Flannery O’Connor and Mid-Century America by Virginia Grant A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 13, 2014 Copyright 2014 by Virginia Grant Approved by Miriam Marty Clark, Chair, Associate Professor of English Susana Morris, Associate Professor of English Erich Nunn, Assistant Professor of English Abstract Though the fiction of Flannery O'Connor has most often been studied from theological or psychological perspectives, her work is deeply entrenched in, and reflective of, the culture of the mid-twentieth-century United States. This dissertation argues that O'Connor's work makes purposeful use of the cultural issues of the mid- twentieth century, particularly in regards to the Cold War, and that O'Connor's novels and short stories are small scale representations of larger national and global concerns. The first chapter examines a pivotal scene of O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away and argues that O'Connor uses the stereotypical characterization of a homosexual man in order to feed on mid-century American homophobia. The second chapter explores the relationship between fear of integration in the American South and fear of Communism in O'Connor's short stories that focus on race. The third and final chapter focuses on the struggle between faith and reason in O'Connor's fiction and argues that these struggles depict a similar struggle between science and religion at mid-century. With a particular focus on the culture of the Cold War, these chapters elucidate the ways in which O'Connor's fiction encompasses and utilizes the concerns of mid-century Americans. ii Acknowledgements This is dedicated to Galen Craven, my amazing fiancé. Thank you for so many things. You inspire me every day. I am deeply grateful for the support of my wonderful parents, Pat and Gina Grant. Thank you to my family, especially Granny, Pop, Stephen, Elizabeth, Amy, Angela, Brooke, and M’er. I also thank Dr. Susana Morris, Dr. Hilary Wyss, and Dr. Erich Nunn. Finally, I wish to express immense gratitude to Dr. Miriam Marty Clark, my advisor and mentor, for her invaluable support and guidance. A version of a portion of this dissertation was published in Volume 12 of the Flannery O’Connor Review as “Miscegenation and Communism in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person.’” iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii List of Abbreviations ...........................................................................................................v Introduction: Atomic Bomb on the Oconee River: Flannery O’Connor’s Small Worlds .............1 Chapter I: Boys Beware: The Violent Bear It Away and Mid-Century American Homophobia ......................................................................7 Chapter II: “a certain situation in the Southern states & indeed in all the world”: Race and the Cold War in O’Connor’s Short Stories ............................................56 Chapter III: Fellow Travelers: Flannery O’Connor and Science in Cold War America ..........................................................................................129 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................217 iv List of Abbreviations CW Collected Works CS The Complete Stories HB The Habit of Being MM Mystery and Manners PJ A Prayer Journal VBA The Violent Bear It Away v Introduction Atomic Bomb on the Oconee River: Flannery O'Connor's Small Worlds In the fall of 1960, Robert Donner, an interviewer for the Catholic magazine The Sign, visited Milledgeville, Georgia. In town at the same time were several other reporters; these had come in hopes of talking with Barbara Powers, “the wife of the U-2 pilot” Francis Gary Powers, “who was shot down [. .] over Russia and convicted of espionage.” Donner, however, was in Milledgeville for a different reason. “I had come to see Flannery O’Connor,” he writes, “one of the most highly regarded of younger American writers” (qtd. in Magee 44). While the presence of the two women in the same small Southern town was a coincidence, the event is a historical intersection between a figure whose connection to the Cold War was obvious and another figure whose fiction is intrinsically tied to the Cold War and the mid-century events that surrounded it. Ralph C. Wood writes of O’Connor that, though she was “safely situated in a Georgia hilltop farmhouse, seemingly sequestered from the terrors of history,” she was still very aware of the events of the world outside Milledgeville (1). Not only was O’Connor aware of global and national events, but she was greatly concerned with the impact of those issues on her country and her region. I argue that the global events and American concerns of the mid- twentieth century distinctly shaped O’Connor’s very focused Southern narratives. O’Connor’s work is often studied from a theological or psychological perspective, and many scholars of her fiction focus on the Christian intentions in her writing. The result is that her very complicated observations and critiques of twentieth-century culture are pushed to the side. Even when she is studied as a Southern writer, a focus on the events of her life—her years spent with her mother on a farm in a rural Georgia, her 1 devout Catholicism, the scarcity of romantic partnership in her life, her struggle with lupus, her very early death—creates the impression of O’Connor as a solitary, eccentric writer who lived apart from the rest of the world. Among those who do study the significance of American culture in O'Connor's fiction, race is a frequent topic of interest, particularly to critics such as Sarah Gordon and John N. Duvall. Scholars such as Katherine H. Prown1 and others have explored issues of gender in O'Connor's work, while Jeffrey J. Folks2 has recently discussed O’Connor’s politics. There are also larger studies of the cultural context and cultural implications of O'Connor's work, including Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo's collection of essays, Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism, and Jon Lance Bacon's book Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture. But while more cultural studies of O'Connor's fiction are now becoming a part of the conversation, some of the most troubling aspects of her fiction remain so, even after years of discourse about her work. I argue that these problematic aspects of O'Connor's fiction are indicative of the conflicts and issues of mid-century America and that O’Connor’s novels and short stories offer small scale representations of the national and global issues that shaped much of the mid-twentieth century. O’Connor’s Southern characters and settings exemplify the realities of mid- century Americans in the South, particularly the rural South. But readings that focus on her fiction's Southern-ness often exclude larger issues in the United States or the globe. O’Connor herself stated: 1 Revising Flannery O'Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. Print. 2 Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to O’Connor to Haruf. Jefferson, NC: 2012. Print. 2 As a fiction writer who is a Southerner, I use the idiom and the manners of the country I know, but I don’t consider that I write about the South. So far as I am concerned as a novelist, a bomb on Hiroshima affects my judgment of life in rural Georgia, and this is not the result of taking a relative view and judging one thing by another, but of taking an absolute view and judging all things together; for a view taken in light of the absolute will include a good deal more than one taken merely in the light provided by a house-to-house survey. (MM 133-34) O'Connor has long been considered, and studied as, a Southern writer, but much of the culture that impacted her fiction is that of the entire United States or of the globe. My aim in these chapters is to show the ways in which O’Connor’s fiction is impacted by such specific events as the “bomb on Hiroshima” and by the attitudes of mid-century Americans. My work elucidates the ways in which O’Connor’s work is directly impacted by the Cold War, and I focus specifically on issues of homophobia, issues of race, and the relationship between science and religion at mid-century. While the Cold War is a topic that seems removed from O’Connor’s stories of strange Southerners and backwoods prophets, it is in fact of enormous consequence in her fiction. O’Connor’s own life was impacted by the Cold War before she completed her first novel. She was involved in activity connected to the Red Scare during her stay at the artists’ colony of Yaddo in New York, writing in February of 1949, “We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group Tuesday—the revolution” (HB 11). Sally Fitzgerald explains that the incident O’Connor mentions is about journalist Agnes Smedley, “who 3 by all accounts made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was a Communist Party member in good standing” (Fitzgerald, HB 11). Robert Lowell led a group of four Yaddo residents in meeting with the board of directors and calling for the removal of Elizabeth Ames as head of Yaddo. Biographer Brad Gooch writes of this series of events that “its least likely participant was Flannery O’Connor, ever silent, and keeping a canny distance. Yet the combination of Lowell’s mesmerizing personality, some annoyance with Mrs. Ames’s autocratic style, and a simple view of Communism as evil, all led her to take part” (168). Though O’Connor’s participation was limited, Fitzgerald asserts that the event “left a deep impression on her” (HB 12).