A Journey to Convergence in Flannery O’Connor’s Stories

2001년

서강대학교 대학원

영어영문학과

박 주 영

A Journey to Convergence

in Flannery O’Connor’s Stories

지도교수 노 재 호

이 논문을 문학석사 학위 논문으로 제출함

2002년 6월 12일

서강대학교 대학원

영어영문학과

박 주 영

논 문 인 준 서

박주영의 영어영문학 석사학위 논문을 인준함

2002년 6월 12일

주심 장 영 희 [印]

부심 노 재 호 [印]

부심 Artem Lozynsky [印]

A Journey to Convergence

in Flannery O’Connor’s Stories

Joo Young Park

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Sogang University in Partial Fulfillment of Requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts

2001 Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful for the faculty of Sogang University. Especially, Prof. Roh Jae-ho has always encouraged me with his kind advice, which was the most helpful for my thesis. Also, I wish to give my special thanks to Prof. Chang Young- hee who has impressed me with her teaching as well as her warm heart. I much owe thanks to Prof. Lozynsky who inspired me to study about Flannery O’Connor. He taught me how to think and write in a literary way, and gave me an opportunity to discover many writers less known to us. I greatly appreciate to meet those respectable teachers while I was in Sogang. I also send my thanks to everyone and everything that encouraged me to endure the times for my thesis: My mom & dad, who always care for me with their special love. Jieun & Steve, you are so great to me. Laputians.. lovely friends I met at Sogang. I want to have you forever in my life. 1004, Thank you so much. And all my beloved friends. . . especially everyone who becomes my friends whenever I wander alone in the shadow of hard time. Beautiful sunshine, serene sky, fresh wind, deep blue nights in azure springtime of 2002 . . and the rainy afternoons in May. . . I cannot forget your mysterious beauty.

Above all, I am happy to finish my thesis at the very moment of ‘convergence’ in this country during the Worldcup game season. Whenever our Korean team won in the games, we the Koreans became one truly. The ‘converging’ was just here very near us, not in the metaphysical, transcendental space beyond our daily lives. I think those moments of convergence must be a small gift Flannery O’Connor presents to me for the memory of this spring with my thesis. June, 2002 Park, Jooyoung

Table of Contents

국문초록...... ………………………………………………………..i

Abstract…...... ……………………………………………………...iii

Introduction: Flannery O’Connor as a Southern Catholic…..…….1

Chapter I: The Alienated People with the Sin of Pride………...….10

Chapter II: The Way into Convergence through God’s Grace…...33

Conclusion………………………………………………………...... 53

Works Cited……………………………………………………...... 57

국 문 초 록

현대 미국 문학 역사상 Flannery O ’Connor는 남부 출신의 카톨릭

작가라는 독특한 위상을 지닌 작가인 동시에 자신의 독특한 정체성을 픽션 속

에 부여함으로써 뛰어난 독창성을 인정 받은 작가이다. 전통적으로 ‘ Bible- belt’라고 불리우며 정통침례교가 주류를 이루고 사상면에서도 지극히 보수

적이던 당시의 미국 남부 사회에서 카톨릭 작가로서의 목소리를 내기란 쉽지

않았음에도 불구하고, 그녀는 자신의 삶과 세상을 바라보는 시각이 카톨릭 교

리에 뿌리를 두고 있음을 당당히 밝혔다. 따라서 본 논문에서 다루게 될 그녀

의 단편 소설들은 표면적으로는 매우 단순하고 현실적으로 인물과 사건을 다

루고 있지만 그 속에 숨겨진 주제들은 공통적으로 형이상학적이고 종교적인

작가 자신의 뚜렷한 비전을 담고 있다.

다시 말해, 문학을 통한 O’Connor의 궁극적인 목적은 일상의 인간 삶

속에서 신의 은총과 그 신비를 드러내는 것이다. 이러한 종교적 메시지는 자

칫하면 교훈적이고 건조할 수 있으나 그녀는 매우 재치있고 해학적인 언어로

인간 실존의 모순과 부조리, 허위와 위선 등을 묘사함으로써 소설에 극적 재

미를 선사함과 더불어 주인공과 독자들에게 강렬한 구원의 메시지를 전달한다.

즉 신에 대한 믿음을 잃은 현대 사회 속에서 인간 삶의 부조리와 악에 무디어

진 그녀의 소설 속 주인공들은 매우 기이하고도 극단적인 경험을 통해 다시

i 삶의 실체와 마주하게 되고 나아가 성숙된 자기인식의 기회를 마련하게 됨으

로써 초자연적인 신의 신비를 깨닫게 되는 것이다.

본서는 O’Connor가 자신의 종교적 비전 속에서 어떻게 인간구원의 문

제에 대한 답을 제시하고 있는지를 알아보고자 한다. 우선 1장에서는 인간이

지닌 오만의 죄로 인해 서로 소외되어 있는 자들을 찾아본다. 그들의 오만과

우월감은 타인과는 물론 자기 자신과 세상으로부터 스스로를 고립시키며 나아

가 현실을 인식하는 능력마저 마비시킨다. 그들에게 타인과의 진정한 소통과

사랑은 존재하지 않는 듯 보인다. 그러므로 2장에서는 이들이 신의 은총을 통

해 구원되어지는 과정을 탐색해보고자 한다. 그 구원의 길은 낯설고 기이한

방법으로 그들을 찾아오며, 바로 이 과정에서 O’Connor는 폭력의 효과를 통

해 그녀의 주인공들을 현실로 돌아오게 만든다. 값비싼 고통의 대가를 치르고

얻어낸 자기인식과 현실인식 속에서 그들은 신 아래 서로가 하나로 통합되어

있음을 깨닫게 되는 것이다.

궁극적으로 Flannery O ’Connor는 섬세하고도 재치있는 인간관계의

묘사를 통해 소외라는 실존적 문제를 언급함과 동시에 눈으로 보이지 않는 믿

음의 실체를 파격적으로 형상화 시킴으로써 인간이 개개인의 존재이기 이전에

신안에 모두 하나였음을 이야기한다. 그 합체 속에서 사회적, 계급적, 인종적,

정신적 차별의 벽은 모두 무의미한 것이다. 결국 그녀는 지역주의 작가라는

한계를 뛰어넘기 위해 오히려 남부의 문화를 바탕으로 이야기를 썼고, 카톨릭

작가라는 타이틀에 한정되기를 거부하며 자신의 종교적 비전과 믿음을 보편적

인류의 메세지로 승화시켰다.

ii

Abstract

Flannery O’Connor said, “to know oneself is to know what one lacks.” In her stories, O’Connor depicts people who do not know oneself. They have no self- awareness because they do not know what they lack – humility as an imperfect human being under the presence of God. They only have pride of self-sufficiency; so they are unable to see themselves as well as others just as they are.

Unfortunately, they drift on the surface if life not recognizing reality as it is. It consequently makes them alienated from each other, stuck in the world of their egoistic selves.

However, O’Connor portrays such a tragic situation of human existence with witty expression. Ironically, this comic atmosphere more enlarges the effect of violence in the climax of stories. The violence O’Connor uses for her thematic purpose is another form of God’s grace descending upon human world for salvation. Through violence, O’Connor’s people eventually encounter the moment of epiphany in which they realize the truth that all human beings are united together into one. Their pride is totally destroyed and at the same time, they return to reality. O’Connor’s ultimate purpose was to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life. And for many people who cannot share her faith, she chose to

iii depict salvation through violence upon characters who are spiritually or physically grotesque.

This thesis will explore O’Connor’s lifelong concern with the problem of human salvation in light of religious meaning. As a devout Catholic, O’Connor’s religious faith was at the very center of her vision of human world. Even though the surface of her stories is simple and realistic, the underlying meaning is deeply connected with her religious world. Chapter One deals with the problem of human alienation caused by sin of pride. We will see the tragic situation of O’Connor’s characters who are unable to confront reality with no self- awareness. However,

O’Connor suggests the way to solve the problem from her Christian standpoint.

Her alienated people with the sin of pride are finally redeemed by God’s grace.

We will look for the very process of religious salvation for those sinners in

Chapter Two. Through God’s grace, the individual is brought into closer communication with the source of truth.

Moreover, in O’Connor’s vision of religious salvation, there lies the theological idea that the entire universe is in perpetual evolution toward cosmic convergence in a single whole and the end is union with God. Therefore,

O’Connor’s people are ultimately going toward cosmic convergence in that everyone is united into one with God. The initiation is through moments of grace in that they recognize reality with true humility. In her stories, O’Connor apparently and effectively expressed her Catholic vision for the ‘hard of hearing

iv you shout and for the almost-blind’ who are used to seeing distortions in modern life as natural. And it consequently makes Flannery O’Connor transcend the regional limitations as a Southern Catholic writer.

v

‘Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1).

vi

Introduction: Flannery O’Connor as a Southern Catholic

Flannery O’Connor (1925-64) has a peculiar position in the history of modern American literature because her life as a Southerner as well as a Roman

Catholic is very closely related with her literary works. As a devout Catholic, she lived all her life in the small Southern town, Milledgeville, in Georgia.

O’Connor’s considerable reputation depends on two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two volumes of stories, A Good Man Is

Hard to Find (1955) and the posthumously published Everything That Rises Must

Converge (1965). Moreover, the stories from both collections and others not formally published before were recollected and published in 1971 under the title of The Complete Stories. Although her short life due to illness interrupted her to write many novels and stories, O’Connor fully achieved significant critical attention even from her first publication.

Even though she is also famous for her novels, many commentators point out that her literary skill is more apt to short fiction. O’Connor’s style is “limpid and refined,” her form “spare and shapely” (Binding 160); Paul Binding suggests that this characteristic style may explain O’Connor’s “predilection for the short story, in which her greatest work was done” (160). Truly, O’Connor herself had

1 special affection toward short story genre. She asserts that the short story is “one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human experience” (Mystery 87).

She also claims that to write a good short story, the writers should convey its meaning by “showing,” not by “saying,” to be long in depth though short in length

(Mystery 98). Among the notable critics on O’Connor’s literary works, the author herself is one of the most influential ones that interprets her own works most clearly. In her book of essays, Mystery and Manners (1962), she discloses her various and critical ideas on her own works; and she manifests that her vision of human world is related with Christian orthodoxy. Accordingly, the critical attention centers most often on religious aspect of her fiction; and also, this thesis will explore O’Connor’s lifelong concern with salvation for the imperfect human beings in light of religious meaning.

Especially, the rural South and a Roman Catholic vision could not be detached from Flannery O’Connor’s literary career: through them, she could see the cosmic world even though she lived all her life in a small town in the rural

South. In her essay, “In the Protestant South,” she remarks upon the great opportunities for a Southern Catholic writer:

He lives in a region where there is a thriving literary tradition and this is always an advantage to the writer, who is initially inspired less by life than by the work of his predecessors. He lives in a region which is struggling, in both good ways and bad, to preserve its identity . . . .

2 He lives in the Bible Belt, where belief can be made believable . . . (Mystery 208).

The first remark indicates the abundant literary heritage in the American South.

The South had brought out many famous writers since the early twentieth century; it is often called the Southern literary renaissance. Secondly, the region’s search for its identity is connected with the “particular history of the South” (O’Connor

Conversations 103). The history of defeat in the Civil War forced the South to change in various aspects: its agrarian culture into the modern industrial culture; because of abrupt breakdown of an established order between the white and black, the South required the greater understanding and love for two races to live together. In such a sudden transformation, the Southerners were wandering, losing their identities. Consequently, the particular history of the South stimulated the

Southerners to recover its lost identity. Furthermore, O’Connor thinks that the

South as the Bible Belt is the place where the conception of man is still

“theological” (O’Connor Mystery 44). Therefore, the South was an optimal background for the Southern Catholic writer such as Flannery O’Connor because the realistic attitude toward human life is mixed with the metaphysical spirituality that transcends the secular history of the South.

Except a few years in New York for her studying and early writing,

O’Connor lived all her life in Milledgeville. As a Southerner descended from prominent Georgia families, she portrays the people in the rural South vividly in 3 her fiction; in the picture, their lives are less modernized, less developed, and less sophisticated than the Northern ones in America. It indicates that the region of the

South is rather alienated even from the rest of the country. Moreover, the particular region of the South has an ironical significance for O’Connor since she was a devout Catholic in the predominantly fundamentalist Protestant area. The

South is perhaps the staunchest and most fanatically Protestant community in

America. In her homeland, generally, Catholics were far removed from the mainstream culture, a culture dominated by evangelical Protestantism whose influence cut across both religious and social realms.

Although O’Connor as a Southern Catholic writer was displaced from the main cultural life in America, her peculiar identity rather gave her literary works originality and individuality. As Stanley Edgar Hyman asserts, O’Connor, as a writer, had the additional advantage of multiple alienation from the dominant assumptions of American culture: “[O’Connor] was comparably an outsider as a woman, a southerner, and a Roman Catholic in the South” (46). Accordingly, the particular circumstances around O’Connor might be closely connected with her literary theme of alienation that will be discussed in Chapter One of this thesis.

With compassion, she depicted the alienated people in her stories. Most of her characters are alienated from human community or from each other; and it is represented in their mental or physical deformity. According to Preston M.

Browning, a stark mood of alienation permeates the entire collection A Good Man

4 Is Hard to Find: “no one in these stories has escaped the existential consequence of the fall – estrangement” (41). Dealing with the problem of alienation is also in the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Furthermore, O’Connor as a devout Catholic connects the cause of human alienation with the sin of pride in Christian conception of man. Definitely, her alienated people are the sinners who have been estranged from the true source of being. Her attitude toward human life is obviously religious; and she was not reluctant to acknowledge her Christian position as a fiction writer. In her essay

“The Fiction Writer and His Country,” O’Connor clearly stated her role as a writer with Christian concerns:

I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction (Mystery 32).

Therefore, only God can redeem the sinners in O’Connor’s world. She gives us the pictures of each person’s relationship to God’s grace in her stories. Through

God’s grace, the individual is brought into closer communication with the source of truth. We will look for the process of religious salvation for the sinners in

Chapter Two. Ted R. Spivey asserts that O’Connor seriously considered religion itself as a “force in the world,” one that had largely been put aside by modern 5 humanity (26). Spivey also praises that O’Connor’s greatest fictional talent lay in her “ability to show the human turmoil resulting from the failure of religious belief” (26).

Ultimately, the key of salvation O’Connor suggests for the imperfect human beings is in the spiritual and religious realm. As Ralph C. Wood points out, therefore, O’Connor’s work is “religious to the core” (55). Even though the surface of her stories is natural and realistic, the underlying meaning is intimately connected with her religious world. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. also suggests that the “primary shaping force of O’Connor’s imagination was her Catholicism” (x).

Above all, O’Connor herself fully acknowledged that the two circumstances of

“being Southern and being Catholic” have given character to her own writing

(Mystery 35). Even in her letters to some friends, O’Connor emphasizes the fact that she is a Catholic: “I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see” (Letters 114). Therefore, her peculiar identity is the key to her artistic development as a fiction writer.

In short, the intimate relationship between the author herself and the place of the South consequently makes O’Connor’s literary works transcend regionalism. Even though she depicts the people in the South and all her stories are set in the South, O’Connor uses the region “in order to suggest what transcends it” (O’Connor Conversations 110). That is to say, the South she portrays is not limited to a mere background, but is transformed into home of lost

6 souls in that they find the way to true salvation. This universal theme O’Connor deals with makes her South trancends the regional meaning. Her ultimate purpose was to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life. And for many readers who cannot share her faith, she chose to depict salvation through violence upon characters who are spiritually or physically grotesque.

Remarkably, O’Connor’s stories are full of grotesque characters and horrible incidents. Some examples are: a cruel psychopathic murderer kills an entire family in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; a one-armed vagrant abandons a deafmute girl to steal her mother’s car in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”; in “Good Country People,” a woman with an artificial leg is violated by a Bible salesman whose real identity is a trickster. O’Connor’s use of the grotesque often places her in the Southern Gothic School, a group of Southern women writers including Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty who shared a strong artistic sympathy for “the wretched, the deformed, the physical and mental misfits”

(Rubin 27). However, O’Connor resisted being confined to regional status since her use of the grotesque is only an effective tool for “[jarring] the reader into seeing reality from an eternal, spiritual perspective incompatible with the modern temper” (McElroy 139).

In her stories, moreover, salvation has a deeper meaning as implied in the title Everything That Rises Must Converge. This title has a spiritual, religious meaning that everything in the universe is in the process of spiritual evolution

7 toward ultimate convergence with the true source of being. Robert Fitzgerald in his introduction of Everything That Rises Must Converge comments that the title,

“Everything That Rises Must Converge,” comes from the French Jesuit Pierre

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) (Everything 34). As a scientist, philosopher, and poet, Chardin proposes that the “entire universe is in perpetual evolution toward cosmic convergence in a single whole” and the end is “union with God”

(Giannone 157). The spiritual convergence is the ultimate place O’Connor’s people are united into one with God, free from the mental prison of alienation.

This process of true salvation for O’Connor’s alienated people is the theme of this thesis.

For the concrete exploration of the theme above, three stories - “A Good

Man Is Hard To Find,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Everything That Rises Must

Converge,” - will be discussed more in detail although other stories will be referred to briefly. Whereas “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is often considered one of O’Connor’s best short stories, “The Artificial Nigger” is described as

O’Connor’s own favorite story. Characteristically, the three stories have a journey motif in common. The characters in the stories are headed for somewhere. An automobile trip to Florida of the entire family is portrayed in “A Good Man Is

Hard To Find”; the two main characters, the old Mr. Head and his grandson in

“The Artificial Nigger” go to the city by train; in “Everything That Rises Must

Converge,” the mother and son have a bus trip to go to the reducing class in town.

8 But their journey is not a simple one merely for enjoyment; it is hugely meaningful because, on their way, they confront the unexpected moment of spiritual awakening through shocking accidents.

9

Chapter I: The Alienated People with the Sin of Pride

Flannery O’Connor represents the various forms of human relationships in her stories. Each individual in her stories has a relationship with other individuals in a number of ways. Those relationships build up human community such as a family, a society, or a country. The human community is important for overcoming the limited condition of human existence because we can share the fundamental sense of pain and loneliness as a human being with each other in it.

Therefore, “individuals must establish a proper relation to their community, thereby overcoming alienation” (Paulson 13). Nevertheless, there are some people who could not overcome alienation although they belong to the community: they are Flannery O’Connor’s people, “those who believe they know themselves best discover that they have been living with a stranger” (Browning 41).

In her stories, O’Connor deals with the existential problem of alienation through her peculiar character portrayal. The problem of human alienation represented by O’Connor is focused on the spiritual world of human beings. Since

O’Connor’s characters are alienated from spiritual reality, they cannot communicate with each other, disharmonized even in the community. Those

10 alienated people ironically share the sin of pride; and especially for O’Connor, a

Catholic writer, the pride is the fundamental cause of human alienation since

God’s creation of universe. Closed in separate world of one’s self, each individual is alienated from others, and ultimately from God. No one in her stories has escaped “the existential consequence of the fall – estrangement” (Browning 41).

Robert Fitzgerald also suggests that almost all of O’Connor’s people in the South are “displaced” and some are either aware of it or become so (Countryside 30).

But it is not a sectional or regional condition; it is a “religious condition,” common indeed to the world we live in (Fitzgerald Countryside 30).

The form of human community represented most recurrently in O’Connor’s stories is the family unit. Most of the family relationships O’Connor depicts are abnormal ones. As Webster Schott asserts, O’Connor’s family unit – not society as a whole – opens the “trap to dysfunction and cataclysm” (142). First, it is dysfunctional in its structure. In her stories, it is hard to find the normal family structure that is formed by parents and children. Or, every member of the family is alienated from each other though it is not dysfunctional in its structure. In many stories, O’Connor’s family features a single parent with a single child. Usually, she portrays a single mother living with her adult child. In the stories that will be discussed below, O’Connor also uses her typical motif of a parent-child relationship: “the resourceful widow as smug and empty and her arty child as useless and affected” (Hyman 31). This type of mother is a widowed or divorced

11 woman who has lived without a husband for a long time. Economically and socially independent, they are strong enough to live out the hard life for themselves. Due to those tough circumstances, they believe they get enough power to control other people: they want to manipulate their children. Also, they are very proud of their own abilities to bring up the children; they are self- complacent for these very reasons.

On the other hand, their children are physically or mentally weak and dependent on their mothers. But the most important problem for them is self- deception: they see themselves as intelligent and independent men/ women.

However, in reality, they are immature beings, having no self-awareness. They are selfish and self-centered people who ignore maternal love for them. They naturally accept the mother’s sacrifice; but they are not supposed to recompense it with true heart. They are unable to recognize mother’s love because mother, for them, is their mental enemy who inhibits their successful social growth in reality.

This conflict between mother and child is on the crux of the stories like

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “The Enduring Chill.”

In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Julian, a would-be writer with college degree, lives with his mother. Economically dependent on his mother, he now sells typewriters for his future dream to be a writer. Julian’s mother has sacrificed everything of herself only for her son. She feels very proud of her son whom she thinks is an intellectual with a degree. However, Julian does not like to

12 consider all she had done for him because he has a great mental burden for his mother’s expectations (CS 405).1 The main characters in “The Enduring Chill” are also in the similar situation. Mrs. Fox, as a widow, had also brought up her son,

Asbury Fox, for herself. Asbury, like Julian, is a pseudo-intellectual who had graduated the University and now prepares to be a playwright in New York. But actually he still achieves nothing in reality. Mrs. Fox has done everything for her son and still cares for him. She treats her twenty-five-year-old adult son as her little child who has no ability to take care of himself. Asbury had gone to New

York not only for studying but also for escaping from his mother’s power though he later comes back to his hometown due to his sickness. The conflict between

Asbury and his mother becomes worse when he returns home.

In the stories like “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Good

Country People,” the parent/ child motif is also represented though these two stories are not mainly focused on the conflict between a mother and child. In “The

Life You Save May Be Your Own,” a widow, Mrs. Crater lives in a rural farm with her daughter, Lucynel Crater. Lucynel is already thirty years old, but she is physically and mentally disabled. Like a little child, she needs her mother’s help in reality. Also, an adult daughter who had taken the Ph. D in philosophy lives with her widowed mother, Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People.” Oddly

1 Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) All further citations to O’Connor’s stories are from this edition and it will be referred to as CS. 13 enough, their relationship is quite distorted: Mrs. Hopewell is an object against which her daughter, Joy/Hulga projects her rage derived from her artificial leg.

For Hulga, all the cause of her misfortune is her mother; so she hates her mother.

Mrs. Hopewell also does not understand her daughter and even pities Hulga for not having “danced a step or had any normal good times” in her youth (CS 274).

They live in different worlds: Hulga in her philosophical nihilism, Mrs. Hopewell in her self-satisfaction.

O’Connor’s people in these stories have a “collective inability to hold normal conversations” with each other (Whitt 8). They hold usually fierce attachments to family members: disrespectful and abrasive adult children do not leave home, but parents do their duty nevertheless. Unwelcome grandparents stay with their adult children, and grandchildren insult them to their faces, as June Star and John Wesley attempt to banish their grandmother from the automobile trip in

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” Exceptionally, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a distinctive story that has a normal family structure in O’Connor’s stories: the family consists of the grandmother, her son, her daughter-in-law, and her two grandchildren. Though the surface of their relationships seems to be normal, the reality is not normal at all. With no concern for each other, communication is totally blocked between family members.

“The Artificial Nigger” also has a somewhat different structure from

O’Connor’s typical family motif. Instead of the mother/ child relationship, the

14 grandfather/ grandson relationship is represented. Mr. Head, a sixty-year-old man, has no family without his grandson, Nelson. They live without women in a small home in a rural place. However, the distorted relationship between family members is also portrayed here. The grandfather and his only grandson are competitors who struggle to dominate over one another rather than the family members loving and understanding each other. For both, therefore, the planned trip to the city is only a chance for testing authority and power over one another.

The outwardly dysfunctional family structure in O’Connor’s stories represents the inwardly abnormal relationship between the family members. The problem in such a family unit is that the members are mentally alienated from each other. Even though they are superficially tied together in the name of the family, each one stays in separate world of his or her self. Though O’Connor’s parent/ child pattern often repeated in her stories is said to be one of her technical limitations by many critics, O’Connor effectively shows the human alienation through her grotesque family motif.

In short, the family relationships in O’Connor’s stories are grotesquely distorted. Ironically, Flannery O’Connor herself had a similar family structure to her characters’. After returning from New York due to her serious illness, she lived with her widowed mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, for the rest of her life.

Therefore, many commentators assert that this parent-child pattern has autobiographical sources; but the distortion O’Connor uses is rather

15 “instrumental” with an exact purpose (O’Connor Conversations 105). It indicates the inner problem of alienation lying behind the surface human relationships. The dysfunctional family structure in the stories above is a kind of physical symbol that represents the mental illness they have in the core of relationships: alienation.

Alienation is the mental deformity in modern life having “no substitute for a lost or failing belief in God”2; and O’Connor tries to portray such a dreary situation of human world deprived of spirituality through her peculiar characters. As the family is the most basic unit among human communities, the disharmony between family members extends to the disparity in the larger groups of humankind. And unfotunately, O’Connor’s people are alienated from each other even inside the small community of family.

Even though the characters in O’Connor’s stories are physically tied to the family relationship, those arrogant people are stuck in the self-centered world that is only accessible to him/ herself. As Kathleen Feeley suggests, O’Connor wrote movingly of “alienated man – man cut off, usually by pride, from a complete apprehension of reality”: “sometimes his truncated view of the universe excludes

2 Bernard McEloy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (London: Macmillan, 1989) 131. McElroy compares Flannery O’Connor to Nathaniel West in their characteristic use of the grotesque. He claims that both use the grotesque primarily as a radical attack upon the normal; and for both, the central problem is that modern life has found no substitute for a lost or failing belief in myth or in God, and culture is uninhabitable without such belief at its center. He points out that the illness of civilized modern life is the destruction of cohesion in human community.

16 all spiritual reality; sometimes it ignores social or material reality . . .” (55). Fully immersed in the kingdom of self-delusion, they choose to see only what they want to see; therefore, they cannot recognize the reality as it is. Their identities are also disoriented in such a distorted reality. They do not know who they are; where they are. Therefore, it is no wonder that they are absolutely unable to communicate with each other, being alienated.

The rule of incommunicability is applied to the relationship between Julian and his mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Julian’s mother is so proud of her son because he has a degree and she believes that he will be a great writer sometime. She thinks her son has grown up as an intellectual through her sacrifice. But Julian is neither a true intellectual nor a good son in reality: actually, he is merely a typewriter salesman, not a writer; and he is a selfish son who could not recognize his mother’s love. Julian’s mother, however, locked in her self- sufficient pride, cannot accept the reality of her son. When Julian accompanies his mother for her reducing class at the Y, he imagines himself as “Saint Sebastian” since he believes that he sacrifices for his mother (CS 405). Different to his imagination, his sense of duty for his mother is not out of his true heart but from the sense of superiorty.

The subtle conflict between Julian and his mother makes them alienated from each other. They cannot understand each other because they live in different worlds. Whereas his mother lives in the glories of the past, Julian is closed in his

17 imaginary kingdom in which he can cruelly punish his mother for the price of her sacrifice. Julian’s feelings toward his mother are quite complex. He feels heavily responsible for his mother’s sacrifice; but at the same time, he feels irritated at his mother’s pride in him because he has no self-confidence to satisfy her in reality.

So Julian thinks “he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him” (CS 407). For Julian, his mother is a cause of his being as a social loser.

Therefore, “everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed

[Julian]” (CS 405). As a pseudo-intellectual, he is contemptuous of his mother’s materialistic values. His mother is O’Connor’s typical type of woman who responds to life superficially and mechanically. For her, one of the most important issues is that she wears an expensive new hat that costs seven dollars. She clings to a romanticized version of the past when her ancestors had been rich and powerful. Even though now she physically stands in the “dingy” neighborhood

(CS 407), mentally she lives in the past. Both Julian and his mother, without self- knowledge, do not recognize the reality as it is.

In case of Asbury in “The Enduring Chill,” he is also locked in the closed world of his self. In the imaginary space of his mind, he sets the kingdom of pride.

And in his kingdom, he can control others with the most superiority. In such a world, he is a great writer as a mature being with mental independence. In the beginning of the story, when Asbury returns to his hometown from New York due

18 to the serious indisposition of illness, he feels that he is about to witness “a majestic transformation, that the flat of roofs might at any moment turn into the mounting turrets of some exotic temple for a god he didn’t know” (CS 357). In

Asbury’s realm of fantasy, he cannot accept the others, including his mother. He is far superior to them. Asbury, like Julian, is a man of self-sufficient pride that

Feeley regards as “the hallmark of O’Connor intellectuals” (54).

However, his mother, Mrs. Fox, is partly responsible for Asbury’s sense of superiority. She covers everything of her son whether it is good or not. Her unconditional love for her son totally spoils him; and it makes them fail to communicate with each other. She also knows her son’s inadaptability to reality; but she never expresses it to her son. Compared with his father, Asbury gets more education; but he could do less than his father. So “she could have told Asbury what would help him. She could have said, ‘If you would get out in the sunshine, or if you would work for a month in the dairy, you’d be a different person!’ but she knew exactly how that suggestion would be received” (CS 361). Mrs. Fox grasps her son’s temperament sharply; but she tries only to cover it because her proud son is the only reason of her life. Eventually the pride of mother about her adult son inhibits his growth as a mature being and finally destroys their relationship.

The main characters in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” are also people who do not recognize the reality, being locked in his/ her closed world. The story is

19 about Bailey family’s encounter with a grotesque accident on their trip to Florida.

On the surface, the family seems to be harmonious: a man is going to enjoy the vacation with his old mother, wife, and two children. However, the relationship between each member is quite dysfunctional. Alienation is also invaded here in this family. Through a brief sketch of the family in the beginning of the story,

O’Connor suggests the problem of alienation in this family unit.

Though the grandmother is the oldest in the family, the other members are totally indifferent to her. Her only son, Bailey, rarely talks with her. For example, the grandmother says to her son: “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida . . . . I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it” (CS 117). Bailey just ignores her opinion without suspecting their later encounter with The Misfit.

The grandmother who is “smug, self-willed and obsessed with breeding and good blood” (Browning 54), is a manipulative woman with an ulterior motive to go to

Tennessee instead of Florida. But her son makes no response to her.

Also, there is no communication at all between the grandmother and children’s mother. O’Connor’s grotesque representation of the alienation of children’s mother is skillful: with no name, children’s mother has a face “as broad and innocent as a cabbage” (CS 117). The fact that she is compared to something vegetable or non-human represents that she has no place in this family (Drake 38).

Besides, the two children – John Wesley and June Star - also ignore their

20 grandmother. John rudely responses to the grandmother who insists to go to

Tennessee: “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” (CS

117) June Star also replies that the grandmother would not stay at home to be

“queen for a day” (CS 117).

On their way to Florida, they turn the direction of the journey merely because of the grandmother’s selfish and manipulative desire to see the old mansion she had visited as a child. But she suddenly remembers that the house they are searching for is in Tennessee not in Georgia. Utterly disoriented, they lose the way to their wrong destination. Moreover, because of the grandmother’s cat, Bailey’s car has an accident on a rough hill; there they encounter the three criminals escaped from the prison. The grandmother’s selfish pride of controlling others eventually leads to entire family’s demise.

The alienation between family members is well represented also in “The

Artificial Nigger.” The relationship between the grandfather and grandson is depicted as rivalry over who knows more about the world. On the one hand, the grandfather wants to teach his grandson with the authority as an elder to reduce the grandson’s boastful pride. Although Mr. Head has himself been there only twice, he pretends to have knowledge of city life in order to maintain a tenuous supremacy over the excessively independent and self-willed boy. Mr. Head’s eyes have a “look of composure and of ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men” (CS 250). This is exactly how Mr. Head perceives

21 himself in his self-delusion: as a man of will and strong character, ripened by years and experience, imbued with “that calm understanding of life that makes

[one] a suitable guide for the young” (CS 249). As “Raphael” (CS 250), the guiding angel, he plans to go to the city with Nelson for teaching a lesson that

Nelson is “not as smart as [he] think [he] is” (CS 251). However, Mr. Head’s pride begins to be destroyed by his unreliability as a guide even prior to the journey: he rouses later to find his grandson already dressed and cooking breakfast.

On the other hand, Nelson, a ten-year-old-boy, always tries to win over his grandfather. So he is “always irked when Mr. Head [is] the first up” (CS 250). On the day when they start the journey to the city, the boy even feels proud of the fact that he gets up earlier than his grandfather: “[Nelson’s] entire figure suggested satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head” (CS 251). Also, though this is the first trip to the city for Nelson, he stubbornly claims that he had already been to

Atlanta before because he had been born there (CS 250): but Mr. Head is indifferent to the boy’s opinion. Through these comic trifles in ordinary life,

O’Connor reveals the fact that are not comic: Mr. Head and Nelson could not recognize the truth that they love and need each other. Instead of it, they are alienated from each other because of each one’s sense of superiority. Their ghost- like images reflected on the train window symbolize the death of communication in their relationship that is not based on love but on selfish pride: “There he saw a pale ghost-like face scowling at him beneath the brim of a pale ghost-like hat. His

22 grandfather, looking quickly too, saw a different ghost, pale but grinning, under a black hat” (CS 253). Therefore, the sojourn in the city is a “descent into hell” for both of them; they spend hours bleakly confronting their own ignorance and, finally, their alienation from each other (Shloss 78).

Ultimately, what makes O’Connor’s people in the stories above alienated from each other is their false pride, the sense of superiority. As Richard Poirier points out, they have “no measure for them but pride” (46). Not even recognizing the reality of alienation, they are struggling to communicate with the outside world; but it fails because they lock themselves up in their own delusion of superiority. They are commonly obsessed with the self-sufficient pride: every individual desires to differentiate him/ herself from others. Self-deception due to pride makes them see the reality in distorted ways; and it prohibits them to see the truth hidden behind the surface life. Preston M. Browning asserts that the most destructive consequence of self-deception is “alienation – alienation from one’s self, from others, and from the source of one’s being, God” (70). Here is the very point on which the mystery of religion is entered by O’Connor.

Especially in the Christian perspective, all of O’Connor’s people in these stories are the sinners under the presence of Divinity. Since Adam’s fall, all human beings are driven from the paradise with the sin of pride. As Thomas

Aquinas said, “pride is the queen and mother of all vices.”3 The loss of paradise

3 Thomas Aquinas’s phrase is requoted from: Webster Schott, “Flannery O’Connor: Faith’s 23 was the price Adam and Eve paid for their pride. Due to the original sin, they are estranged from the Divine realm. “Original sin” in the human heart is a darkness that is most importantly at the center of O’Connor’s conception of man (Orvell

33). O’Connor’s people discussed above are isolated separately even inside the community; but at the same time, they are ultimately alienated from God’s world.

They have no capacity to discern the mystery of God in human life. This is the key point that O’Connor wants to convey through her fictional characters. Her ultimate concern was “man’s alienation from the supernatural world” (Feeley 55); and it is due to human pride.

First, in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” the pride of the grandmother is well represented by her appearance. Even though she is on the trip, she wears the formal suit to represent that she is a “lady”:

… the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady (CS 118).

For the grandmother, the outer image seen by others is more important than the

tepchild,” The Nation 201.7 September 13 (1965): 144.

24 reality beneath her appearance. She puts the value of life on the appearance, matter, and money. The superficiality of her life is depicted in the scene where she regards a Negro child as a doll: “Oh, Look at that the cute little pickaninny! . . . .

Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” (CS 119). There is no trace of human sympathy for the poor boy because she cannot recognize the reality around him.

She is a woman of self-complacence. Stanley Edgar Hyman suggests that

O’Connor’s female characters are largely “self-intoxicated,”; they are prone to complacency and self-deception.4 If such a generalization is acceptable, the grandmother is one of those “self-intoxicated” women.

Also in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Julian and his mother could not communicate with each other because each one lives in different worlds of self-delusion. O’Connor uses the outer image to represent the individual personality also in this story: Julian’s mother’s hat. Her fashionable new hat: “A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out” (CS 405). For

Julian’s mother who is very proud of her aristocratic past and her intellectual son, the hat, like the grandmother’s dress in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is a symbolic indicator of her pride: she wears it to differentiate herself from others.

4 Stanley Edgar Hyman, Flannery O’Connor (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1966) 34. Stanley Edgar Hyman divides O’Connor’s characters into two groups: whereas male characters such as The Misfit are “God-intoxicated,” female characters are mainly “self-intoxicated.”

25 She is self-complacent in that she “knows who [she is]”; so she can go anywhere and can be gracious to anybody though they are not “[her] kind of people” (CS

407). She is superior to others in her delusion; but the reality is different to her fantasy. In reality, her hat that is identical to the Negro woman’s indicates that she is not superior to others. Because her arrogance has also been applied to the racial issue in the Southern society, her pride is largely hurt by the encounter in a bus with the Negro woman who wears a hat identical to hers.

On the other hand, stuck in his own pride of intellectualism, Julian observes the world around him through a distorted view. He wants desperately to distinguish himself from “everything in the South which he finds morally, intellectually, and aesthetically repugnant: its racism, its nostalgia for the glorious past, its petty concern with manners” (Browning 100). His intellectualism is but a false one that is merely based on his arrogant sense of superiority. It is also revealed in his attitude toward his mother. Julian is contemptuous of his mother’s mechanical and prejudiced attitude toward life. For example, Julian claims the racial equality, disdaining his mother’s racism. But actually he uses the Negro only to communicate his antagonism against her. In the bus, he deliberately sits beside the Negro man, and cruelly enjoys his mother’s embarrassment. Julian’s liberalism is merely a tool for rebelling against his mother’s power. According to

Browning, “Julian wants to be different, and since everything about the South which affronts his sense of decency and decorum is symbolized by his mother,

26 Julian wants especially to be different from his mother”(101).

But Julian’s fantasy world is totally different to the reality he has: what he thinks he detests, he loves and longs for. What he believes he is totally free of, he is fearfully dependent upon. His desire to write is also the mask for his “fear of adult responsibility” (Giannone 161). Confined in “mental bubble” (CS 411) where the self is free to judge without making itself vulnerable to judgement

(Browning 104), he isolates himself from others; moreover, he is finally alienated from his self. Therefore, he cannot judge himself or the reality. The invisible conflicts between family members due to each one’s pride make their alienation deeper and worse.

Though Hyman claims that the self-intoxicated people in O’Connor’s stories are female, those “self-intoxicated” characters are not confined merely to them (Hyman 36). Mr. Head in “The Artificial Nigger” is a male character who is self-intoxicated. In this aspect, he resembles the grandmother in “A Good Man Is

Hard To Find” or Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Mr.

Head, the racist, shows his superiority to Nelson using the Negro as a great tool.

Since Nelson has never seen them before, Mr. Head boasts of his knowledge of the Negro. The question of knowing the city comes down to the question of knowing the Negro. When they see the Negro men and women in the train, Mr.

Head shows immediate contempt for them with white superiority. In contrast to the grandfather’s racial prejudice, Nelson’s response to them is innocent. Nelson

27 replies to the grandfather’s question of “What was that?”: “A man,” . . . “A fat man,” . . . “An old man.” Then Mr. Head proudly says, “that was a nigger” (CS

255). Mr. Head’s pride isolates him from his grandson.

The problem of alienation is extended into the larger community beyond the family unit in O’Connor’s stories. Her people such as The Misfit are totally isolated alone from others; also from God in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” The leader of the escaped convicts is The Misfit, the “philosophical psychopath”

(Browning 55), who finds no pleasure in life but “meanness” and who claims that

“Jesus thrown everything off balance” (CS 131). The Misfit deliberatrely places himself in opposition to Christ; his “sense of alienation is intensified by his belief that God has abandoned him” (Muller 31). Gilbert H. Muller asserts that the criminal like The Misfit in O’Connor’s stories is “grotesque of a very special sort”

(33). The Misfit, “deliberately cutting himself off from transcendent values, he lapses into what is essentially an attitude of despair; and with the recession of belief which he experiences comes the isolation, alienation, and sense of abandonment” (Muller 33). The Misfit describes his sense of displacement from human community as symbolic claustrophobia: “Turn to the right, it was a wall, . . . Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor” (CS 130). For The Misfit, being isolated from communities, the road to communicate with human world is blocked everywhere.

In this story, as an antagonist of the grandmother, The Misfit is one of those

28 who must know the fundamental meaning of everything in human life. His idiosyncratic attitude toward life is extremely contrasted to the grandmother’s. At least, his response to life is not superficial like hers: as a “God-intoxicated” man

(Hyman 34), he is distressed by the mysterious presence of Jesus Christ because he has not seen him with his naked eyes. For The Misfit, the matter of good and evil and the matter of belief and unbelief is very important as Browning comments that he “takes the question of good and evil seriously” (57). So, to the grandmother’s desperate flattery, he honestly responds: “I ain’t a good man” (CS

128). Unlike the grandmother, The Misfit might have no delusion of the self and know the way to solve the existential problem of alienation. But he definitely denies it and remains as a loser since he believes only what he sees. Totally alienated from the mystery of life, therefore, he builds up his own world of the devil with no help from others. As a response to the grandmother’s suggestion to pray for himself, he says: “I’m doing all right by myself” (CS 130). It is The

Misfit’s sin of pride: “Pride in his self-sufficiency blocks his apprehension of spiritual reality” (Feeley 74). It is the very reason that bars him from belief and causes his spiritual alienation. The grandmother and The Misfit would never communicate with each other because the world each belongs to is too distant and separated.

Let alone the alienation from others, the false pride of human beings isolates O’Connor’s characters from their selves. Since it blocks their spiritual

29 capacity to see the reality as it is, they are also unable to recognize the true images of their selves. In the world of self-sufficient pride, the view toward the outer world is distorted or closed. Therefore, they cannot communicate or comprehend each other with love, even though they truly long for it. They cannot see the truth of life, the truth of human existence beyond the surface. Ultimately, the pride is the fundamental cause to bring forth the individual’s estrangement from others and from the source of our being, God. Through the grotesque portrayal of family relationships, Flannery O’Connor raises the question of “whether the larger human family will ever ‘converge’ when individuals deny their own immediate family” (Paulson 83). Consequently, O’Connor’s alienated people are “guilty of the same sin” of pride: they fail to recognize the “essential fallenness of human nature” and hence need for “grace and redemption” (McElroy 141).

Characteristically, O’Connor uses the grotesque as a literary device to represent the spiritual deformity of her characters. Her stories are full of the grotesque characters such as the murderer, freaks, deafmute, a one-armed carpenter, and the Ph. D. with artificial leg, and so on. For example, The Misfit in

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is a cruel murderer who has killed his father and does not remember it. He also kills the grandmother’s family for his sole pleasure of “meanness” (CS 132). For O’Connor, however, “we are all grotesque” since all of us are sinners under God because of our pride (O’Connor Conversations 103).

Irving Malin refers to the Christian writer’s belief that “sin and the grotesque are

30 joined because sin violates cosmic order”: when a sinner is “proud,” he disturbs

“the great chain of being”; he steps out of his spiritual domain and in attempt to rise, falls into animalistic depths; he, therefore, becomes “freakish” (108). So

O’Connor states that “writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse” (O’Connor Mystery 33).

But at the more mundane level, the grotesque can be reflected in an “absurd family group” (Muller 7). In other words, O’Connor’s parent/ child motif is the grotesque expression representing the distorted human relationship. O’Connor wants to make sure that the distortions are seen and understood as distortions to

“an audience which is used to seeing them as natural” (Whitt 10). Therefore, in

O’Connor’s stories, physical or mental deformity of the outward and visible sort always suggests “inner, spiritual deformity” (Drake 39). The spiritual deformity found in O’Connor’s families is alienation. Each individual is commonly obssessed with the selfish pride; so unless they are able to accept true humility, the “first product of self-knowledge” (O’Connor Mystery 35), they cannot communicate the reality and unite into one. To her alienated people, O’Connor suggests the way to solve the problem from her Christian standpoint. “So intense is the estrangement and so all-pervasive, that it almost inevitably erupts in violence, and the violence, while frequently ending in the death of one or more of the characters, leads to an epiphany or what O’Connor preferred to call the moment of grace” (Browning 41 emphasis mine). While she discovers the

31 problem of alienation lying beneath the surface relationships of her people, she finds the exit to the world of union in the mystery of religion.

32

Chapter II: The Way into Convergence through God’s Grace

In the previous chapter, I have examined the problem of human alienation, the universal disease in modern world, depicted in O’Connor’s stories. Through her witty portrayal of character relationships, O’Connor shows us that human pride is the fundamental cause of alienation. Her alienated people with the sin of pride cannot be harmonized together because of the very thought that ‘I’ am superior to ‘you.’ It forbids them to accept reality as it is. As we have already seen, their mental deformity is represented in their grotesque or distorted relationships with others. Those locked-in egos, however, confront the sudden, unexpected moment of spiritual awakening. Their suffering from the experience mysteriously opens a way into oneness.

In O’Connor’s fictional world, salvation comes in a grotesque and strange way. She uses violence as a mental shock therapy for people who are separately alienated in the world of proud individualism. In her book of essays, Mystery and

Manners, O’Connor honestly reveals the function of using violence in her stories:

Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that

33 reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world (112).

For O’Connor, a writer with religious concern, violence is an effective tool for representing revelation of supernatural grace in the human world. Therefore,

O’Connor’s characters who ‘return to reality’ through the violence eventually encounter the moment of epiphany, in which they realize the ultimate truth that all human beings are united together into one, not alienated. This is a process of spiritual rising into convergence: a journey of O’Connor’s people to the world of true love through the mysterious power of God’s grace.

The characters we have met in the first chapter are commonly stuck in their own world of self-sufficient pride. The most serious problem for them is that they can never recognize it. They are unable to see reality as it is or themselves as they are because of the pride. Alienation from each other is an inevitable result of their pride. However, O’Connor opens the door for her alienated people into another world of communication that is connected with Christian God’s realm. The device she uses for the purpose is ‘violence.’ Paradoxically, the very pride of O’Connor’s people calls for violence that allows the opportunity of painful suffering for redemption. O’Connor associates the condition of pain with that of contact with

God because “holiness costs” (Giannone 71). Violence in her stories usually appears as an extreme form such as death, the ultimate violence. Its appearance is

34 so sudden and weird that it fully transfers the grotesque shock effects to the characters as well as the readers.

The violence in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” for example, is the killing of the grandmother’s family by The Misfit. The Misfit commands his henchmen to kill the family members one by one in the woods. After the deaths of other family members, when at last the grandmother confronts The Misfit, she implores him with inane remarks to save herself, “you’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got ” (CS 132). She still believes that she can fully control reality that she grasps superficially. As

Browning claims, the grandmother is not able to comprehend either the Misfit’s belief that everything was once thrown off balance by Jesus or the mystery of evil which he himself ambiguously embodies (55). Her life has no genuine reality but sham gentility: even in her Christian belief, there is no reality. So when she faces imminent death, she cries looking for the help of Jesus: “Finally she found herself saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing” (CS 131). Ironically, the name of Jesus the grandmother looks for only seems to appear more as a “curse than as a prayer”

(Browning 56).

However, the confrontation with the most imminent situation of death finally makes the grandmother return to reality, in which she is not superior to

35 others; and without her selfish pride, she keeps the intimate relationship with others. The reality she returns to is the place where all the family members understand and love each other with true heart. Not only the grandmother but also her son, Bailey, is changed to recognize the reality when faced with death. When

The Misfit’s henchmen draw him into the dark woods for killing, Bailey, who has been so indifferent to his mother, leaves with the first and last words of affection to her, “Mamma, wait on me!” (CS 128). Bailey also returns to reality as the grandmother’s beloved son. Probably, The Misfit might already be aware of the effect of violence. After killing the grandmother, he says: “she would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”

(CS 133). Feeley also suggests that The Misfit understands the “impact of violence” which has ended the grandmother’s alienation by returning her to reality and transformed her from a “lady” to a “good woman” (73).

In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” violence also results in the death of one character because of an unexpected intruder. It breaks down the mental bubble of Julian as well as his mother; and makes them recognize the reality in which they stand. At the end of their bus trip, Julian’s mother wants to give a nickel to the Negro boy. Although the gesture is as “natural to her as breathing” (CS 417), it is not at all to the Negro woman, who has been very nervous about Julian’s mother’s careless attitude toward her son in the bus. In spite of Julian’s dissuasion of that behavior, his mother opens her bag and gives a

36 bright new penny to the Negro child. At the very moment, the huge Negro woman, the boy’s mother, hits Julian’s mother on her head with her red purse, shouting that “he don’t take nobody’s pennies!” (CS 418). Then Julian discovers that his mother is sitting on the sidewalk with expressionless face. The black woman’s reaction to Julian’s mother’s superficial act of charity demonstrates that the old lady is “out of touch with the society in which she lives” (Feeley 102).

However, the more violent thing for Julian’s mother is committed by her son following the accident. Julian callously blames his mother with no sympathy for her disaster; “you got exactly what you deserved” (CS 418). His cruel attitude toward his mother’s disaster is due to his own helplessness. His pride does not admit him to lower his superior position. Richard Giannone suggests that the effect of Julian’s self-protection is awful: “his mother is victimized three times over. First, by her own sacrifices for Julian; then, by the Negro boy’s mother for her touchy pride over the bright penny offered to her son; and finally, by Julian’s punishing her for his helplessness in the moment of humiliation” (164).

In the far superior place above his mother, Julian hopes this calamity teaches her a lesson, and also impudently denies her identity: “you are not who you think you are” (CS 419). He cruelly condemns his mother’s pride of the old world, not recognizing the reality in which his mother moves in the wrong direction. On the verge of death, Julian’s mother eternally retreats into the secure world of her youth. She was going “home,” not to the Y (CS 419). ‘Home’ is her

37 grandpa’s place, where “she is loved as she is, where the arms of the old black nurse will embrace the widow-child” (Giannone 165). In the place, she does not need to protect herself with the false pride. For her, therefore, becoming a child is not a regression but rather an “advance to true identity” (Giannone 165).

It is also in “The Artificial Nigger” that violence becomes the grotesque means for individuals’ spiritual growth. The violent accident the two main characters encounter in the story is the result of Mr. Head’s “pride of Adam”

(Feeley 121). The pride deprives him of seeing the reality as it is; and consequently, it makes Mr. Head and his grandson alienated from social community, let alone from each other, as revealed in the climax of the story. Mr.

Head’s inability to recognize reality is well depicted in the city scene. As an unreliable guide, he also bars Nelson to recognize reality. For instance, he shows

Nelson the city’s sinister side only – its system of sewers, “endless pitchblack tunnels” like “the entrance to hell” (CS 259). And totally disoriented in the city,

Mr. Head stubbornly guides Nelson into the wrong way even though Nelson points out that they might lose themselves due to Mr. Head’s misjudgment. Mr.

Head’s false pride makes him disallow his own fault.

Although, in this story, violence is not finally experienced in the form of death as in the above two stories, O’Connor also reveals human selfishness and weakness through the shocking moments encountered by Nelson and Mr. Head.

Nelson’s recognition of reality comes far earlier than his grandfather’s case.

38 Nelson submits to his grandfather when he realizes that he might be alone with no guide, lost in the strange city; and he takes hold of the grandfather’s hand as a sign of “dependence” (CS 262). Being aware of the smallness of his existence, Nelson acknowledges the superior power of the older man. On the other hand, Mr. Head cannot easily escape from his self-absorbed world of superiority; gratuitously, he still tries to further the boy’s education. At the boy’s moments of great vulnerability, however, the old man deserts his grandson: first, he hides when the boy wakes up from an exhausted nap; then, he denies his kinship with the boy when Nelson upsets a woman’s groceries in the panic of abandonment.

Like Julian commits against his mother in “Everything That Rises Must

Converge,” the real violence for the little boy comes from his grandfather whom the boy feels solely dependent upon, rather than from the clashing accident itself.

So scared at the approach of a policeman, Mr. Head denies Nelson as his grandson in front of a crowd: “this is not my boy, . . . I never seen him before” (CS 265). Mr.

Head’s denial of Nelson is the pivotal event in the story. Strongly hurt by Mr.

Head’s treachery, Nelson’s mind freezes; and he totally scorns Mr. Head’s disgrace. And Mr. Head is fully separated from his grandson whom he truly loves in reality even without recognizing it. Browning claims that Mr. Head’s denial can be compared to the “denial of Christ by Judas and Peter” (63). Denying the

Christ-figure, Mr. Head suffers from his painful sense of guilt; it is the condition preparing the moment of epiphany to come later.

39 As seen in the above stories, O’Connor uses violence grotesquely for her arrogant ingrates to open their eyes to reality. Their sense of superiority to others is totally destroyed by the sudden, shocking moment of violence. The reason why

O’Connor uses such an extreme device of violence is because it best reveals

“what we are essentially” (O’Connor Mystery 113). With passionate concern about some hidden reality beneath the surface, O’Connor clearly affirms the necessity of using distortion and violence in her stories:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him; and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures (Mystery 33-4).

By bringing characters to the point of death or the deepest solitude, O’Connor forces them to reveal the “essence of the best possible self, the truest self, the self most clearly in touch with inner coherence, the self most ready for eternity”

(Whitt 11). Furthermore, the effect of violence is also enlarged in the reader’s mind, not limited to the characters in the stories. As Whitt asserts, violence is

40 essential as a “device to move the reader toward something else, something that could be seen as the embodiment of the story’s mystery” (11). Violence, therefore, is never gratuitous in O’Connor’s stories. Importantly, the suffering through violence is spontaneously connected with the epiphany of the characters.

In the traditional sense, epiphany has identified the “moment in which an external force revealed some truth to human beings” (Shloss 67). According to

Carol Shloss, O’Connor seemed to feel an affinity with this ancient concept of epiphany; and hence she tended to emphasize a divine movement-human response pattern, whereby people are the “recipients of some great and even unsought knowledge” (69). O’Connor uses violence as the external force required for the revelation of supernatural grace. In short, the violence opens the way to salvation for the sinners in her stories, and makes them prepare for the moment of epiphany.

And for O’Connor, the meaning of salvation lies in orthodox Christianity.

O’Connor’s concern about religion indicates her intense concern about human spirituality: she focuses more on the inner life of human beings rather than on the surface life. And the inner life represented in her stories is firmly connected with the world of her Roman Catholicism. Her people with the sin of pride are redeemed only by God’s grace, a term used for the “communication of love between God and man” (Maida 552); and it is the very way for salvation to get eternal life. However, God’s grace is visited with human suffering. And it is connected with the characters’ epiphany, the most climactic point of the stories.

41 That is to say, epiphany is ‘moment of grace’ for O’Connor.

In “A Good Man is Hard To Find,” for example, at the last moment of the grandmother’s life, she suddenly feels sympathy for the vicious murderer; and she acknowledges that she is no better than The Misfit. He could be her son; he could indeed be good enough to be her son. At the very moment of recognition, her head clears for an instant. Stretching out her hand, she touches him and murmurs, “why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (CS 132). However, in case of The Misfit, the self-sufficient killer coldly rejects the grandmother’s sympathy for him. When she touches him on the shoulder with words of love, he immediately shoots her three times through her chest. He is only a heartless man thinking that the pleasure of life is nothing but “meanness” (CS 132). Because a

“person who cannot feel pleasure abhors human contact,” what he does most readily is “kill” (Giannone 50).

The Misfit’s real conflict is with God. He feels torn between the impulse to follow Jesus and the dread of doing so, so all he can do is to suppress Jesus’ call by killing, burning and destroying. Since he could not verify whether or not Christ is God, he does not believe in the presence of Jesus; and the mystery of life is nothing to him. This mental torture of The Misfit is ambiguously revealed onto his face: his voice seems about to “crack” and his face is “twisted as if he were going to cry” (CS 132). And it is at this point that the grandmother feels sudden sympathy for The Misfit. Giannone suggests that The Misfit’s very tortuous need

42 for certitude shakes the grandmother into covering his exposed humanness with a maternal embrace (50).

The grandmother’s gesture makes “contact with mystery” (O’Connor

Mystery 111). Ironically, The Misfit is wearing Bailey’s shirt at the instant. It is a symbolic representation that he could become her genuine son in the world of union. Accepting God’s grace, she finally chooses to love others with humility.

Although the story ends with the grandmother’s death, she is “wiser as she goes into that next life” (Whitt 48). She recognizes briefly that she and The Misfit are bound together by the mystery of life and death, a mystery that she has been able to ignore until this extreme moment. Living on the surface of life, she is unaware of its depth; however, she finally embraces the religious reality with her corporeal death. Dieter Meindl asserts that the grandmother expands the vital community into the community of all human life by calling the murderer one of her babies

(164).

On the other hand, some commentators have often noted that in rejecting the old lady’s proffered sympathy, The Misfit turns his back on the possibility of redemption. He absolutely refuses to open his mind to belief. His spiritual world has been a void, in which there is no sun and no cloud (CS 131). The blankness of the sky, the “light-darkness” setting of the last scene (Giannone 48), suggests The

Misfit’s “spiritually unlighted, unnourished world” (Feeley 74). However, after killing the grandmother, The Misfit, with “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-

43 looking” eyes, grumbles out: “it’s no real pleasure in life” (CS 133). The movement from a deliberate desire to seek meanness as pleasure to an understanding that meanness is not a pleasure is a discernible difference. As Whitt asserts, “with the grandmother’s death, The Misfit has been offered a moment of grace as well” (48). Therefore, the grandmother’s epiphany also penetrates into

The Misfit’s rationalistic heart; taking the form of a “maternal gesture signifying the unity and oneness of life,” it is an instance of “making contact with the sacred core of Being” (Meindl 164).

O’Connor herself claims that the grandmother’ s gesture, like the “mustard- seed,” will grow to be a “great crow-filled tree in The Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become” (Mystery 113). Obviously, the old lady’s mysterious action of love will open The Misfit’s mind to the reality of mystery. God’s grace accepted is symbolically represented by the description of the dead woman “with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (CS

132). Susan Currie also suggests that it implies that the grandmother accepts the gift of grace offered by God and is redeemed ultimately (143). She is reborn in an act of selfless love in the end. Moreover, through her acceptance, The Misfit will open himself to God sometime. The moment of grace for both of them flows out into convergence, the ultimate point of union.

It is also in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” that the distorted

44 relationship between the mother and son enters a new phase through extreme violence. Julian’s mother’s death forces a reversal in Julian’s mind. Julian finally discovers the true relationship between his mother and himself after she has been struck to the ground by the hostile Negro woman. “A tide of darkness” carries her swiftly back to the ordered world of childhood and thence to death (CS 420).

Julian is compelled at last to recognize how total has been his dependence upon her. For Julian, the moment of epiphany comes simultaneously with the violence of his mother’s death. Recognizing that his mother is dying, he vainly cries out:

“Darling, sweetheart, wait!” (CS 420). But she is not able to recognize her son since she is already in the past: “Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed” (CS 420).

For Julian’s mother, the cost of salvation is death.

However, Julian’s mother’s death becomes the “terrible means by which

[her son] can grow toward maturity” (Denham 51). Julian’s ego is “too hard to be destroyed except violently” (Oates 49); therefore, when he suffers from the real loss of his mother, the real Julian emerges. Now returning to reality, Julian realizes how much he has loved his mother, and how deeply he is tied with her. To each other they are darlings, dearly loved ones. For the first time, he is truly aware of his own fault that he has been so insensitive to his mother’s love. Outside his mental bubble, Julian is no longer above his mother. Therefore, his calamity will

45 eventually lead to the growth of consciousness. He is now able to replace his defensive idealized image with a realistic view of the self. With the considerable cost, he attains a “true ego, capable of proper self-love and proper love of others”

(Browning 108).

The direction of Julian’s new growth is through darkness of suffering. In the end of the story, O’Connor describes it like this: “The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (CS 420). With the painful sense of guilt, Julian eventually steps forward into the spiritual process of convergence. It represents the paradoxical power of God’s grace that comes with human suffering. Feeley also suggests that this story shows the “rising” of Julian’s mother, and Julian’s own, by implication (105). Ultimately, the unity between mother and son represents the “convergence which rises into contact with God” (Giannone 166).

Also in “The Artificial Nigger,” what comes after violence is the moment of grace. After Mr. Head’s denial of Nelson, they wander in a strange place where

“everything [is] entirely deserted” (CS 267). This symbolic place represents the dreary landscape that mirrors Mr. Head’s soul. Having lost all the hope of recovery of relationship with Nelson, he is deeply aware of the horror of his own mistake. He finally cries out for help: “I’m lost!” (CS 267). His cry expresses a

“despairing displacement of soul” (Shloss 79). This is an imminent sign that the sinner sends to the highest presence for salvation of the lost soul; a sign that

46 directs his way to convergence.

The moment of epiphany suddenly visits Mr. Head’s mind at the very moment he suffers from the deepest solitude as a human being totally alienated from others: “He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation” (CS 268). And it is at this point that Mr. Head and Nelson find “an artificial nigger” with a “wild look of misery” standing before them (CS 268):

“They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in the common defeat” (CS 269). Looking at the statue, they recognize the feeling of mercy for the first time; in the mood, they understand each other with true humility. As Feeley asserts, through the shocking accident, a proud old man becomes aware of the evil in his own heart and of God’s healing mercy, of which he had never before thought himself in need (120).

In other words, the moment of revelation through the plaster statue provides

Mr. Head and Nelson the “opportunity to feel mercy” (Whitt 68). They feel perfect harmony between each other dissolving their differences mysteriously.

Therefore, the statue importantly functions as a “medium of grace” through which the alienated people are united into one, enabling the man and boy to forgive and be forgiven (Browning 68). Browning points out the marvelous appropriateness of this symbol: “the Negro, a traditional symbol in the American South of inequality

47 among men, should be the agent of effecting an acknowledgment of essential human equality” (68). Like the Negro woman in “Everything That Rises Must

Converge,” the violent intruder in “The Artificial Nigger” also appears in the form of a Negro. O’Connor imagined the Negro as an agent of salvation in these stories.

But in neither story is the focus of attention ultimately on the issue of race. As

Miles Orvell affirms, the root meaning of the artificial nigger to Nelson and Mr.

Head lies in its “being not an image of Negro suffering but an image of common human misery” (160). Therefore, being harmonized with the statue, Mr. Head and

Nelson now feel “united to the ‘man’ before them” (Orvell 156).

Now Mr. Head and Nelson are no longer rivals in pride; instead, they become the best companion for each other. Mr. Head and Nelson ride the last train home. Reunited, they come back home of love and mercy in the end. Mr. Head realizes with “shame” that he has been a “great sinner” due to his pride (CS 270); at the same time, he experiences the moment of grace in which the “action of mercy covers his pride like a flame and consumes it” (CS 270). Unlike

O’Connor’s other stories, the moment of grace at the end of this story that reunites two people after their sundering is stated explicitly in theological terms. As Shloss claims, O’Connor unambiguously conveys that it is the Christian God who has spoken to Mr. Head, and the old man interprets his own character and situation in light of Original Sin, damnation, and release from suffering (80). Finally realized that he is forgiven for his sin and restored from the fall, Mr. Head is ready to enter

48 Paradise, the “true garden of salvation, watered by the ever-flowing rivers of

God’s mercy” (Browning 66). It means that Mr. Head and Nelson humbly participate in the way to convergence, the union with each other and with God.

O’Connor’s idea of convergence is inspired by Teilhard de Chardin’s theology of evolution as slightly mentioned in the introduction. According to

Chardin, growth toward unity with others is the “spiritual direction of evolution”

(Browning 107). Giannone roughly explains about the Chardin’s idea entitling

O’Connor’s final collection Everything That Rises Must Converge:

The entire universe is, and always has been, in perpetual evolution toward cosmic convergence into a single whole. The air, the earth, humankind – everything – are heading toward a unitive perfection. That end is union with God through God’s Son (157).

With Chardin, O’Connor shares the faith in “God’s plan to unify a diverse cosmos into Himself” (Giannone 157). O’Connor’s people are not quite whole until violence makes them whole; they must suffer an amazing initiation for their spiritual growth. The long journey of O’Connor’s people ends in the true destination of convergence at which point all of them are united with God Himself.

However, O’Connor’s concern with the discovery of spiritual reality is quite similar with the nineteenth century American romancers’. In comparison between the nineteenth century romancers and O’Connor, they resemble in their

“metaphysical habit of discovery - of penetrating beyond the surface of life to 49 some hidden reality”(Orvell 39). For example, Poe’s prose poem, Eureka, is based on the idea that is very similar with O’Connor’s idea of cosmic convergence:

The universe, composed of atoms radiated outward from a primary divine unity to an almost infinite variety, is conceived to be governed by the complementary laws of attraction and repulsion, in terms of which all phenomena are explicable (Hart 262).

But at the same time, an important distinction is made because of O’Connor’s

Catholic vision. O’Connor’s concern with the spiritual is obviously theological unlike Poe’s. Whereas for O’Connor, in every case where the mystery is experienced, it is through an act of God, through grace, that Christian agency is absent in Poe’s transcendental imagination. Orvell also suggests that O’Connor’s imagination is closest to that of the Southern-bred Poe, for whom “discovery means transcending the limitations of the material earth in a vision of supernatural wonder” (38). But he points out the difference between the two: for Poe “death is passage from matter to a transcendence of matter,” while for O’Connor the “soul is itself metamorphosed through descending grace” (Orvell 38).

It is remarkable that O’Connor uses some images to represent her idea of convergence instead of explaining it. For example, in “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr.

Head and Nelson ironically have the similar appearance, even though the gap between their ages is more than fifty years: “they looked enough alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had a youthful 50 expression by daylight, while the boy’s look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it” (CS 251). From the first, their final convergence is implied in this double image. Moreover, at the instant of reunion in front of the artificial Negro, they become one: “The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets” (CS 268). In a theological sense, the double in O’Connor’s fiction represents an “ineluctable human dualism, the divided self that is the inheritance of fallen man” (Asals 121). Browning asserts that since Nelson is a “living embodiment of Mr. Head’s intellectual pride and moral boasting,” the old man’s denial of the boy is tantamount to the death of that aspect of himself which Nelson represents (63). Through the denial, accordingly, Mr. Head finally humbles himself and becomes reunited with Nelson. Ultimately, the double motif is

O’Connor’s symbolic representation of Mr. Head and Nelson’s final convergence.

O’Connor subtly represents her idea of convergence through the implication of double images in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” as well. In this story, the oblique hint of convergence is the identical hats of Julian’s mother and the huge Negro woman: “a purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out” (CS 405). This “hideous” hat, a symbol of Julian’s mother’s pride, is also found on the head of the Negro woman by Julian (CS 405). O’Connor describes

51 the image of the hat twice in the story to emphasize its double identity. The large

Negro woman embodies a “side of life his mother has refused to see” (Asals 96).

Through her, Julian’s mother’s sense of superiority to others is destroyed; and she finally joins the way of convergence with the suffering of physical death.

Consequently, O’Connor shows us her hopeful vision of spiritual convergence in the end of her stories. Her stories are about the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who do not have a chance of spiritual growth without it. O’Connor emphasizes that the sinners in her stories are redeemed only by God’s grace; only God’s mercy can burn away the sin of pride. Her people’s suffering through violence is an inevitable fate for preparing the moment of grace.

When they accept it, they realize that they are going toward the realm of divine love in which their spirits are harmoniously united into oneness without distressful feelings of displacement and alienation.

52

Conclusion

In terms of O’Connor’s humanistic attitude toward mankind, ‘converging’ means the “growth of sympathy through the acceptance of the essential equality of all human beings” (Spivey 144); it also means that one is joined to others by “ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery” (O’Connor Mystery 112).

O’Connor tries to embody her characters’ spiritual metamorphosis from alienation into perfect union through supernatural grace in her stories. Whereas she portrays the problem of alienation and reunion in the family unit in “The Artificial Nigger” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” she further embraces the union of the larger human community beyond the immediate family unit in “A Good Man

Is Hard To Find.” The final union of the grandmother and The Misfit transcends the one between family members.

It is important that mutual understanding and love between family members is immediately extended into perfect union of mankind. Therefore, the endings of the three stories discussed so far emphasize the human tendency toward

“interdependence” and the idea that an inability to recognize sameness, and thus to “converge or love, results in destructiveness” (Paulson 84). Alienation expressed between family members and between different social groups is only

53 overcome when individuals suffer moments of insight coincidental with moments of guilt.

That is to say, the way of salvation O’Connor suggests through her fiction is to realize perfect union between you and me and the world with true humility. The growth of spirit always accompanies the suffering of disillusionment from the self-complacent world. Through the painful destruction of pride and false identities, O’Connor’s characters eventually come to recognize reality as it is: how much they love each other; how much they have been indifferent to others and how much it hurts each other; and ultimately, how much they are alienated from each other. The characters’ acceptance of reality is ultimately connected with the sacred power of God, since O’Connor as a Catholic writer believed that

“salvation, in the traditional sense of achieving eternal life, was obtained within the Church” (Spivey 21). For O’Connor, therefore, the ultimate human alienation is the estrangement from invisible truth of life; from the mystery of faith that is a

“gift of grace.”5 Only God’s grace can redeem his displaced sinners through its mysterious revelation in human world.

The final process of salvation is to realize the spiritual convergence of mankind in God. According to Teilhard de Chardin, the “peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to

5 Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 122, quoted in Sister Katherine Feeley, Vioce of the Peacock (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1972) 42. Jung said that “ . . . faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace. We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of 54 the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together” (quoted in Oates 46 emphasis mine). Fortunately in the end, O’Connor’s people open themselves to God, accepting the gift of grace offered by God.

Escaped from the world of egoistic self, they find their ‘person’ through converging together. In other words, realizing that their identities as an isolated individual are false, they rediscover their true identities in convergence.

Eventually, the individual in O’Connor’s stories recognizes his potential as a person through self-awarenness, which is the ultimate effect of grace. Therefore, the theme of the three stories might be considered “a search for human significance in the evolutionary process” (Maida 552). On the journey of

O’Connor’s people in the stories, they encounter the violent incidents that are shocking but also mysterious because the accidents lead them to accept the moment of epiphany. When they meet with those mysterious moments, they realize the universal kinship between themselves and others acknowledging their own limits and weaknesses as human beings. O’Connor tells that it is the mystery of grace God presents us. For O’Connor’s people, therefore, the final destination of the journey is ‘convergence,’ a point where “everything that goes up comes together, meets, becomes one thing” (Walker 74).

On the other hand, O’Connor’s idea of cosmic convergence – all of the diverse cosmos are converged into God himself – is transcendental. Its Christian

the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves.” 55 spirituality transcending the material, secular world is connected with American tradition. Especially, according to Orvell, O’Connor’s metaphors of the “journey, the quest, the movement of a character into the unknown world” for a “discovery of the ultimate nature of reality” suggest the very tradition of American romance

(32). In O’Connor’s stories, the characters proceed through their journey to cosmic convergence, the ultimate way of salvation. In short, O’Connor’s roots are in the nineteenth-century romance tradition, but she carries that tradition into the twentieth century and gives it the spiritual cast of her Catholic faith. Therefore, her Catholic vision makes her stories more individual and original in the very tradition, and consequently places Flannery O’Connor among the most prominent fiction writers in America, transcending regional limitations as a Southern

Catholic writer.

56

Works Cited

Primary Sources:

O’Connor, Flannery. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Rosemary M. Magee. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1987.

O’Connor, Flannery. Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. NY: Vintage Books, 1979.

Secondary Sources:

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: the Imagination of Extremity. Athens: Georgia UP, 1982.

Binding, Paul. Separate Country: A Literary Journey through the American South. NY: Paddinton Press Ltd., 1979.

Brinkmeyer, Jr. Robert H. Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1985.

Browning, Preston M. Flannery O’Connor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1974.

57 Currie, Sheldon. “A Good Grandmother Is Hard to Find: Story as Exemplum.” The Antigonish Review. 81-2, Spring-Summer (1990): 143-55.

Denham, Robert D. “The World of Guilt and Sorrow; Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.’” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin. IV. Autumn (1975): 42-51.

Drake, Robert. Flannery O’Connor: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids: W. B. Erdmans, 1966.

Feeley, Kathleen. Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1972.

Fitzgerald, Robert. “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Harold Bloom. 31-6. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

. “The Countryside and the True Country.” Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Harold Bloom. 19-30. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989.

Hart, James D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. NY: Oxford UP, 1965.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Flannery O’Connor. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1966.

Maida, Patricia Dinneen. “Convergence’ in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction. VII.4 (1970): 549-55.

58

Malin, Irving. “Flannery O’Connor and the Grotesque.” The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. NY: Fordham UP, 1966.

McElroy, Bernard. Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Meindl, Dieter. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Muller, Gilbert H. Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque. Athens: Georgia UP, 1972.

Oates, Joyce Carol. The Visionry Art of Flannery O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Harold Bloom. 43-54. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Orvell, Miles. Invisible Parade: the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1972.

Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. Flannery O’Connor: a Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Poirier, Richard. “If You Know Who You Are You Can Go Anywhere.” Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Melvin J Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark. 45-8. NY: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985.

Rubin, Jr. Louis D. “Two Ladies of the South.” Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark. 25-8. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985.

59

Schott, Webster. “Flannery O’Connor: Faith’s Stepchild.” The Nation. 201.7 September 13. (1965): 142-6.

Shloss, Carol. “Epiphany.” Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Harold Bloom. 65-80. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Spivey, Ted. R. Flannery O’Connor: the Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary. Georgia: Mercer UP, 1995.

Walker, Alice. “Beyone the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” Critical Essays on Flannery O’Conor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark. 71-81. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: South Carolina UP, 1995.

Wood, Ralph C. “From Fashionable Tolerance to Unfashionable Redemption.” Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Harold Bloom. 55-64. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

60