University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Fall 1978 CLOWNS AND CAPTIVES: FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S IMAGES OF THE SELF MICHAEL JOHN LEE Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation LEE, MICHAEL JOHN, "CLOWNS AND CAPTIVES: FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S IMAGES OF THE SELF" (1978). Doctoral Dissertations. 1210. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1210 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. 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ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 7909427 LEE, MICHAEL JOHN CLOWNS AND CAPTIVES: FLANNERY 0 ‘ CONNOR'S IMAGES OF THE SELF. UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE* P H .D .* 1978 University Mkrorilrns international 300 n. zeeb road, ann arb o r, mi 8<io 6 © 1978 MICHAEL JOHN LEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED /Y ^ 7 CLOWNS AND CAPTIVES: FLANNERY 0*CONNOR'S IMAGES OF THE SELF by MICHAEL JOHN LEE B.A., Seton Hall University, 1968 M.A., Northeastern University, 1972 A DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in E nglish September, 1978 This dissertation has been examined and approved. Dis^drtaiitfh director, Gary Lindbergh Associate Professor of English Lester Fisher, Assistant Professor of English c Jean Kennard, Professor of English ifessor of History l u r r ^ i y Straws, Professor of Sociology /? r Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the following people for their assistance in com­ pleting this work: Gary Lindberg, for his critical judgments and editor­ ial suggestions which I have found invaluable; Kathleen Berry-Lee and Jesse Lee, for their moral support; and Katherine Hughes, for her expert preparation of the manuscript. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... i i i ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 I . FINDING GOOD MEN AND WOMEN: OBJECTIVE IMAGES OF THE SELF ................................................................................................. 10 I I . THREE VIEWS OF THE WOODS: THE SELF AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD ......................................................................... US I I I . GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE IN THE SECULAR CITY; THE SELF IN SOCIETY ................................................................................ 76 IV. REVELATIONS OF THE SELF: GRACE IN O'CONNOR'S WORLD ........... 118 V. "THE THREATENED INTIMACY OF CREATION1': WISE BLOOD AND THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY ..................................... 11*2: BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 16 8 iv ABSTRACT CLOWNS AND CAPTIVES: FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S IMAGES OF THE SELF by MICHAEL JOHN LEE This study seeks from Flannery O'Connor's fiction the author's implicit attitudes towards human nature. Specifically, it focuses upon what O'Connor felt to be the problem of finding and maintaining a human identity in a de-humanizing world. By examining the images O'Connor uses to describe her characters and the ways in which she has them per­ ceive themselves and others, the study finds throughout her fiction a dominant theme. That theme is that people discover their own identity only when they see themselves or images of themselves reflected in the condition and experience of other human beings. The result is an approach to O'Connor's fiction which differs greatly from the theologically ori­ ented approaches which have dominated O'Connor criticism . In a variety of her works O'Connor uses objective descriptions of people as animals, machines, or inert objects. Chapter One shows how these images establish a world-view which reduces human behavior and iden­ tity to animal instinct or mechanical response. In this milieu charac­ ters must find human identities. Chapter Two discusses how O'Connor's characters participate in this de-humanizing process by seeing themselves v in terras of objects or positions which symbolize their social worth, rather than in human terms. Chapter Three shows characters failing to realize their humanity even in their social interactions. Most of them act out social roles not to relate to one another, but to define themselves as different from (i.e. better than) one another. Chapter Four seeks to establish a working definition of '’grace*' in O'Connor's world. This chapter examines several of the epiphanies in her fiction, and finds that her characters become most fully human when they perceive images of their essential unity with other people— when they see their differences dissolve. In short, the grace they re­ ceive is not divinely infused. Rather, it is a human process, involving a person's relationships with others, rather than his or her position with God or in the cosmos. Finally, Chapter Five examines O'Connor's two novels, finding in them the images and themes discussed in the first four chapters, which deal mainly with the shorter fiction. Wise Blood is seen to be a novel whose hero fails to find a coherent human identity because he fails to seek that identity in his human relationships. The Violent Bear It Away, by contrast, allows its main character the chance to redeem himself, concluding as it does with young Tarwater on the verge of a return to the city with a new sense of himself as part of the human co n d itio n . The bleakly inhuman imagery which dominates O'Connor's fiction does not indicate that she felt humans to be doomed to a bestial existence unless they shared her own vision of God. Rather, this imagery suggests what people make of them selves when they c u t them selves o ff from th e ir fellows for social, economic, or religious reasons. By undercutting these false visions of the self, and t»y implying that grace operates within a human context, O'Connor's fiction affirms the human spirit in a world whose institutions she felt to be inimical to that spirit. INTRODUCTION "Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. In the little over thirty years since Flannery O'Connor published her first piece of fiction, her critics have found embodied in her works an array of beliefs ranging from nihilism to orthodoxy, from Southern 2 A grarianism to C h ristia n Humanism. But to appraise her work on the basis of an abstract dogmatic content does an injustice to her skill as a writer, and critics who see in her work an "ism" of some kind ignore what she saw as the fundamental aim of fiction. As she herself stated, "the least common denominator of all fiction" is its concreteness. The good writer "appeals through the senses," and "you cannot appeal to the Flannery O'Connor, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1969), p. 73* 2 The earliest critical assessments of O'Connor's works were that they were nihilistic or deterministic. Cf. Carl Hartman, "Jesus Without Christ," Western Review, 17 (1932), pp. 76-82, and James Farnham, "The Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor," America, 103 (1961), pp. 277-81. Two critics who see in O'Connor's work the beliefs expressed by the Southern Agrarians are P. Albert Duhamel, "The Novelist as Prophet," and C. Hugh Holman, "Her Rue With a Difference: Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Literary Tradition," both in The Added Dimension, ed. Lewis Lawson and Melvin Friedman (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1961;), pp. 88-107 and 73-87. David Eggenschwiler's The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Con­ nor (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 19^8) places O'Connor's work in the tradition of Christian existential humanism.