Fitzgerald as a boarder in their Ridgefield, Connecticut, home. Here she continued to work on Wise Blood until its publication in 1952 by Harcourt, Brace and Company (Fitzgerald Collected Works henceforih CtJV 1257). The period, then, from 1945 until 1952, during which O'Connor was absent from the South, living and writing among well known literary figures, was a time of great expansion for her writing career. However, this phase was brought to a drastic, almost fatal, halt with the onset of lupus. It was between the publication of her early short fiction (found in The Geranium collection) and the appearance of Wise Blood, that she began to feel the effects of the illness that would drastically redirect her life. O'Connor spent the first and last months of 1950 in the hospital. In January she was admitted for kidney surgery, and in December, while visiting her mother for Christmas, she began to suffer pains and heaviness in her amis and shoulders. The Fitzgerald family doctor suggested it might be due to arthritis, but advised her to schedule tests when she retumed home to Georgia. While on the train, she became dangerously il1 and was taken to the hospital in Milledgeville, where she was informed that she had acute rheumatoid arthritis, one of the first signs of lupus. She began cortisone treatments, but it was not until a couple of months later in January 1951 that she was officially diagnosed with lupus. The family refrained frorn telling her for fear of further physical setback. Sally Fitzgerald, in the "Chronology," writes: Wood tests confimi iilness is lupus, when family is told, they decide to withhold information from O'Connor, fearing that diagnosis of incurable disease would cause physical setback. Temporarily loses hair from fevers and suffers facial swelling frorn cortisone. Dr. Merriil wams mother that O'Connor rnay die. (CW 1245) Nevertheless, despite numerous trips for treatment that year, O'Connor was still adamantly revising Wise Blood, even in the hospital. Sally Fitzgerald, in the "IntroductionntoThe Habit of Being, writes: A few nights [ater her mother called to tell us that Flannery was dying of lupus. The doctor had minced no words. We were stunned . . . . As she emerged from the crisis, debilitated by high fevers and the treatment alike, she began to communicate again herse1 f - - chiefly on the subject of her novel, which had never been much out of her mind, even when the lupus attack was most severe. She required daily medication, ACTH by inoculation, and she leamed to manage this for herself. It was al1 an ordeal, but she was sure that it was to be temporary, and her greatest concern was for Wise Blood, which she rewrote,

correcting and polishing it, while she was still in the hospital. (m22) At this point O'Connor did not understand the degree of severity of her illness; she was still hopeful that she would fuily recover and retum to Connecticut to continue writing. Her letters written during 1951 attest to this. Her illness did not stifle her desire to complete her novel, and in April she wrote to her friend Betty Boyd Love: I got your letter a long time ago when l was at Emory Hospital. I stayed there a month, giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, al1 hours of the day and night, but now I am at home again and not receiving any more awful cards that Say to a dear sick friend, in verse what's worse. Now I shoot myself with ACTH oncet daily and look very well . . . . I have finished my opus nauseous and expect it to be out one of these days. The name will be Wise Blood . It was not until July 1952 that O'Connor discovered the true nature of her illness; she writes: "1 saw rny doctor as soon as I got to Atlanta. He said I had a virus infection and it had reacted on my cornplaint (1 now know that it is lupus and I am very glad to so know) . . . " (m38). It was only then that she requested her things to be sent from Ridgefield, Connecticut to her mother's home in Georgia. The illness brought her near to the point of death, and when finally controlled, required her permanent return to the South as a semi-invalid in the custodial care of her mother. Circurnstances of her health dictated a life of sustained isolation. By 1955 she was resigned to the use of crutches to get around; her world had contracted into a carefully protected domestic routine separated from her contemporaries and her intellectual peers. In a letter to a close friend, she writes factually about her condition: "I myself am afflicted with time, as I do not work out [of the house] on account of an energy-depriving ailment and my work in, being creative, can go on only a few hours a day. I live on a farm and don't see many people" (m91). Her life had changed. At twenty-six years of age, O'Connor, aware of her inevitable outcome, appears to have accepted this knowledge of her condition and her future quite well. And during these last years of her life, while engaged in a mortal struggle with depleting energy, immobility, and other adverse effects, she came to her full stature as an individual and as an artist. Aside from her years at the University of Iowa and a short time in New York and Connecticut, O'Connor spent the remainder of her time in Georgia. Her later life was quite sedentary; nevertheless, it was under these conditions that she fine-tuned her elegantly crafted stories and intricately pattemed short novels. The fact that little could stop her from writing is evident in a comment in a letter to Catherine Carver upon completing a seven-year struggle with The Violent Bear it Away: "Now that I have stopped working on the novel, 1 feel like sornebody fired from his job, unemployed, looking for work. No writing is a good deal worse than writing" (m342). In fact, she often commented that the illness enabled her to write unhindered, as she had little energy for anything else. O'Connor's battle with lupus made her the artist she became by intensifying her creative ability to convey illness and suffering. Lee Sturma notes in "Flannery O'Connor, Simone Weil and the Virtue of Necessity": "She could have sat on her mother's porch and rocked and fed peafowl and waited to die. lnstead fifteen years after her retum io the South we see her finishing her last story from her hospital bed" (120). Sally Fitzgerald notes that O'Connor realized the benefits of her move back to Georgia: But her return was for good, in more ways than one. She herself acknowledged this, describing it in one of her letters as not the end of al1 work she had thought it would be but only the beginning. Once she had accepted her destiny, she began to embrace it, and it is clear from her correspondence that she cherished her life there and knew she had been brought back exactly where she belonged and where her best work would be done. Here her mature growth began. When she leamed how matters really stood, and when her health had been more or less stabilized and meticulous treatment worked out to control her illness, she set about building a life with her mother, under Regina O'Connor's care, at Andalusia. Her living and working habits were established so as to ensure that her diminished strength could go almost entirely into her writing. (m xv-xvi) Her lifestyle was merely adjusted to accommodate both the sickness and her writing career. In a letter to Cecil Dawkins dated July 16, 1957, O'Connor herself reaffirms this: It is perhaps good and necessary to get away from it [the South] physically for a while, but this is by no means to escape it. I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the Iife of my writing depended on my staying away. l would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very il1 and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here. (m230) It appears from these letters that she resigned herself quite quickly to a change of location and to the fact that she would be dependent on her mother for the rest of her life. Later, O'Connor herself insists on the disease's pivotal role in her career, in a letter to a friend who was thinking about moving back to the South: So it may be the South! You get no condolences frorn me. This is a Retum I have faced and when 1 faced it I was roped and tied and resigned the way it is necessary to be resigned to death, and largely because I thought it would be the end of any creation, any writing, any WORK from me. And as I told you by the fence, it was only the beginning. (HB 224) A characteristic description of her feelings about the move is contained in a 1953 letter to Robert Lowell and his wife: 1 am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories . . . . 1 have enough energy to write with and as that is al1 I have any business doing anyhow, 1 can with one eye squinted take it al1 as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, or so I tell myself. (m57) In yet another letter to Cecil Dawkins written August 4, 1957, she calls her illness a "blessing in disguise": I have had some bone trouble and for the last two years have been walking on crutches; I expect to be on them for two or three years more or longer--but when you can't be too active physically, there is nothing left to do but write so 1 may have a blessing in disguise. (HEJ 234) This necessary move to rural Georgia also brought about another less obvious benefit. On the small fam, with few visitors, the young writer worked faithfully each moming with Iittle interruption from the outside world. Because of her isolated location, and without the luxury of television, record player, or telephone, she relied on writing many letters to friends for companionship. These letters are a very valuable source for understanding the young wrÏter, for without them, O'Connor's personality would not be so readily accessible. The Habit of Being, her letters compiled and edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald in 1979, allow more than just a brief glimpse of O'Connor's life. The book includes approximately one hundred and fifty letters extending over approximately two decades-between 1946, the year she published her first story, "The Geranium," and 1964, the year she died. And they reveal some very interesting opinions and attitudes about herself as a person. Letter writing was very important to O'Connor, since the lupus gave her life a decisively sedentary tum. She explained her circumstances to a priest friend: "1 never mind writing anybody. In fact it is about my only way of visiting with people as 1 don't get around much and people seldom corne to see us in the country" (m139). The letters are also an important source for understanding the writer's attitude towards her illness and her career. For the most part, she refers little to the suffering her deteriorating condition must have inevitably caused. In many instances she appeaw light-hearted about it; on separate occasions she writes of her battle to master the crutches she had to use in hopes of preventing further breakdown of a deteriorating hip bone. She writes a characteristically humorous note to "A" in November 1955 about this: 1 have decided I must be a pretty pathetic sight with these crutches. I was in Atlanta the other day in Davison's. An old lady got on the elevator behind me and as soon as I tumed around she fixed me with a moist gleaming eye and said in a loud voice, "Bless you, darling!"' I felt exactly like the Misfit and I gave her a weakly lethal look, whereupon greatly encouraged, she grabbed my am and whispered (very loud) in my ear. "Remember what they said to John at the gate darling!" It was not my floor, but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, "te lame shall enter first." This may be because the lame

will be able to knock everybody else down with their crutches. 11 6) O'Connor's letters typically reflect the surface picture of her condition-- tonenting nurses with black plastic spiders in the "horsepital" and rattling around Lourdes on her metal crutches. In a letter written only six years before her death in 1958, she jokes about her DREAD DISEASE: No I am not going to Rome nor nowhere else. . . . The doctor as of yesterday says I can't go. You didn't know I had a DREAD DISEASE didja? Well I got one. My father died of the same stuff at the age of 44 but the scientists hope to keep me here until I am 96. 1 owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago Illinois at the Amour packing plant. If pigs wore garments 1 wouldn't be worthy to kiss the hems of them. They have been supporting my presence in this world for the last seven years. What you met here was a product of Artificial Energy. . . . I am bearing this with my usual magnificent fortitude. (m266) In another instance she is vety grateful upon receiving a blender from Maryat Lee so she can mince her food finer to spare the pain of a deteriorating jaw bone. She lightheartedly writes: "1 am bowled over and under. You can only be the donor of this instrument which makes me speechless. Ah, now my jaw can rot at its leisuren 435-36). With al1 this joking, one might miss the sense of suffenng that she must have felt during these years. Her sentences are almost entirely devoid of the pain and violence of disease she must have endured. The cumulative effect of these letters ultimately is to heighten rather than resolve the mystery of her personality and illness, for even in the most personal of the letters, O'Connor is removed, distant. Often during the worst attacks, she refrains from discussing her own private difficulties, except in the most general or playful terms. Never for a moment does she want her pain to be seen as contributing to her work. She writes to Maryat Lee in response to a Time article: "My lupus has no business in literary considerations" (m380). On another occasion, to Betsy Lockridge, she states: "Most writers have had many obstacles put in their way. I have had none. . . . There has been no interesting or noble struggle. The only thing I wrestle with is the language and a certain poverty of means in handling it, but this is merely what you have to do to write at all" (40). She asserts again and again in her letters that the disease never really affected her life. In one she writes to a girl who discovered her illness from Time and wanted to get acquainted: This girl had just been told that she had it and the week that she was told, she had also attended the funeral of sornebody with it, so she was scared to death and wrote to me to find out what she could do about lupus. Then nothing would do but they must corne to see me and since then, they have been here three times. 1 suppose it gives her confidence to see that the lupus does not deter me ovemiuch. (l-&! 41 5) In another instance, she writes: 'The disease is of no consequence to rny writing since for that I use my head and not my feet" (Paulson 131). But these are evasive remarks, concentrating on the physical circumstances of composition rather than the emotional effects that the disease must have inevitably evoked. Not surpnsingly, therefore, her friends have repeatedly remarked that they never knew how il1 O'Connor really was, even as she was dying. Jean Wylder notes in "Flannery O'Connor: A Reminiscence and Some Lettersn: "She was to make only the most casual reference to her illness, and that infrequently, in her letters through the years, most of what I leamed of it came from others, and that was usually reassuring. I never knew how serious it actually was" (Wylder 63). Another close friend, Cecil Dawkins, proposed in November of 1963 to adapt some of O'Connor's stories to the stage, only to encounter O'Connor's death before the project was completed: I was almost through with the work in the summer of 1964. 1 recall we'd first planned that I go to Milledgeville in June and we'd read it together. But I saw I

had a couple of more months of work on it yet, and she was in bad health. (1 didn't know how bad.) When she died in August, I put the play away. . . . (HB 545) In the introduction to the letters written in O'Connor's final year, Sally Fitzgerald, too, notes the deceptive quality of the letters with regard to her condition; Fitzgerald writes this about her final days: She must have suspected that something was gravely wrong but she was casual, even reassuring, in every mention of her state of being. . . . She never lost interest in her friends during the wearying year: her letters continued to pour out to them, and her light tone was deceptive. Most of us didn't realize how sick she was, though in retrospect her letters tell us more than they did at the time. Robert and I remember a letter she wrote us, now lost, very much in her vein, except that it was written with a request for prayers. Others received the same request. (m559-60) However, of equal interest are the ideas and experiences that must have been fostered by prolonged physical vulnerability. Flannery O'Connor's [etters are almost entirely devoid of dues about her attitude conceming what was surely an ill-favoured fate--to live thirteen years with the uninterrupted consciousness of imminent demise. Only in the rarest moments did she risk speaking of what illness rneant to her. Much is revealed in O'Connor's understated attitude about her condition. To Sister Mariella Gable in July 1964, a month before her death, she writes: The wolf [lupus], I'm afraid, is tearing up the place. I've been in the hospital 50 days already this year. At present I'm just home from the hospital and have to stay in bed" (m591). Toward the middle of August 1963, her letters refer to a new lupus-related symptom--anemia. This condition was not then recognized as connected with the disease, and an operation needed to counteract the low blood count would reactivate the lupus, which eventually brought about her death a year later. The pain and suffering she must have experienced are evident in these last letters more than anywhere else. In a most characteristic understated, but telling, way, she described her condition to Louise Abbot in a note written in May of 1964: "1 am sick of being siok" (m581 ). Her letters seem to indicate that she was 'sick' more from the inconvenience the illness brought to her literary endeavours than the pain it caused. After a trip to the healing waters of the Lourdes (which she took rather reluctantly), she writes: I've been to the Lourdes once, as a patient not as a helper. I felt that being only on crutches I was probably the healthiest person there. I prayed there for the novel I was working on [The Violent Bear It Awav,] not for my bones, which I care about less, but I guess my prayers were answered about the novel, inasmuch as I finished it. 509) The fact that little could stop O'Connor from wnting is evident from her final letters. Notes from the hospital during her final days reflect an urgency to finish her work on Everythina That Rises Must Converue. Sally Fitzgerald, in the introduction to The Habit of Being, notes the young writer's concem with her work:

There was probably never much doubt of the outcome, and I find it hard to believe that Flannery didn't know it. Be that as it may, her chief concem was to finish the work on Everythina That Rises Must Converae. And it was from the last year of her life that three unforgettable stories came: "Revelationll' which was finished in iate 1963, "Judgment Day," and "Parker's Backln both completed when she was more or less in extremis. (m559) It becomes obvious that her primary concern was not for her health but for her unfinished stories. To Elizabeth McKee in January 1964 and again in February she writes: My blood count has gone up from 8.5 to 11.6 in a month and the doctor thinks that phenomenal. Around 13 is normal and l'II rnake it yet. . . . [Fifteen days later] My blood is back up now so I am working like mad and hope to keep it up so that possibly I can have a book of stories ou! in the fall. (M564) June saw her admitted again to the hospital for over a month. She writes to Catherine Carver about how the illness has set back her work: I am stuck up here in the hospital. I thought I was coming for a week or ten days and l'II have been here a month Saturday. I wrote Giroux and asked him to hold off the publication date of the stories until spring. In that way 1 thought I could probably manage another story. I've got one rLJudgmentDay"] that I'm not satisfied with that I finished about the same time as "Revelation" and when I get home I'rn going to send it to you as is, and ask you to let me know what you think of it. I have another in the making [ "Parker's Back"] that I scratch on it in long hand here in the hospital at night but that's not my idea of writing. How do those French ladies such as Madame Mallet-Joris write in cafes? . . . Anybody that can write in a cafe is made different. . . . 1 think when they finally let me out of here l'II be able to work if they ever let me out. 585) After explaining the blood- and lupus-related problems to Cecil Dawkins on June 24, she writes: "As far as I'rn concemed, as long as I can get at that typewriter, I have enough. They expect me to improve or so they Say. I expect anything that happens" (HJ 585). She was even forced to write secretly because hospital staff felt that any strain whatsoever could prove fatal. Perhaps she realized how little time she had left, for in August 1964, she wrote a note to Maryat Lee: I'm pleased I can't have Company because it means what energy I've got I can use for my own bidnis, getting this book out. I've got to get it out before 1 get worse & should 1 get better l'II have other & new stuff to work on. More to consider here than my habitua1 fiscal responsibility. My dose of prednisone has been cut in half on Dr. Merrill's orders because the nitrogen content of the blood has increased by a third. So far as I can see the medicine and the disease run neck & neck to kill you, but anyway I dont hear any choruses now, no more "Clementine" or "Coming For To Carry Me Home." l am likely some better. (m 590) To Catherine Carver she writes: I have drug another out of rnyself and I enclose it rParker's Back"]. I think it's much better than the last, but I want to know what you thin k. I thin k these two new stories, l'II just leave it at 9 and forget about "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead." I never thought much cf including it anyway. . . . I'm still in bed but I climb out of it into the typewriter about 2 hours every moming. (m593) O'Connor was not plagued by the change of location or by the suffering the disease caused so rnuch as the demands on her time that it inevitably made; her letters are concerned more about completing her stories than they are about her health. And her humorous prophesy to Catherine Carver on March 27, 1959, about her death came true: "l've rewritten the last pages so l'II enclose them as I think they're an improvement. When the grim reaper cornes to get me, he'll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words" (m324). She died in the Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 3, 1964. With the exception of the six stories that constituted her Master's theçis at Iowa and early parts of Wise Blood, her first novel, al1 her published work was completed in Georgia between the onset of lupus and her death. O'Connoi's stories reflect her experience with a progressively debilitating illness; the pain she accepted contributes to an understanding of suffering and imperfection that is so forcefully embodied in many of her characters. The impetus and mode of perception present in her engagingly violent tales do not a~sefrom social anger or love. Rather, they seem to stem from the need to,face the ultimate ravishment of the flesh. O'Connor did not escape from her personality when she wrote. A discussion of her texts alone cannot account for the illness and suffering that is so prominent in her work; her stories are an offspring of her own experiences. Many critics, however, have failed to see the important connection between O'Connor's illness and her preoccupation with deformed and ailing characters. A closer look at the various critiques of the relationship between this writer and her disease is necessary to detenine the extent to which the lupus affected her writing. O'Connor expressed her own views on the parts that make her stories work in Mvstety and Manners (henceforth MM): Story-writers are always talking about what makes a story 'work.' From my own experience in trying to make stories 'work,' I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. (MM 11 8) The question posed by O'Connor is how "grace" has been offered. In her own life. grace has been experienced through the acceptance of suffering. In a letter to "A," (m 163) she notes that she has "never been anywhere by sick," and that "illness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe." From that "place" came some of the best stories of her time. Chapter 2

The Struggle to Accept

This setting apart sornetl'mes has positive effects; it does not mereiy isolate, it elevates. Thus ugliness and defonnities, while marking out those who possess them, at the same time make them sacred. -Mirma Eliade (quoted in Feeley, 24)

By her middle thirties, O'Connor had attracted the attention of many of the well- known critics of the time, and at her death, in 1964, she was beginning to be accepted by many as a major Southem writer. Much has been written on Flannery O'Connor's wotk, so much that commentators are beginning to despair about the accumulation of criticism about a writer with an exceedingly modest output. Even Robert Coles, one of the most patient reviewers, expresses some discontent in his Flannery O'Connor's South : How much more critical attention can a couple of dozen stories and two slim novels, however brilliantly crafted, manage to sustain--without some recognition from al1 of us that the time has corne for a bit of a pause. (xxiii) This chorus of discontent has been expressed by many crîtics. Melvin Friedman who examines O'Connor critics himself, writes: "1 shall resist the temptation of writing yet another essay on the two novels and thit-ty-one short stories* (Critical Essavs 6). Perhaps the copious material on O'Connor can, in part, be attributed to the elusive nature of her life in letters, as well as her characters that resist easy explanation as to her purpose, meaning, and tone. O'Connor remarks in a lecture recorded in Mvstery and Mamers that "A story that is any good can't be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you see more and more in it' and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four" ('Writing Short Stories" 102). This statement is an accurate description of her rapid development as an artist, and a possible explanation for the many critical responses to her life and work. She is a writer who, because of her complexity and her visionary insights, is continually being rediscovered. Flannery O'Connor censured many reviews of her work written during her lifetime. She told students at Georgia State College in 1960 that when I sit down to write a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, "1 don't get it, i don't see it, I don't want it." Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how. I know that l must never let him affect my vision, must never let hirn gain control over my thinking, must never listen to his demands unless they accord with my conscience; yet I feel I must make him see what I have to show, even if my means of making him see have to be extreme. (as quoted in Feeley frorn an unpublished manuscript 45) She loathed the idea of her art's being misunderstood; about The Violent Bear It Awav, she writes to Maryat Lee: I am about convinced now that my novel is finished. It has reached the stage where it is a pleasure for me to type it . . . . There is nothing like being pleased with your own efforts-- and this is the best stage--before it is published and begins to be misunderstood. (m339) To Cecil Dawkins a few days later, she expresses a similar concem: 'The most I am willing to say is that it has taken more doing than anything else I've done. I dread all the reviews, all the misunderstanding of my intentions, etc. etc. Sometimes the most you can ask is to be ignoredn (m340). Ted R. Spivy, a friand and Georgia State University professor, wrote in 1972: When I first visited Flannery O'Connor in her home. . . in the summer of 1958, she told me that she occasionally received letters from prison inmates. And she added that they seemed to understand what she was writing better than other people. She felt in 1958 that her stories were understood by very few. (As quoted in Paulson 135) In a letter to Cecil Dawkins, O'Connor confesses: At interviews I always feel like a dry cow being milked. There is no telling what they will get out of you . . . . If you do manage to Say anything that makes sense, they put down the opposite. (m306) Like most authors, she dreaded the thought of being misquoted; perhaps more than most, she loathed the possibility of being misinterpreted. Violence in O'Connor's fiction, along with the associated collection of deformed people and the frequency of bizarre behaviour, inspirsd many questions from critics. In response, she talked quite directly about the meaning and nature of the grotesque in literature and what it signified in her own fiction. She demonstrated her desire to have her ideas presented as clearly and as cohesively as possible. Much against O'Connor's objections, I'm sure, there has arisen a proliferation of material on her life and work that distorts her character and intentions. Many conventional critics have argued that O'Connor's deforrned and diseased characters indicate a "sick imaginationn and a disgust for the human body. Despite her eamest attempts at correcting false accusations about her life and work, numerous critics continue to comment on the bieakness of her fictional world as a reflection of her cold, hard view of life. Martha Stevens, in The Question of Flannerv O'Connor, feels that the author's perceptions are too far removed from the prevailing view of the modem reader, and that her stories reflect a contempt for human life and emit a message of despair: A good indication of what must be called O'Connor's contempt for ordinary human life is the loathing with which she apparently contemplated the human body. She iiked to describe faces--she hardly ever passed up an opportunity- and nearly all her faces are ugly. . . . Human beings are ugly in every way; the human form itself is distinctly unpleasant to behold; human life is a sordid, almost unrelievedly hideous affair. (10) Stevens attributes the repetitive nature of O'Connor's themes and characters to her "exile" to Andalusia because of the lupus: It constricted her range of subjects rather too much. . . . The narrowness of her doctrine seems to have combined with the narrowness of her physical life to

produce an art that was highly static, if often enomiously skillful. (146) Claire Kahane in "Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision," believes that O'Connor's disfigured characters are representations of herself; in Kahane's view, the characters are treated with rage and contempt because of the author's bittemess about becoming il1 and being forced to live at home under her mother's care: If we look at the characters O'Connor chooses to pillory-children who rebel against parental control, women, intellectuals-what becomes startlingly clear is that she addresses rage and contempt to characters who at least partially represent herself. She was a woman, an intellectual, a writer with metictilous concem for words, a child forced by illness to depend on her mother. Yet her fiction tums her world upside down, and these aspects of herself become the objects of her hatred. (Kahane 128) Kahane is by no means alone in taking this approach. Many others follow this Iine of argument, viewing O'Connor's attitude towards her illness and relocation as a negative one that greatly influenced her literary endeavours. Josephine Hendin in The World of Flannery O'Connor insists that the world she portrays in her art is one of "unredeemable pain--of man as simply an organism containing juices in irreversible flow" (3). She further explains that the bleak fictional worlds are reflections of O'Connor's lonely isolation at Andaluçia: [Her work] seems to me also to express her older, more essential malaise-that deep isolation that seems to have made her only cornfortable when alone in an insulated and protected world, in a world where the most constant and enduring attachment is to swans, ducks, and peacocks. If this is an affirmation of life at all, it is an affirmation of the life of a very lonely child. (Hendin 11 ) Ann Reuman, in her article, "Revolting Fictions: Flannery O'Connor's Letier to Her Mother," follows a similar notion in asserting that O'Connor's resentment for being dependent on her mother is reflected in the stories; she writes: Like Ashbury [of The Enduring Chill"] O'Connor was an artist, inervated by protracted illness and forced to live with her parent, and in her dependency, O'Connor too, it seems, felt "pinionedn like a "domesticated bird" and stifled by an overbearing control. (Reuman 205) Many of these specolatory responses to Flannery O'Connor's work have prevented us from understanding the cornplexity of the relationship between her art and her character. The trouble with many of those who write about O'Connor is that they distort both her personal life and her literary intentions. A criticism is needed that will explore the complexity of the work without making negative assumptions about her personality, beliefs, and relationship with her mother. O'Connor's preoccupation with the grotesque as manifested in physical, mental and spiritual defomity has led many to assume wrongly that her work is despairing. O'Connor refutes this notion in an interview with Gerald E. Sherry in 1963 when she says: "My characters are described as despairing only by superficial critics. Veiy few of my characters despair and those who do, don? reflect my views" (Conversations with Flannery O'Connor 99). Although O'Connor's letters to her mother were never published, Sally Fitzgerald in the "Introduction" to The Habit of Being notes that Flannery took a daily half-mile walk to the mailbox to get letters she received from Regina O'Connor. Fitzgerald contends that Flannery's biggest fear was that her mother would die before her. Her assertation, "1 don't know what l would do without her" (xii), contradicts the notion that O'Connor longed to be free from her mother's care. Furthemore, it becomes difficult to accept criticisms that discuss her dissatisfaction with the quality of life when her letters clearly indicate the opposiie-they are full of a joie de vivre and an appreciation for the world's details. Also, Reurnan's assumption about O'Connor's reclusive nature contradicts the sentiments expressed in her letters. She enjoyed Company, often sending invitations to her friends to visit at the fam. Once her daily three-hour writing period was over, she looked forward to socializing and throve on companionship. She participated quite actively in her friend's lives through letters; it appears that the lupus did little to hinder her. Another group of critics suggest that O'Connor's life and experiences act as positive sources for much of her art--some noting how her history of illness plays a central part of her success as an author. Kathleen Spaltro, in an article "When We Dead Awaken: Flannery O'Connor's Debt to Lupus," is one cntic who concentrates on the positive effects of the disease on this author's wnting career. Spaltro argues that the way O'Connor dealt with her illness illuminates her fiction; her writing was concemed "in both comic and terrible ways, with the awakening of deadened souls" (Spaltro 33). She feels that books by Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit piest, enabled the sickly author to resolve the fear the disease inevitably evoked, and to accept its presence and profound consequence as a necessary part of her life. She notes that Teilhard wrote so pertinently about pain and death that his comments sound like a gloss on Flannery's life. Teilhard wrote in The Divine Milieu that losses and misfortunes in life are completely necessary in getting closer to God: Events which show themselves experimentally in Our lives as pure loss will become an immediate factor in the union we dream of establishing with [God]. . . . We have not yet crossed the critical point of our ex-centration, of our reversion to God. There is a further step to take: the one that makes us lose al1 foothold within ourselves. . . . What will be the agent of that definitive transformation? Nothing else than death. (Teilhard, as quoted by Spaltro 34) Spaltro concludes that Teilhard's theory gave O'Connor a way of seeing the lupus as a necessary part of her developrnent as a writer. This opinion is also expressed by Sally Fitzgerald in an aside to the O'Connor letters: From Teilhard de Chardin she eventually leamed a phrase for something she already knew about: "passive dirninishmenGthe serene acceptance of whatever affliction or loss cannot be changed by any means--and she rnust have reasoned that the eventual effect of such dirninishment, accompanied by a perfecting of the will, is to bring increase. . . . So now she set about rnaking the most she could of both her gift and her circurnstanceç, from day to day. (m53) It is important, Spaltro believes, for readers to recognize the pain O'Connor suffered as a valid factor shaping her writing. Spaltro believes that the fiction is misinterpreted if readers imagine "unresolved resentment [goveming] her creationsn (37). She contends that O'Connor's comments on her illness often cause rnisinterpretations among scholars. In particular, she notes the criticisms by Josephine Hendin and Clara Claibome Park, which 1 have mentioned. These critics pity O'Connor's situation rather than noting its necessity to her accomplishments; this type of reading, Spaltro believes, only reinforces misreadings of the author's attitude and intentions in creating grotesque and dysfunctional characters. She writes: "The uncomprehending reader, not O'Connor, feels the cruel impulse to kick the cripple" (38). She believes that the rnairned characters do not cal1 for Our pity, but for a recognition that they are Our kin; these deformed souls in O'Connor's stories do not differ frorn the rest of us (m171). Spaltro concludes that in pitying O'Connor's characters instead of accepting the necessity of their pain and loss, the reader has missed the point (43). Spaltro contends that O'Connor's battle to accept the lupus leads her to create characters who do not willingly accept their limitations and who sometimes refuse to evolve. The young writer herself, in a letter to "A," admits facing her own struggle with death: The latter has the answer in it to what you cal1 my struggle to submit, which is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. . . . The other day I ran upon a wonderful quotation: The dragon is at the side of the road watching those who pas. Take care lest he devour you! You are going to the Father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." (m126) If viewed in this light, one can see O'Connor's treatment of the freak in a new way. The suffering characters are not to be pitied, but are to be watched to see if they accept their destiny and gain a deeper spirituality (as O'Connor herself did), or if they reject suffering and alienate themselves. Critics who best understand Flannery O'Connor's work see that in her appallingly deformed characters she has captured important elements of life as it is--imperfection and all. She did not wish to incite our sympathy or to urge social change, as many scholars believe. These characters are in her stories because her vision of the world was one of imperfections. To pity thern is to do both them and her an injustice. Lewis Lawson, in an article entitled 'The Perfect Deformity: Wise Blood," writes aptly, "True, O'Connor presents a warped world, but our world is twisted and defomed and imperfect. If one cannot create a perfect fom perhaps the next best thing is to create the perfect defonity" (cited from Bloom's Flannerv O'Connor 38). A similar line of argument is pursued in Frederick Asals' "Flannery O'Connor: "The Lame Shall Enter First." He sees lameness as "a metaphor of human limitation and suffering," with which "al1 men are afflicted" (117-1 8). Asals reaffims his idea in another article entitied "The Doubfe:" In a world of incomplete selves, we are ihus led back to the grotesque not as a didactic metaphor of evil or godlessness or false belief but as an accurate description of the human condition, even at its best. That conclusion is implicit everywhere in O'Connor's work. (cited from Bloom's Flannery O'Connor 108) In a letter to "A" written June 14, 1958, O'Connor mentions a man who committed suicide: "His tragedy was, I suppose, that he didn't know what to do with his suffering" (HJ 287). O'Connor, herself, leamed what to do with her suffering. In her we see a great strength made perfect in the weakness of her illness. And in her stories, characters are at various stages of coming to tems with their imperfections and shortcomings. The world is strange and mysterious, O'Connor implies, sometimes baffling, ugly, even disgusting. In any case, it's surely a fallen one. However, hope of change in Christ is always implied in each story. As He suffered with His body, so O'Connor's people rnust suffer in order to realize Christ in them. O'Connor's own struggles made her keenly aware of the pleasures and limitations of being a physical creature; this gives her stories their power.

A good example of the validity of Spaltro's critical approach to Flannery O'Connor and her fiction can be clearly seen in O'Connor's "Introduction" to A Memoir of Marv Ann (Collected Works 822-31). O'Connor here most nearly reveals her personal position regarding illness, suffering and disfigurement, as discussed in Spaltro's critique. The "Mary Ann" piece is O'Connor's introduction to a true story written by nuns who ran a home for cancer patients. The Sisters were moved by a three-year-old girl who was afflicted by a disfiguring cancer that eventually resulted in her death. In the "lntroduction," Flannery writes of a little girl who accepts her imperfect body and moves closer to God. She points out that Mary Ann possessed the ability not merely to endure her fate, but to build upon it. The Sisters asked O'Connor to write the girl's story; however, she felt the best ones to relate her Iife were the nuns themselves. O'Connor, therefore, opted to serve as editor and preface-writer. The introduction she fashioned reflects many of her own views and experiences with suffering, evil, the grotesque, and the mysteries of God--al1 important aspects of her stories as well. The introduction is short but telling; it quite clearly becomes representative of the deeper aspects of O'Connor's fiction. She herself, in her letters, declares this piece necessary "in order to make legitimate criticism of her work" (m442). O'Connor believed, in keeping with the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, that suffering, if accepted, will move one closer to God. O'Connor found in Mary Ann al1 the characteristics of one who accepted her imperfections gladly: She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian's life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which the world's goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls "passive diminishment." Mary Ann's diminishment was extreme, but she was equipped by natural intelligence and by a suitable education, not simply to endure it, but to build upon it. She was an extraordinarily rich little girl. ("Introduction" in CW 828) O'Connor writes: "Hers was an education for death, but not one carried on obtrusively" (829). The little girl never bemoaned her condition. and because of her right attitude, and accepting personality, Patients, visitors, Sisters, al1 were influenced in some way by this afflicted child. Yet one never thought of her as afflicted . . . . and after one meeting one never was conscious of her physical defect but recognized only the beautiful brave spirit and felt the joy of such contact. (822) Never once does O'Connor wish that Mary Ann had been spared such physical horrors; instead she concludes that none of the children that visited the sickly child were as fortunate as she (829). Perhaps the best indication that O'Connor was aware of the positive qualities in the grotesque is in her statement that "a new perspective on the grotesque" had occurred to her as she leamed about the child. "When we look into the face of good," she writes, "we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann's, full of promise" (830). O'Connor interweaves related anecdotes into Mary Ann's story. Upon looking at the sickly girl's picture, she is rerninded of Hawthorne's "The Birthmark." She quotes the incident in which Alyrner first mentions his wife's defect to her. Then O'Connor introduces Hawthorne's own encounter with a sick child and how his resewations about touching it melt with the little one's love: It was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eye which the Govemor said was the scurvy. I never saw . . . a child that 1 should feel less inclined to fondle. But this little sickly, hurnor-eaten fnght prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands, smiled in rny face and standing directly before me, insisted on rny taking it up! . . . 1 should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances. (Hawthorne as quoted in the "Introduction" 825) O'Connor tells how Hawthorne's daughter, Rose, was moved by her father's kindness, and by the state of poor cancerous people, to open an old tenernent as a rnakeshift hospital. The volunteer nurses eventually became a congregation of nuns, and O'Connor praises the charity work of the selfiess nuns in the present. When one of the Sisters asks her why she writes so much about the grotesque, she responds: This [question] opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, Our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face is too grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann's, full of promise. . . . (830) She ties together her stories of Hawthome's daughter, the child from the workhouse, and Mary Ann, "Who stands not only for herself but for al1 the other examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie which the sisters of Rose Hawthorne's order spent their lives caring for" (831). Rose, Hawthome's daughter, symbolized the search for solutions to the problem as a tree and Mary Ann the tree's flower; O'Connor likens Hawthorne's fear of the sick child and his eventual embrace of it to this tree: Their work [Sisters] is the tree sprung from Hawthorne's small act of Christlikeness and Mary Ann is its flower. By reason of the fear, the search, and the charity that marked his life and influenced his daughter's, Mary Ann inherited, a century later, the wealth of Catholic wisdom that taught her what to

make of her death; Hawthorne gave what he did not have himself. (831) The introduction closes with a note on the "Communion of Saints," in which charity suwives and entwines the living with the dead. Mary Ann's story, she concludes, "iiluminate[s] the lines that join the most diverse lives and hold us fast in Christ" (831). The introduction is a short but telling work on O'Connor's views about suffering, death and the grotesque. Her earliest mention of Mary Ann is found in a letter to "A written in 1960, in which she admits that her interest "in it is simply the mystery, the agony that is given in strange ways to childrenn (M394). Spaltro's theory finds clear support in the "Introduction to Mary Ann". Because of her own illness, O'Connor understood what it meant to suffer, and to suffer without bittemess. The qualities that she admired in Mary Ann's life were qualities she too perfected in her own disease- ridden body. In 1960, reviewer Richard Gilman talks about an interview with Flannery in which he was apprehensive about meeting the afflicted writer. However, the lupus appeared to affect her little: Before I met her I had found out something about her illness . . . . I had known she was crippled and that the disease had distorted her face, but the only picture of her 1 had seen had been on the back of Wise Blood and been taken before the illness broke out. Knowing what I did, I had held off looking at her from the moment of my arrival. Uncertain and afraid of what 1 might feel, self-conscious and ashamed of it, I had found myself glancing past her face, averting my eyes when she moved laboriously about, not wanting yet to see her. But then, as we talked, something broke and I was looking at her, at her face twisted to one side, and her stiff and somewhat puffy hands and amis, and at her thinning and lusterless hair. From then on, although I would be shaken by an occasional spasm of pity I hated feeling, her appearance was absorbed for me into her presence and--1 don't use the word lightly, transfigured by it. Tough-rninded, laconic, with a marvellous wit and an absolute absence of self-pity . . . . she could exhibit impatience, doubt, pleasure in compliments, great distress at unfavorable reviews. But she was almost entirely free from calculation, from concern with what might be expected of her, and from any desire to question her fate or move into outrage. (Conversations With Flanneiy O'Connor 53-54) Thus Mary Ann stands not only for herself but for al1 the other examples of human imperfection and g rotesquerie, including O'Connor's own lupus-affl icted body and many of the diseased personalities that form the basis of her fictional work. In an interview Harvey Breit, in 1955, asks O'Connor about her characters: "What about those fascinating characters? Do you know them all? Have you seen people like that?" O'Connor replies, Well no, not really. I've seen many people like that, I think, and I've seen myself. I think, putting ail that together you get these people." (Conversations With Flanney O'Connor 7) In her stories O'Connor depicts human imperfection, and reactions to various grotesque situations which her fictional characters encounter. The author's persona1 reaction both to the symptoms of lupus and to the life changes it imposed have influenced her ideas about disease and suffering in her stories. She makes her position clear: avoiding suffering means avoiding depth. In her stories the reader sees what happens to characters who do not accept their imperfection. The "Introduction" to the Mernoir is important because it reveals O'Connor's attitude toward physical deformity, and it connects her in a personal way to the lives of her characters. She was definitely no stranger to pain. And her attitude toward it can be found time and time again in the lives of her characters. Atter the interview, Breit surnmarized their conversation: "She believes that what the writer needs the most is self-knowledge. that in knowing yourself you know everything, or nearly everything, about people" ( Breit as quoted in Magee's Conversations With Flannew O'Connor 11). For O'Connor, imperfection of the body and loss of health are completely necessary to her fiction. Often the characters' deforrnities becorne the means by which they realize a revelation that othewise might not have been experienced. She feels the suffering of her characters from the inside. Their deformity has a distinct purpose; it signifies that the characters are fallen creatures who are nevertheless capable of being vessels of God's grace and mercy. Therefore, the deformed are not really a lower fom of the spiritual, nor are they a reflection of O'Connor's despair, but they show a way of revealing spiritual vision and enlightenment. Her characters' imperfections dramatize the real living, suffering, and imperfect individual that she herself knows so well. Feeley, in Flannerv O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock, notes this telling sentence marked in O'Connor's copy of Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Reliaion: "This setting apart sornetirnes has positive effects; it does not merely isolate, it elevates. Thus ugliness and deformities, while rnarking out those who possess them, at the same time make them sacred" (as quoted in Feeley 24). Just as O'Connor avoided pity conceming her own condition, so too little Mary Ann looked beyond her deformity. Characters in O'Connor's fiction who manage to look beyond their deformity, as we shall see in the hermaphrodite in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," can gain a closer relationship with God. Chapter 3

A Force of Redemption

in

"A Temple of the Holy Ghost"

Lo! The sacred Host we hail; Lo! O'er ancient foms departrng, Newer rites of grace prevail, Faith for a// defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail -7anturn Ergon (translated by Edwarû Caswell)

O'Connor expertly uses the grotesque in two ways: either to effect a redemption or to highlight a fall. Her stories present characters who react in different ways to their human limitations and imperfections: sorne feel degraded by their physical deformity and isolated from society. while others react more positively to their situation and experience a transformation. This idea, outlined in Marshall Gentry's The Reliaion of the Grotesque, provides a useful avenue in understanding the derangement of rninds and defomity of bodies prevalent throughout her fiction: All these foms of oppression [ignorance, physicai defomity, and disease ] make O'Connor's characters perceive thernselves as grotesque. . . and on the conscious level, the typical O'Connor character sees no prospect for anything but continued and increased degradation. . . ; the protagonist may realize that not al1 the forces of oppression can be banished; the protagonist can, however, take control of one fom of degradation, make it more important than other forms, and then transform that grotesquerie into a force of redemption. . . . in O'Connor the grotesque [only] becomes positive through action. (14-1 5) Many O'Connor characters are deformed, self-rig hteous, and ignorantly oblivious to their stale Iives. Her stories consist of a sinister parade of invalids and freaks plagued by spiritual numbness, fraught with physical infirmity, and soiled by pride. They live blindly in their self-destructive world of fooiish mediocrity and tepidness. In almost every instance, grace is offered in one fom or another as a solution to their problems.

Often it is not immediately embraced, and violence ensues. However, O'Connor has one story in which revelation is reached through less violent means and with a more positive outcorne, making it stand apart from her other tales. "A Temple of the Hoiy Ghost" is a powerful story about one of O'Connor's most hopeful protagonists-a nameless girl who is positively affected by one of O'Connor's physically disfigured charaeters-a hermaphrodite. O'Connor wrote "The Temple of the Holy Ghost" just two years after she was diagnosed with lupus. It appeared in the May issue of Harper's Bazaar in 1954. Strangely enough, the story never received much criticism; she writes in a letter to "An in 1962: Odd about "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." Nobody notices it. It is never anthologized, never commented upon. A few nuns have mentioned it with pleasure, but nobody else besides you. (m487) Even since her death little has been said about this story in comparison with the abundant attention paid to her others. It has little action; the protagonist does nothing other than dream, observe, and contemplate. But the revelations she gains Say much about O'Connor's possible motives and influences in her writing. This highly symbolic and ambiguous tale about attitudes to defonity is rich in religious imagery. The acceptance and transformation that occur in the child's life as a result of thinking about the hermaphrodite provide an ideal that is never attained in her other stories. The tale is from the point of view of a girl O'Connor introduces simply as The child," whose family is visited by her two fourteen-year-old cousins from a convent. The cousins' account of a freak at the county fair spurs the child's interest, and ultimately leads her to reflect on the imperfections of the body and how, despite them, it can be a temple of God. The story's focus on physical imperfections of the body is evident at once-through the ugly adolescent narrator's "fat cheeks" and braces that "glared like th" (1 98). However, the child is quick to elaborate on everyone's else's faults. She is initially revolted by al1 bodies: the story opens with a comment about her two cousins in "loud blouses," who were "shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway" (197). There is a suggestion that she actually thinks the cousins are attractive, and that she is jealous. Nevertheless, she expresses her relief that they are distantly related to her--which decreases the chances of "inheriting their stupidity. . . . They were practicaliy moronsn (197). She observes Mr. Cheatam, their boarder's boyfriend with his protruding stomach, pigeon-toes, and the "little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face [which] was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like thern with ruts and gullies" (198). She jokes about possible suitors for her cousins with her description of the eighteen-year-old, 250-pound cab driver named Alonzo Myers: "When he drove," she noted, "al1 the windows of the car had to be opened" (198). But, by the end of the story, the child has realized that the body is God's temple, despite physical imperfections. The child's curiosity about sexuality attracts her to the antics of her cousins, and iç another way O'Connor leads the child to the transformation. The two fourteen-year- old cousins are concemed with how they look. Their obsessions with their bodies is seen with the changing of the school unifortns into tighter, flashier clothing so they can look sexy. Right from the first sentence, they ridicule the idea of their bodies' being temples of the Holy Ghost, by calling one another "Temple One " and "Temple Two." They mock Sister Perpetua's instructions: "If a young man behaves in an ungentlemanly rnanner with them in the back of an automobilen. . . . 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. (1 99) The child, because of her curiousity about sexuality, constantly watches her cousins. They are too involved in trying to look appealing to contemplate anything spiritual. They have perfect and young bodies; disease and deformity are not a concern. However, the child thinks about the body's being a temple and likes the idea. The child watches the girls attentively at the rendezvous with the fundamentalist boys, who sing a few choruses to the girls, as a kind of courtship ritual, and the cousins respond by singing the "Tantum Ergo." This superficial blasphemy reveals what to O'Connor is a real, fundamental blasphemous attitude. Ironically, the very words Sister Perpetua instructs the girls to say to the boys who try to get them in the back seats of cars is the Song they sing in jest to woo their suitors. Their lack of reverence for Christ's broken body reveals a lack of any real sense of the value of their own bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost. The child's disapproval shows that she is aware that what the girls are doing is wrong. Her curiosity about sexuality is revealed most importantly in her interest in the hermaphrodite. As the cousins laugh about the hermaphrodite's dual sexuality, the child notes its acceptance of deformity and its witness to God's goodness despite its situation. In her mind, the hermaphrodite becomes a preacher. All her curiosity about sexuality, then, has led the child to think about her body as being a Temple, as Jesus' body is being broken for people's sin, and about even deformed bodies' being eligible to house God's Holy Spirit. The child's reaction to the hermaphrodite is one of awe instead of repulsion. She inquires of her cousins: "Did you see the fat man and those midgets?" "AI1 kinds of freaks," Joanne said. And then she said to Susan, "1 enjoyed it al1 but the you-know-what." (205) This spurs the child's interest. They reluctantly tell her the story of the freak in the tent parading from one side of the stage to the other saying, "I'm going to show you this 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 don't dispute hit." (206) The child becomes excited, and feels "every muscle strained as if she were hean'ng the answer to a riddle that was more puuling than the n'ddle itself" (206). She goes to sleep dreaming about the freak show as a religious seivice; she transfomis the carnival tent into a sanctuary with the hermaphrodite as preacher. She dreams of it exhorting: "God done this to me and I praise Him." "Amen. Amen." "He could strike you thisaway." "Amen. Amen." "But he has not." "Amen." "Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God's temple, don't you know? Don't you know? God's spirit has a dwelling in you, don? you know?" (207) Her vision provides her with the opportunity to transform negative thoughts about the body into more positive ones. The hermaphrodite is central to the story's power and mystery. O'Connor's hermaphrodite is atypical in the fact that it accepts the grace that causes so many of her other characters to struggle. While retuming from Mayvilie, the child leams that the freak has been martyred a second time: the police and local preachers have closed the fair and exiled the hermaphrodite from society. They would rather refuse the freak a place among them than accept it. For the girl, this creature has effected a redemption of sorts, a realization and acceptance of hurnan flaws, disabilities and weaknesses. However, the townspeople's rejection of the hermaphrodite indicates embarrassrnent and a denial of the imperfection of humans. The neighborhood that rejects the freak is like the child before her revelation: critical of the faults of others, and unaccepting of imperfection and the laws of nature. Physical deformity is exploited in a sideshow; the hermaphrodite suffers in an unaccepting society, and is alienated and banned from a town which is unwilling to admit that disease and imperfections are a part of their world. The ugliness of the hermaphrodite offends the community, but that very ugliness becomes a source of grace, in that this person accepts its adverse physical condition and draws the girl closer to an acceptance of the physically undesirable. The child sees something new in the imperfections of people that she did not realize before. O'Connor, in a note to "A," writes that this story is about purity (m11 7). O'Connor skillfully uses the shunned hermaphrodite and tums it into a spiritually pure and inspiring prophet. In a letter she explains herself: As near as I get to Say what is purity is in this story, is saying that it is an acceptance of what God wills for us, an acceptance of Our individual circumstances. (M124) The hermaphrodite's acceptance of the inevitability of imperfection greatly influences the young girl. O'Connor defines passive dimit irkment in a letter to Janet McKane just before her death in 1963: The "passive diminishment" is probably a bad translation of something more understandable. What he milhard1 means is that . . . .the patient is passive in relation to the disease-he's done al1 he can to get rid of it and can't so he's passive and accepts it. (m5 12) In a letter to Beverley Brunson, she describes her character in this way: The hermaphrodite here is no invention of mine, it having appeared at a fair here last surnrner where our dairyman's daughter attended its performance. She came back and told me about it and my account in the story is substantialiy hers. The freak told them that God had made it this way and that therefore it was making the best of it. Any freak so inspired could Say the same and I could have used any freak but there is certainly a more poignant element of suffering in this than in anything else one could find at a fair. The point is of course in the resignation to suffering, which is one of the fruits of the Holy Ghost; not to any element of sex or sexlessness. (CW 9.25) The exhibition of the hermaphrodite inspires the refinement, surety, and insight needed to effect a change in the girl. In a speech deiivered to Georgetown University in 1963 entitled "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," O'Connor rnakes her point about the significance of the Holy Spirit clear: There is only one Holy Spirit, and He is no respecter of perçons. These people in the invisible church make discoveries that have meaning for us who are better protected frorn the vicissitudes of our own natures and who are often too dead to the world to make any discoveries at all. These people in the invisible church may be grotesque, but their grotesqueness has a significance and a value that the Catholic should be in a better position than others to access. (CW 860) The hermaphrodite reveals a two-fold mystery to the child: the mystery of God's plan for people--"This is the way He wanted me to ben (CW 207)' and the greater mystery of the deformed and irnperfect believer's accepting God's grace through faith. She realizes that to be a person in the Christian sense of a "temple" consists of knowing and accepting one's natural condition, as the freak does, and of being open to the ennobling power of the supernatural. When she attends church with her mother, her mind wanders to sarcastic thoughts about the two sisters, which she quickly stifles. 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 was in the presence of God.

Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. (208) The importance of the Eucharist for O'Connor is at once apparent in a letter to "A," about a discussion of the Eucharist" with a friend of the Lowells: Well toward moming the conversation :umed on the Eucharist, which 1. being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost. He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky

voice, "Well, if it is a symbol, to hell with it." That was ali the defence 1 was capable of but I realize now that this is al1 I will ever be able to Say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; al! the rest of life is expendable. 125) When the priest raises the Host, she thinks of the freak in the tent, and his words corne back to her. At the end she even notes Alonzo's body. She is not repelled by it as before, though she sees the "three folds of fat in the back of his neck and noted that his ears were pointed like a pigs" (248). Whereas in the beginning of the story, she thought of herself as an ugly child incapable of virtue, she now identifies herself as a "temple of the Holy Ghost," and cornes to some feeling of the concept. O'Connor's syrnbolic ending is a vision of the red elevated Sun making a blazing path across the tree line like an elevated Host. This is representative of the last line of the 'Tantum ErgoW--"salvation,honor, blessing, might and eternal majesty." The Sun in this story metaphorically makes al1 things visible; it represents her revelation and symbolizes God's watchfulness, purification and regeneration. Alice Walker writes of O'Connor: If [O'Connor's fiction] can be said to be 'about' anything, then it is about prophets and prophesy, about revelation, and about the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don? have a chance of spiritual growth without it. (Critical Essavs 77) Only after the child sings the hymn does she herself begin to grasp the meaning of the Eucharist and Christ's grace for her imperfect life. Hearing the hymn which the cousins sang to the Wilkens boys, the child reflects on Christ's broken body and its relevance to hers: Lo! The sacred Host we hail; Lo! O'er ancient fons departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for ail defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail.

To the Everlasting Father, And the Son who reigns on high With the Holy Ghost proceeding Forth from each eternally, Be salvation, honor, blessing, Might and endless majesty. ('Tantum Ergo," Stanzas 5 and 6, translated by Edward Caswall) After the hymn, her "ugly thoughts" stop, and the child realizes that she, too, is in the presence of God and that God's presence is in her despite her shortcomings: "Her mind began to get quiet and then empty" (208).

The "Tantum Ergo" is central to the story. This hymn addressed to the Lord of the Eucharist has been a part of Roman Catholic liturgy since the thirteenth century. "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is centered around the communion, in which the single image of the bread and wine changing into the broken body and blood of Christ changes the child, and allows her to conclude that her own defective person is a temple--just as Christ's broken body becomes holy, and just as the hermaphrodite's broken body becomes holy. O'Connor uses the child's curiosity about sexuality to draw her into revelations about the body's becoming a temple. "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is a story central to O'Connor's writing, just as the Eucharist to her is the centre of existence, and central in the discussion of the role illness played in her philosophy that led her to write. The basis of Roman Catholicism is found within the seven sacraments, as Jaroslav Pelikan notes in his Riddle of 46

Roman Catholicism (110). They carry the "life giving grace of God" to believers; it is believed that God has promised to confer grace through them. O'Connor has based this tale on the most central of the sacraments, the Eucharist. At Mass the bread and wine are changed to the body and blood of Christ. To "A" she writes, "If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Euchanst in ir (125). The communion plays a critical role in the child's transformation. To believe that eating the bread is a sacred act, that the bread actually becomes God and that one can incorporate it into one's own body through communion, makes the reader conscious of the importance of the body as a temple of God. It is impossible to feel shame about the body if one believes that Christ became a man himself-a fleshly being for human redemption. As the priest raises the monstrance in the story, the child is reminded of the hermaphrodite's words: "1 don't dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be." The child, thinking about Christ's broken body and the hermaphrodite's deforrned one, cornes to accept bodily imperfection, and, in tum, realizes that grace abides most fully in it. It is not the Eucharist or the 'Tantum Ergoln or even the hermaphrodite which solely causes the child's transformation, but all of these things combined with the acceptance of grace offered.

Grace plays a major motivating force in the child's transformation, and is an important concept for understanding her other stories. As noted earlier, O'Connor believes that "the action that indicates that grace has been offered" (MM 118), makes her stories "work." More often than not it is at the very last moment, at the climax of violence or at the point of death that grace manifests itself. In many O'Connor stories, the impact of grace is sudden, and the protagonists are caught off guard. In "A Temple," however, the child, with iittle resistance, accepts the grace offered. The Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians that their salvation is through God's grace; this could easily be a sermon of the hermaphrodite: . . . . conceming this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart frorn me And he said to me, 'rny grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness." Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infimities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12: 8-1 0)

Dr. Loraine Boettner notes in Roman Catholicism that in Ephesians 1:7-10, God's purpose in redeeming sinners was to show His goodness through undeserved love to Wis sinful creatures. Al1 men are represented as sunk in a state of sin and rnisery, from which they are utteriy unable to deliver themselves. When they deserved only God's wrath and curse, He detemined that He wouid graciously provide redemption for a vast number. To that end Christ, the second person of the trinity, assumed out- nature and guilt, and obeyed and suffered in Our stead; and the Holy Spirit was sent to apply that redemption to the individual souls. (258) Each of O'Connor's plots is a recounting of her character's struggles with God's redemption. In Mvstery and Manners, O'Connor defines the subject of her fiction as "the action of grace in a territory held largely by the devil" (118). Questions posed by her correspondent "A" result in interesting discussions of her work in religious ternis. In one letter she writes of the need for growth and change within the characters: "If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him" (m199); she reiterates this thought later: It seems to me that al1 good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing. . . . The action of grace changes a character. Grace can't be experienced in itself. An example: when you go to communion, you receive grace but you experience nothing; or if you do experience something, what you experience is not the grace but an emotion caused by it. Therefore in a story, al1 you can do with grace is to show that it is changing a character. (m275) O'Connor believes that grace causes characters to accept their imperfections and make positive attitude changes. "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is O'Connor's most obvious tale of grace working to change a character, for it changes the young girl from a critical, close-minded person to a more compassionate and accepting one. Her prayer in the church indicates transformation: in a single symbolic act the flaming bal1 of sun reinforces the notion that the girl has recognized her body as a temple of the Holy Ghost, and has moved into a deeper level of maturity. O'Connor aptly writes of the child, "You accept grace the quickest when you have the least" (m241). Very few O'Connor characters experience a change because of grace; rnany are unable to look beyond their self-centred problerns. O'Connor succeeds in depicting grace in these stories by highlighting its absence, and the resulting effects. Many despair and rage; few attain degrees of humility, but no character accepts grace and human imperfection better than the nameless protagonist in The Temple." Perhaps this is one reason why the story has not received the attention given to the other stories. The author succeeds in describing aspects of grace by recounting its rejection in her negative, self-absorbed, and narrow-minded protagonists; she writes: Fiction is the concrete expression of mystery--mystery that is lived. Catholics believe that al1 creation is good and that evil is wrong use of good and that without grace we use it wrong most of the tirne. It is almost impossible to write about supematural grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural grace we have to take it the way it cornes--through nature. In any case it operates surrounded by evil. . . .Or perhaps you find a misunderstanding of what the operation of grace can look like in fiction. The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive . . . . The word that occurs again and again in his dernands of the novel is the word 'positive.' He seems to assume that what the writer writes about will follow a broad general attitude he has about the goodness of creation and our redemption and resurrection in Christ. There may be wnters whose genuine vocation it is to do this, but it is not a vocation that can be demanded of every Catholic writer. . . . Most of the people who want this positive literature are not able to recognize it when they

get it. ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" 862) O'Connor's use of disease and deformity is essential to her theme of grace; she defends her negative portrayai of grace, saying, "1 morally and strongly defend the right of the artist to select a negative aspect of the world to portray and as the world gets more materialistic there will be more such to select from. Of course you are only able to see what is black by having the light to see it by" (m241). If the character accepts the grace offered, a positive change occurs. On the other hand, characters who reject the grace offered remain trapped in their diseased physical, mental, and spiritual states, unwilling to change. Another quality making the child's transformation possible is her own self- criticism. Characters in the other stories lack the ability to see their faults. O'Connor prepares the child for the acceptance of deformity in a dream about the fair: She had gone last year on the aftemoon for school children and had seen the rnonkeys and the fat man and had ndden on the Fems wheel. Certain tents were closed then because they contained things that would be known only to grown people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the closed tents, and the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces of martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier. (CW 203) She then imagines possible occupations for her future--medicine, or engineering, but concludes that these would not do. She decides to be a saint, because that vocation includes ail knowledge, but then begins to note her own imperfections: Yet she knew she would never be a saint. She did not steal or murder but she was a bom liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately ugly to almost everyone. She made fun of the Baptist preacher who came to the school at commencement to give the devotional. She would pull down her mouth and hit her forehead as if she were in agony and groan, "Fawther, we thank Thee," exactly the way he did and she had been told many times not to do it. She could never be a saint but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick. (203) Admitting her own faults prepares the girl as well as the reader for her reaction to the carnival freak. O'Connor cleverly brings her to a realization of her own physical limitations--which leads to a reverence for the camival spectacle's attitude. The child's self-criticism is necessary to the story; it allows room for change and transformation. O'Connor chooses an adolescent protagonist because at no time is one's bewilderment over the body so intense as it is in adolescence. "A Templen deals with the identity crisis that often occurs at this critical time when an awareness of the body's self leads to the questions of Who and What am I?" "A Temple* stands notably apart from the situations of her other stories, in which close-minded, egocentric, blinded adults refuse g race offered, and are themselves spiritually and physically deformed- with no recognition of the regeneration that is offered time and time again. Most of O'Connor's other characters are stubborn and fixated in their ways and unaccepting of change. The child, on the other hand, harbors no preconceived notions about the way society should operate. There is much truth in her thinking that "she could be a martyr if they killed her quickn IHB 204). With age cornes an embarrassrnent for the imperfect and the different. Few characters in O'Connor's later stories reach the level of realization that the child does. Their transfomations are less pronounced, and in some cases positive change does not occur at all. In a letter to "A," O'Connor notes the seriousness of children's thoughts as she remembers her own childhood: When I was twelve i made up my mind absolutely that 1 would not get any older. 1 don? remember how 1 meant to stop it. There was something about 'teen' attached to anything that was repulsive to me. 1 certainly didn't approve of what I saw of people that age. 1 was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War Veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it. (m137) As O'Connor argues in a letter to Brunson (13 Sept. 1984), that the child's innocence is necessary to the story's development: As for the child in the story, I find your interpretation of her only rather silly- there is no concem or question here of any kind of inversion. The child is still innocent and here you need an innocent observer. (CW 925) O'Connor has created a unique transformation in the protagonist in this story. Her experience with the Eucharist and acceptance of the actual body and blood of Christ, along with the realization of grace and the positive attitude to the deformed hermaphrodite, al1 contribute to the transformation at the story's end. The child's fascination with the hermaphrodite, curiosity about sexuality, and interest in the partaking of communion, lead to the grace she experiences in accepting imperfection. This acceptance of grace leads her to revelation that few of the other O'Connor characters experience. For many, death seems to be the only form of revelation. Revelation becomes the centre of her stories, and the goal which protagonists do not always reach, or only realize too late. Michael Gresset, in the "Audacity of Flannery O'Connor," notes that revelation is the method O'Connor uses to convey a message: "An artist, she shows the path to the ineffable instead of trying to Say if' (Critical Essavs 106). The idea of "passive diminishment," to which O'Connor devoted so much of her letters, is embodied in the prophet-freak. Just as the hermaphrodite uses its deformity to effect a change, O'Connor uses her own experiences of suffering and deformity indirectly in her stories to effect a change. Her own disability becomes an avenue for her characters, her readers, and herself to corne to an attitude of acceptance: not just to cope, but to triumph. In "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," she writes, "the eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and the imagination reproduces what by some related gift it is able to make live" (CW 854). O'Connor's own struggles made her aware of the implications of having a positive attitude about these situations. As she accepted her disability and continued to write, as Mary Ann affected others with her positive attitude, so too does the child. In each case, these actual and fictional characters overcome limitations, accept the grace offered, and gain deep spirituality; the words of the %ntum Ergo" ring throughout their lives as they accept defects and are transformed. The story is an ideal introduction to her other tales--for other deformed and ailing characters are not as accepting of their problems. and create more and more chaos. Characters in most of O'Connor's other stories lack the quality of self-criticism; the plot is built around the harsh collapse of their self-righteous, worldly views of themselves. There is no question that the child is sullen and sarcastic, but an important difference between her and the others is that she possesses the art of self-criticism. The remainder of this study will explore the various positions that O'Connor's characters adopt concerning defonity. Her stories becorne variations on the ways different personalities deal with physical imperfection. and how their attitudes affect revelations of themselves. The Apostle Paul's advice to the peop!e at Corinth rings throughout her stories: Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. (1Corinthians 6:lg) Chapter 4

Who Will Remain Whole?

[The Catholic Novel] cannot see man as determined; it cannot see him as totally depraved. It will see him as incomplete. In himseK as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace. And it will see this grace as working through nature, but as entliety transcending it, so that a door is always open to possibility and the unexpected in the human soul. Its center of meaning will be ChnSt; its center of destruction will be the devil. No mafter how this view of life may be fleshed out, these assumptions form its skeleton.

-Flannery O 'Connor IMvstery and Manners 196)

The years from 1953 to 1955, in which O'Connor wrote the stories that would eventually comprise A Good Man is Hard to Find, were productive. She wrote ten stories during this time--many of which were quickly published in well- respected magazines, and some were even winning national awards. She was also receiving critical attention, something that did not always please her; O'Connor often felt misunderstood. When Shirley Abbott, a college woman, wrote a feature story in Mademoiselle (m149) stating that O'Connor resembled the existential writers Gide and Sartre, O'Connor replied: The one question: "Her message is immoralistic, in the Gidean sense." I don7 know what the Gidean sense is. Gide is one of the few writers who really nauseates me so I am naturally not an authority on him. But my "messagen (if you want to cal1 it that) is a highly moral one. Now whether it's "moralistic" or not I don't know. In any case, I believe that the writer's moral sense must coincide with his dramatic sense and this means that moral judgment has to be implicit in the act of vision. Let me make no bones about it: 1 write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a littie immoralistic message. . . . It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. (i-&5 147) In a lecture entitled The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," O'Connor scomed modem writers for making alienation in fiction an ideal: Alienation was once a diagnosis but in much of the fiction of our time it has become an ideal. The modem hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any kind of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull. (MM 200) The fact that her characters were frequently compared to those of Gide and Sartre-- hopelessly alienated and rootless--greatly disturbed her. O'Connor defended herself again and again against such daims, saying that the one distinct difference between her writings and those of the existentialists is in the revelations of the characters she creates. She wiites to "A": She ["BI'] liked most of it but did not like "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." She wrote to me that the It in there was a lie. She is full up to her ears of the Existentialists, Gide and Madame de Beauvoir and Sartre and Life and Loneliness and Alienation. l sympathize but sometimes it gets very maudlin.... (m202) Her protagonists are offered alternatives to alienation and meaninglessness th rough the mercy and grace of Christ. Most of her characters reluctantly see beyond the borders of their skull (MM 200) to a greater reality. O'Connor's characters are in search of wholeness. Teilhard de Chardin's observation in the Vision of the Past, We are compelled by al1 that is most sacred in man: the need to know and orient himself" (24), is one of the primary concerns that drives O'Connor's characters to revelations beyond thernselves. A Good Man is Hard to Find, then, is a collection of tales about characters who discover meaning and vision after their self-created existences are revealed to them as inadequate. In the course of these stories, al1 characters are in need of redemption, but few actually attain it. Flannery O'Connor describes A Good Man is Hard To Find as "a collection about original sin," but her stories are also about the quest for redemption and mercy. "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" provides one of the positive examples of transformation and resignation to suffering. This story and "The Artificial Nigger" display the most obvious and successful examples of grace and mercy, and O'Connor expertly places them in the center of the collection. The two tales display people's capability of attaining redemption despite imperfections-an idea central to her purpose in writing. Much of O'Connor's doctrinal rneaning is expressed in "The Artificial Nigger." Mr. Head is one of the few O'Connor characters who accepts the grace offered them. This narrative is about a grandfather and grandson's trip to the big city to bring the youngster face to face with the real worid. Mr. Head intends to show Nelson everything in the city so that he will be content to stay in the country. However, the two get lost in the crowd. While Nelson is resting, Mr. Head decides to hide. Nelson awakens and discovers that his grandfather is missing. He runs around in a blind panic; when he actually finds his grandfather, he denies knowing Nelson. After this betrayal, they wander until they come to a lawn omament black man, and their mutual wonder dissolves their differences and draws them together. O'Connor, in this story, more than in any other, explains the acceptance and realization of grace. Mr. Head realizes his self-righteousness and his lack of compassion, and is offered mercy: 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 had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of tirne, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to daim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise. (CW 231 ) Before denying Nelson, Mr.Head felt himself too good to need mercy. His realization of the necessity of grace shows the inadequacies of relying on himself and his own merit, instead of God's goodness. O'Connor admits, in a letter to Ben Griffith in 1955, that she experimented with a more direct approach to conveying her ideas at the end of this story: Well the end of The Artificial Nigger" was a very definite attempt to do that and in those last two paragraphs 1 have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise. I am not sure it is successful, but I mean to keep trying with other things. (m78) The other stories in the collection, unlike "A Temple of the Holy Ghosr and "The Artificial Nigger," do not picture the achieving of redemption. They deal with characters who search for truth or have it unwillingly thrust upon them. The Misfit in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" does acknowledge that he is lacking sornething significant, but decides to deny the means to compensate for his spiritual dryness; this is clearly seen in his speech to the grandmother about whether Jesus ever raised the dead: "1 wasn't there so I can't Say He didn't," The Misfît said. "1 wisht I had been right there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It aint right I wasn't there because if l had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if 1 had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." (CW 152) The Misfit is left at the end scolding his accomplice for enjoying killing, but unable to accept the fact that he must rely on someone other than himself to be free from spiritual bondage. He does realize that he has a spiritual void; however, he stubbomly refuses help. When the Grandrnother offers prayer as a solution, he responds: "1 don't want no hep. . . I'm doing al1 right by myself" (CW 150). The same predicament is true of Mr. Shiftlet in 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own." He marries a mentally disabled girl in order to get an automobile, and then promptly deserts her in a restaruant. The one-amied con-artist's physical deformity equals his spiritual one; ShiftletJsmissing amis parallel to his lack of spiritual wholeness. And the only life he intends to Save is his own materialistic one. Shiftlet's desire for possessions ciearly conflicts with the teachings of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew to take up his cross and follow Him: Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let hirn deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to Save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world. and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matthew 16:24-26) Shiftlet exchanges his sou1 for an automobile. He even draws the cornparison for Lucynell's rnother: "But the spirit, lady," he says, "is like an automobile: always on the move. . . (CW 179)." In the process, he also sacrifices an innocent disabled girl for his desire to own a car. Shiftlet shows no signs of remorse. He does not even acknowledge any error in his actions; materialism has deprived him of any spiritual values and of any sense of guilt. The Misfit and Shiftlet, then, have inflicted suffering instead of coping and coming to terms with their own inadequacies. However, Hulga in "Good Country People" comes a little closer to the truth that is never recognized by Shiftlet and denied so vehemently by the Misfit. "Good Country People" took the meticulous O'Connor only four days to write (m75); she was so pleased with the results that she omitted two stories from A Good Man is Hard to Find ("A Stroke of Good Fortune" and "Aftemoon in the Woods" ) so she could include it (CW 1248). She writes to Robert Giroux in February in 1955: I have just written a story called "Good Country People" that Allen and Caroline Gordon both Say is the best thing I have written and should be in this collection. I told them I thought it was too late but any how I am writing now to ask if it is. It is really a story that would set the whole collection on its feet. (YB 75) And in a later note to Ben Griffith she adds that "Good Country People" pleases me to no end (m78)." The tale is a clear example of the methods O'Connor employs to bring her protagonist near to a realization of truth about herself. It is a powerfully ironic tale of an educated thirty-Wo-year-old spinster who lives on a farm with her mother. Hulga, an avowed atheist and a firm believer in "nothing," decides to seduce a seerningly innocent Bible salesman named (he says) Manley Pointer. The following day they retire to a barn's hayloft. Pointer convinces Hulga to remove her artifical leg as proof of her love. He immediately takes it, and reveals in his briefcase, inside one of his two Bibles, a pack of pomographic cards, a bottle of whiskey and some condoms. Hulga is appalled and refuses his advances. Pointer goes from the barn with her glasses and the prosthesis in his case, leaving Hulga overcome by the possibility that she herself is the innocent "good country" person, and not the educated cynic she thought she was. Hulga is first introduced to the reader as a "large blonde girl who had an artificial leg (CW 263)." Her leg gains significance with each character's reaction to it, and its meaning is necessary to the climax when the leg is stolen. Mrs. Hopewell's opinion of her daughter's deformity is given first. The mother's responses to her daughter are automatic and conditioned. She pities Hulga for having lost her leg (which was shot off in a hunting accident) and for not having any "normal good times," which the mother defines as dancing and looking pretty: It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. (CW 266) Mrs. Hopewell further expresses her disapproval over Hulga's career in philosophy instead of nursing or another practical profession. And when she imagines her daughter lecturing "like a scarecrow," it is clear just how much she regrets the fact that Hulga's wooden leg makes her less like other people (CW 268). Even the hired help, Mrs. Freeman, is given plenty of opportunity in the story to express her interest in the wooden leg. O'Connor writes that Mrs. Freeman listened to the hunting accident story over and over: Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago. (CW 267) The protagonist has changed her name from Joy to Hulga because she delights in ugliness; it fits the image of her disability. Hulga is narcissistic; she purposely makes herself uglier. She clomps around, refuses to srnile, dresses hideously. Hulga has a secret pride in her difference. She uses her wooden leg to define herself, and refuses to remove it for Manley until he notes that it distinguishes her from others. This Hulga-identity alienates her from truth; she rejects God's grace and mystery for her own inadequate philosophy. O'Connor explains this to "A in a letter: She is full of contempt for the Bible salesman until she finds he is full of contempt for her. Nothing "cornes to flower" here except her realization in the

end that she ain't so smart. It is not said that she has never had any faith but it is implied that her fine education has got rid of it for her, that purity has been overridden by pride of intellect through her fine education. (m170) Hulga's artificial leg, her physical prosthesis, becomes an apt parallel of the education that has become the prosthesis for her soul. Only when both aids are exposed as insufficient in defining her true identity dues the truth become clear to Hulga. Asals in The Importance of Extremity" notes that O'Connor's characters frequently create their own illusions about thernselves only to have them shattered when truth is revealed to thern. This is especially true of Hulga. He writes: More frequently O'Connor's protagonists are driven out of their mockingly presented cocoons of illusion, purified by the very intensity of the action until they reach some recognition of the reality beyond the self. Now and again these wrenching eye openings burst with the suddennesç of an exploded balloon, as in "Good Country Peoplen where the loss of the leg signals the unanticipated stripping away of the girl's entire Hulga identity. (Asals 204) Hulga's own attitude about her deformity is necessary to the story. The leg is Joy-Hulga's source of identity; it has become an objective correlative to her soul. She cherishes the prosthesis because it makes her different. She identifies fiercely with her Iimb. This identification with the deformed leg seems less perverse once one recognizeç how persistently al1 the other characters define her in ternis of her missing leg. The prosthesis possesses the only identifiable value in her Sour life. Spaltro, in "When We Dead Awaken: Flannery O'Connor's Debt to Lupus," contends that disability threatens a hurnan's feelings of invincibility: Disability carries an incredibly powerful stigma precisely because it deeply threatens other people's fantasy that they are invulnerable to suffering and death. While only a minority reacts sadistically, most people unintentionally heighten the pain of disability by reacting narcissistically. Unable to deal with it rationally, they either deny its reality or exaggerate its effects. Both irrational distortions confirm not the reality of the disability, but the self-protective denial of our universal human vulnerability. (39) When Manley asks to see where the leg joins on, for the first time she shows any kind of emotion other than anger: The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the question is not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more

have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But 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 tumed away. "No," she said. (CW 281) When Hulga asks Manley Pointer why he wants to see her wooden leg, he says, "Because it's what makes you different you aint like nobody elsen (281). And Hulga gives in; she thinks: "This boy with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. . . .it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again miraculously, in his" (CW 281). lt is the wooden leg that really, in some sense 'contains' Hulga's integrity and makes her unique. The wooden leg is the prosthesis of her broken body; the Ph.D. is the prosthesis of her soul. The source of Hulga's aloof superiority has become the vehicle of her greatest vulnerability. The theft of the leg reveals the uselessness and danger of her "nothing" theory and indicates the full implications of nihilism-that nothing, including the leg and the degree she has derived her identity from, has value. Further, it gives her insight into her own lack of self-knowledge; the leg loss marks the beginning of Hulga's revelation. She begins to recognize the need for something more to define her life by than an empty education and a hollow leg-both of which have let her down. At the beginning of the çtory Mrs. Freeman has three expressions (forward, neutral, and reverse, [263])but Hulga has divested herself of al1 expression: "constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her facen (265). However, at the end of outrage had obliterated every expression from her facen (265). However, ai the end of the story Hulga's face is "chumingn (283). Joy-Hulga's acceptance of grace is not stated directly within the story, but she has been startled out of her pose of indifference.

"The Displaced Person," O'Connor's longest tale, and the fina.I story in the collection, is about a Polish immigrant worker who comes to work for Mrs. Mclntyre, a Georgian famer. She is so impressed by Mr. Guizac's efficiency that she forces her previous hired help, the Shortleys, to leave: Three weeks later Mrs. Mclntyre and Mrs. Shortley drove to the cane bottom to see Mr. Guizac start to operate the silage cutter, a new machine that Mrs. Mclntyre had just bought because she said, for the first time, she had somebody who could operate it. Mr. Guizac could drive a tractor, use the rotary hay-baler, the silage cutter, the combine, the letz mill, or any other machine she had on the place. He was an expert mechanic, a carpenter, and a mason. He was thrifty and energetic. (CW 292) His honesty, efficiency, and resourcefulness sharply contrast with the lazy, unskilled, and sneaky qualities of the Shortleys. Mrs. Mclntyre is highly impressed by the immigrant until she leams of Mr. Guizac's plan to convince one of the Negro helpers to marry his niece in order to get her out of a Displaced Perçons camp in Europe. Mr. Shortley resumes his position at the fam. Everyone on the fam watches as Mr. Guizac is killed by a tractor whose brake had not been set properly by Mr. Shortley. They have, in effect, conspired in his murder. Mrs. Mclntyre's witnessing of the death renders her immobile and helpless: A nurnbness developed in one of her legs and her hands and head began to jiggle and eventually she had to stay in bed al1 the time. . . . Her eyesight grew steadily worse and she lost her voice altogether. (CW 326) In the end, Mrs. Mclntyre loses her farrn and becomes an invalid, unable to cope with the knowledge that she has caused the death of an innocent man. She refuses to recognize her responsibility. That refusal is her refusal of grace. Before the accident, Mrs. Mclntyre has shunned religion. "As far as I'm concemed," she tells the Priest, "Christ was just another D.P. He just didn't fit in." After Mr. Guizac's death, however, she recognizes her part in a modem crucifixion of an innocent man, and begins to realize her responsibility to others. Mrs. Mclntyre's suffering connects her to the suffering humanity that she denies in the beginning of the story. The idea of atonement, for her, now becomes concrete. Earlier, she had viewed Purgatory as an abstract concept that had no bearing on everyday Iife--"Listen," she tells Father Flynn, "I'm not theological, I'm practical! I want to talk to you about something practical!"--but now she herself suffers in a kind of purgatory where she finally realizes her mistakes, but must suffer because of them (CW 234). Many O'Connor characters in this collection experience a kind of purgatorial suffering. Only a few characters are spiritually ready to accept revelation and are willing to change; the rest get glimpses of vision, after reluctantiy removing the focus from themselves. O'Connor drew this analogy herself when discussing the outcome of story: ["The Displaced Person"] did accomplish a kind of redemption in that he destroyed the place, which was evil, and set Mrs. Mclntyre on the road to a new kind of suffering, not Purgatory as St. Catherine would conceive it (realization), but Purgatory at least as a beginning of suffering. . . .nothing survived in the end but a peacock and Mrs. Mclntyre suffering. Isn't her position entirely helpless to herself, very like that of the Souls in Purgatory? (i-JEJ 11 8) "The Displaced Person" is an extremely important story; it is explicit about a theme which is expressed only implicitly in the previous stories: the idea of wholeness. Mrs. Shortley, remembering Holocaust photographs, has a vision: She stood there tottering slightly but still upright, her eyes shut tight and her fists clenched and her straw Sun hat low on her forehead. 'The children of the wicked nations will be butchered," she said in a loud voice. "Legs where amis should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of the hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who? (CW 301) This question is posed in every story of A Good Man is Hard to Find. None are spared in the stories; the educated are not exempt (Joy-Hulga), nor are the mentally disabled (Lucynell Crater), the children (Harry Ashfield), or the old (Mr. Head). All suffer; al1 are subject to mental suffering and physical infinity; al1 are, like Mrs. Mclntyre, alienated and displaced. Some, however. triurnph because of their acceptance, while others are caught, like the Misfit, in an etemal struggle against truth and acceptance. But O'Connor does not celebrate this alienation the way she believes the existentialists do. O'Connor's vision is one of unabashedly orthodox Christianity, but her "message," as she (unfashionably) is willing to cal1 it, can be taken by those who are not orthodox Christians. Everyone since Adam and Eve is iinwhole. Joy-Hulga's mistake is to think that a prosthetic Ph. D. and an artificial leg can give her the effect of wholeness. We need help, through grace, to make our broken bodies temples of God. An inability to see, and lack of expression, accompany rejection of the Jesus of the Incarnation- the subject of the "Tantum Ergo" that figures in 'The Temple of the Holy Ghost." Mr. Shiftlet believes he will be complete when he gets his car. The displaced person, Mr. Guizac, is such a terrible reminder to Mrs. Mclntyre and the Shortleys of the unwholeness of their entire culture that they conspire to kill him: an unmistakable parallel to the Crucifixion. To accept grace is to accept that the ugly and broken bodies are designed to be temples of the Holy Spirit. Chapter 5

Blind Men Cured

A visionay Iïght settled in her eyes. She saw a streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon if a vast huard of souls were rumbling to ward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the firsf tjme in their Iives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.

-Flannery O'Connor Revelation" 653)

By the time O'Connor completed the stories for her final collection, her health was rapidly deteriorating. Her detemination to finish revisions on her final stories marks the extraordinary stamina and persistence of an ailing author. Sally Fitzgerald notes in the "Chronology" of The Collected Works: She hid unfinished stories under her pillow in fear that the hospital staff would forbid her to work on them. She received the Sacrament of the Sick from the priest in July; and in that same month, she received "Judgment Day" back from Catherine Carver and continued the final revisions on it. Before her death on August Znd, she was making continual changes to "Parker's Back" until exhaustion prevented any more work to be done. ("Chronology" 1256) She desperately wanted her stories to be clear, and her purpose understood; for this reason, she pondered over countless revisions. Her comments about the development of "The Enduring Chill* reveal her struggle to perfect her message. In November 1957, she finished writing it, and in a letter to "A," expressed her satisfaction, and estimated three more re-writes before the story would be cornplete (m253),even though she noted: "Right now I am highly satisfied with al1 its possibilities and al1 that's already in it. This can be a delusion. Monday it may appear hopeless to me, but I doubt it." Her predictions came tnie, however, for a year later, in

December 1958, she threw the story away and commenced to write it anew: 1 have tom the story up and am doing it over or at least a good deal of it over. It bids fair to be very long. Parts of it are very funny and it contains a memorable Jesuit, but I haven't got it right yet. But I am anxious to send it to you and trust it will get there before Christmas. (m259) Even six months after it was printed, she still expressed her dissatisfaction with the story. She writes to Maryat Lee: "When I read that last paragraph in print, I knew instanter that it was too long. When 1 have another collection, I am going to do some operating on it before I put it in (m293)." Years later, O'Connor was still expressing her concem that aspects of the story were not "right." The constant revisions dernonstrate O'Connor's concem for perfecting her message while she was battling time demands inflicted by the increasingly powerful lupus. However, faced with failing health, O'Connor, in a note to Elizabeth McKee, admits that her illness is preventing her from finishing al1 the desired re-writes: 1 have been thinking about this collection of my stories and what can be done to get it out with me sick. I am definitely out of commission for the summer and maybe longer with this lupus. I have to stay mostly in bed and am not supposed to get up and type except very short business letters. . . .If I were well there is a lot of rewriting and polishing I could do, but in my present state of health I see no reason for me to spend my energies in old stories that are essentially al1 right as they are. (HB 574) Although the stories of A Good Man is Hard to Find were published rapidly between 1953 and 1955, in the first collection one can trace a gradua1 movement towards those climactic moments of revelation that would emerge fully in Evervthinq That Rises Must Converae. O'Connor realized that her time was Iimited; so she endeavored through the toughest moments of her illness to complete stories for the final collection; under these pressures of time and sickness her tales express a clarity of fully rendered visions that were only hinted at in earlier stories. Her later tales are more direct and explicit about characters: imperfect temples of God, they need to accept grace to corne to a revelation of God and their spiritual relationship with Him. They move toward a vision of grace and mercy. Moreover, she brings the readers to the very point of realizing grace; no longer are her stories prologues, in the sense that they imitate revelations without dramatizing them. Her focus is concentrated on the necessity of exposing the problems of humans' inherent alienation from God. In these final stories O'Connor succeeds better in making her point apparent than she does in earlier ones. Revelation often occurs with a character discovering the image of God mirrored in the depth of the self. Those who believe they know themselves discover they have been living with a stranger. The stories in Everythina That Rises Must Converae move forward--past the damned Misfits, the eternally ignorant Mr. Shiftlets, and the puuled Joy-Hulgas of A Good Man is Hard to Find, who are given only glimpses of grace before the story's end . Asbuiy Fox in "The Enduring Chill" moves home to spend what he thinks are his final days, waiting to die from an illness which he later discovers is not fatal. After denying any validity to religion, he gets more than he bargains for when he cornes face to face with the Holy Ghost. O'Connor uses a direct approach in documenting Asbury's encounter with the Holy Ghost. She drarnatizes its descent through a water stain image on a ceiling: [His eyes] looked shocked clean as if they had been prepared for some awful vision about to come down on him. . . . Below it the treeline was black against the crirnson sky. It formed a bnttle wall, standing as if it were the frail defence he had set up in his mind to protect him from what was coming. The boy fell back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. His limbs that had been racked for so rnany weeks by fever and chill were numb now. The old life in hirn was exhausted. He awaited the coming of new. It was then that he felt the beginning of a chill, a chill so peculiar, so light, that it was like a warm ripple across a deeper sea of cold. His breath came short. The fierce bird which through the years of his childhood and the days of his illness had been poised over his head, waiting mysteriously, appeared al1 at once to be in motion. Asbury blanched and the last film of illusion was tom as if by a whirlwind from his eyes. He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend. (CW 572) We are unsure if Asbury accepts the grace offered here, but one thing is certain-- Asbury will never be the same. O'Connor depicts the Holy Ghost's presence in this disillusioned life. In "Revelation," as well, O'Connor takes a more direct approach. Ruby Turpin, a self-righteous wife of a pig fanner, receives a vision, after being attacked by a mentally disturbed Wellesley student in a doctor's office. Ruby Turpin's insight represents the vision to which many O'Connor characters are unconsciously drawn, but few are given the permission to witness. Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to thern [the pigs] as if she were absorbing some abysmal life- giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souk were nimbling 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 shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned fomvard to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. ln a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. . . . . In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (CW 653-4) One cannot help but see O'Connor's parade of misfits: her Joy-Hulgas, her hermaphrodites, her grandmothers, and Asbury Foxes taking up the procession- as representations of the imperfect vessels of Christ. As the pain of living with her own disease increased, Flannery O'Connor did not end her career with a bitter story. "Parker's Back" is one of the most positive examples of redemption in al1 her writing. A simple fellow literally transfoms his body, by means of a tattoo of Christ, into an imperfect temple. This story is an incredible accomplishment for an ailing author whose own temple was failing under the most painful moments of her disease. Parker's character stands in contrast to O'Connor's parade of intellectuals (Joy- Hulga, Asbury Fox, Sheppard), and to wealthy landowners (Mrs. Greenleaf, Mrs. Mclntyre, Mrs. Turpin), who frequent her other tales. Unlike them, Parker is one of the most lowly and ignorant characters in any of the stories, "He was a boy whose mouth habitually hung open. He was heavy and earnest, as ordinary as a loaf of bread" (CW 658). His road to revelation is possible because of his simplicity; the hindrances of money and education that weigh heavily on other characters' spirituality are of Iittle concern to him. Parker nevertheless feels incomplete, and he is constantly searching for wholeness . At the age of fourteen, he sees a tattooed man at the fair and is attracted to his appearance of unity: Except for his loins which were girded with a panther hide, the man's skin was pattemed in what seemed from Parker's distance--he was near the back of the tent, standing on a bench--a single intricate design of color. The man, who was srnall and sturdy, moved about on the platfonn, flexing his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own. Parker was filled with emotion. . . . (CW 657) Thereafter throughout the course of his life, he searches for the wholeness that was represented to him on the tattooed man at the fair: Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been tumed so gently in a different direction that he did not know his direction had changed. (658) In an attempt to find meaning, Parker constructs a varied life for himself. He quits high school, attends and quits trade school. and works in a garage. He also joins the navy, but "received a dishonorable discharge after he remained away without an official leave. . . . His dissatisfaction from being chronic and latent, had suddenly become acute and raged in him" (CW 659). He decides to try his luck in the country and takes various odd jobs. He marries the fanatically religious Sarah Ruth in hopes of filling his emptiness, but this too only makes Parker "gloomier than ever" (663). When reflecting on his marriage, he thinks: "He could account for her [Sarah Ruth] one way or another; it was hirnself he could not understand" (665). And he attempts to 'Yind" himself by covering his exterior with tattoos. He wishes to achieve the same effect as the man at the fair. However, the satisfaction with each image is short-lived, and the same feelings of dissatisfaction quickly retum: He did not care so much what the subject was so long as it was colorful . . . . Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it would Wear off. . . . The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would corne over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up. The front of Parker was almost completely covered but there were no tattoos on his back. He had no desire for one anywhere he could not readily see it himself. As the space on the front of him for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew and became general. (659) With each tattoo Parker's intemal distress increases . The narcissistic attempt to transfigure his body and understand himseif through his own efforts does not work; he fails to achieve wholeness on his own. Parker's desire for completeness, he realizes, cannot be achieved by merely decorating his body. His dissatisfaction with the visual effect of his body, then, represents a deeper unhappiness with his whole life. It is a spiritual quest that drives Parker to seek wholeness. Flannery O'Connor reveals his incompleteness expertly through images of Parker's eyes. Before he receives the revelation of Christ, he believes that someone is following him; his eyes, she writes, have a "hollow preoccupied expression, like those of an icon" (CW 520). After he hits the tree with the tractor and watches his shoes burn, his eyes are "cavemous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it" (CW 520). A tractor accident marks the first tuming point in the story. He realizes that he has been mysteriously saved from a fier-death. Inspiration from the accident drives him to fiIl the one free space on his body with a transcendent tattoo: Parker did not allow himself to think on the way to the city. He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap fonvard into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it. It was for al1 intents accomplished. (666) His unquestioning acceptance paves the way for the greatest revelation and religious act by a character in any O'Connor story-the transformation of an ignorant man through a tattoo of Christ on his back. He goes to a tattoo parlour and decides to get a picture of God tattooed on his back--choosing the face of a "Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes, a representation of Christ's rnajesty and glory" (CW 522). It has been his body al1 along that has been trying to shock him into a new awareness of himself as God's temple. God has Iiterally become another layer of his skin. Earlier, Parker atternpts to receive fulfilment by applying secular tattoos, which results in a haphazard disarray. It is only when he gets the tattoo on his back that his spiritual blindness dissipates; the Apostle Paul writes: . . . we also who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. For we were not saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, then we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. (Romans 8:23-5) The tattooed Christ is on Parker's back, not readily available to his sight except by reflection in the mirror. Now his hope of wholeness is embodied on the Christ on his back, the "hopen he cannot see. This hope is symbolic of O'Connor's own hope, throughout her life. Christ in the earlier works is displayed by His absence, while "Parker's Back" uses the same grotesqueness to depict Christ's presence--1iterally. Parker's act transformç his body into the temple of the Holy Ghost; despite the inadequacies of the tattoos in the front, he has achieved the much sought after wholeness with the Christ tattoo on his back. Parker is aware of the change in himself, and he uns home to tell Sarah Ruth, in hopes that a religious tattoo will mend their relationship. He knocks on the door, and Sarah Ruth asks "Who's there?" And here again, as so often in O'Connor, the natural worid outside seems to interpose itself in the life within: a tree of light bursting over the skyline seems to Parker to illuminate at last his long ignored and abused sou! and to show him--at least momentarily--the beauty within that he could not achieve without. Parker goes by the name O.E.; he has previously admitted only to Sarah that O.E. stands for Obadiah Elihue, and he has swom her to secrecy. Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. "Obadiah," he whispered and al1 at once he felt the light pouring through him, tuming his spider web sou1 into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts. (CW 673) Parker is overcome with religious emotion that, finally, opens his eyes to see that what matters is not the design of his desperately adomed body, but the state of his neglected soul. In each of these final stories, prophecy becomes-ever more imaginatively--"a matter of seeing." When Parker has Christ etched on his body, he acknowledges for the first time the tnie identity of the creature who inhabits his sou! as Obadiah Elihue. The names mean "servant of Yahweh," and "God Himself' ("People and Places of the Bible" in The Holv Bible 1124, 1098). Far from comforting Parker, the physical imposition of the image of Christ ont0 his back changes the man's life; nothing will ever be the same for him again, and in the final scene, when Sarah Ruth sees the tattoo and beats hirn, because to her it is idolatry, Christ suffers in him, and he in Christ, as the welts form on the tattooed face. Parker's gesture makes hirn a changed man; the tattoo which he cannot see, and which his wife despises, will be with him forever, disrupting his mariage and peace of mind.

Mrs. Turpin's vision of the freaks, invalids, and other marred and imperfect creatures, al1 climbing towards heaven and shouting hallelujahs, is what O'Connor's grotesques are inevitably drawn toward. They converge at this bridge in the sky where the rnarred and imperfect bodies are seen as the true temples of God. Teilhard notes in "The Vision of the Past": The infallible pull, which overcorning from the beginning the whims of chance, the disorder of rnatter, the sloth of the flesh and the pt-ide of the spirit, has created man and continues to construct almost perceptibly, out of Our souls a higher reality-this pull--1 would say-gathers and consecrates (in fact and in faith) al1 that the analysis of the phenornenon of man has revealed to us in the course of this study. By its continuity it demonstrates the coherence of the deep movement which starting from matter culminates in spirit. (Vision of the Past 78) Teilhard's statement can aptly be applied to O'Connor's literary endeavors. The message she attempted to convey with the defomed bodies culminated in the triumph of O.EYsspirit in "Parker's Back," her last story, finished under hospital sheets, hours before her death. All O'Connor's stories rise and converge with "Parker's BacK' --the tale of hope represented in O.E. Parker, who realizes a truth that many O'Connor characters struggle to accept and obtain--that the body, however marred and imperfect, is a temple of the Holy Spirit. "The eyes that were forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed" (CW 672). "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," written two years after O'Connor's lupus was diagnosed, depicted a child's realization that the imperfect human body is capable of becoming God's temple. She finished "Parkeis Back" ten years later. O'Connor's writing cornes full circle to depict characters who experience transformations. Between the child and Parker, O'Connor's characters are subjected to al1 sorts of plights; nevertheless, they are ail granted moments of revelation in which truth about deformity and inadequacy is discovered to be necessary to endure for grace. O'Connor says of the artist: In order not to destroy, he will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to his work. This descent into hirnself will, at the same time, be a descent into his region. It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision. (O'Connor "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southem Fiction" 50) O'Connor's aim was a retum to clear sight for herself and her characters--"the blind, prophetical unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to Say, of faith." O'Connor's Biblical parallel to the blind man healed at Bethesda is fitting: So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town and when he had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. And he looked up and said, '1 see men like trees, walking.' Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made hirn look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly. (Mark 8:23-6) The blind man receives his sight gradually. Aptly enough, for O'Connor, this became an appropriate model for her characters who, like the blind man cured, begin to receive vision. None of the characters becomes whole, that is, perfectly healthy, even though Parker's spider web sou1 is tumed into a "perfect arabesque of colors." Vision is still distorted, but with the beginning of their joumey godward, the scales gradually fall from their eyes and often they see their error, acknowledge the lack, and note their imperfection. The horrible things that happen in O'Connor stories bring her characters to realizations of themselves as limited creatures, whose recognitions are essential to their spiritual salvation. The broken body is the temple. Fitzgerald says: "This idea of grace through imperfection is an outgrowth of Miss O'Connor's belief that the true communion of saints is not a communion of love but a communion of suffering" (Fitzgerald as quoted in Paulson 160). Chapter 6 The Long Trip is Over

Prayer to Saint Raphael O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for; those who are waitl'ng for us: Raphael, Ange1 of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are louking for. . . . Lonely and tired, crushed &y the separatïons and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleadrirg for the protection of your wings, so that we rnay not be as strangers in the province of jox al1 ignorant of the concems of ouf country Remember the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder; serene and bwht with the resplendent glory of God. -Quoted by Flannery O'Connor (Habit of Being 592)

In August, 1964, O'Connor's short life came to a close; she died in the Piedmont hospital. And the disease she lived with for thirteen years had finally been too much. However, its effects on her writing are tremendous. Her stories, letters and speeches attest to the profundity of her desire to tum her own imperfect existence to creative purposes. Her physical limitations resulted in penetrating thernatic insights, a consciousness of humanness and of the need for spiritual wholeness. The expectation of her end was completely necessary to the quality of work she produced. Her illness was her teacher, for her oddly disfigured and unconventional prophets were a direct offspring of her coming to ternis with her own physical limitations. Paradoxically, O'Connor accepted the suffering and battled with the passing time to complete her vision. She accepted her plight, drew the experiences of her characters from feelings she knew best and, in tum, produced an amazingly powerful and complex body of fiction that can only be fully understood by studying O'Connor's own disease-ridden life and the ideas on suffering and imperfection that were fostered because of its ravagement. She developed a creative life from an acceptance of the presence of her terminal illness. Coping with the lupus taught her about the diminishing physical Iife and how it can be used to reconcile one to the spiritual. Very few critics have looked upon O'Connor's stories as a positive reflection of her illness. But if one sees her work as essentially positive, as a reflection of her vision of people as imperfect with the potential for atonement through spirituality- then this coincides with the cheerfully dedicated and spiritual young writer of her letters. Her characters, then, should not be seen as products of a bitter and twisted mind, nor victims of an unfortunate physical or social condition, but as souls who share life's common dignity, suffer from its common calamity, and are faced with the same terrifying promise that is offered to all. O'Connor discovered in Mary Ann's story elements that she herself dramatized as an ideal in her fiction. Mary Ann transformed her disfigured state into a positive experience. Similarly, O'Connor leads a child in ''The Temple" to a similar enlightenment about defomity as she leams about the body frorn the hermaphrodite. O'Connor's own pain also provided insight into the suffering present in her characters as they proceed toward wholeness and take part in redemption. In "Writing Short Stories" O'Connor explains: I think the answer to this is what Martian calls "te habit to art." It is a fact that fiction writing is something in which the whole personality takes part-the conscious as well as the unconscious mind. Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit over a long period of time. . . . (MM 100) O'Connor's "habit " was deeply rooted in the discovery of the lupus, the effects of suffering, and the consolation in God. Her physical challenges becarne essential to her sense of her own being and were translated ingeniously into her fiction. The lupus taught, like "a long trip to Europe," (f-& 163) something she could never leam from books--the experience of suffering and how to reconcile it with the spiritual in her life and in her art. Bibliography

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