'Between the House and the Chicken Yard' The Masks of Mary Flannery O'Connor Jolly Kay Sharp Approved Graduate Committee: |/v } i> i f'l v-K^cr u-^ Dr. Will Brantley, Major Professor (ilk, RA^UT: Dr. Allen Hibbard, Reader A c •U>"*' *\*J&k- Dr. Tom Strawman, Chair of the Department of English Dr. Michael D. Allen, Dean of the College of Graduate Studies "Between the House and the Chicken Yard": The Masks of Mary Flannery O'Connor Jolly Kay Sharp A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Middle Tennessee State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree December 2008 UMI Number: 3347094 Copyright 2009 by Sharp, Jolly Kay All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3347094 Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway PO Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Acknowledgements This dissertation came about as a result of my life's circumstances and the desire to rise above them. Many people have challenged or inspired me throughout its completion, especially my mother, Emma Sharp; my daughter, Jessica; my son, Josh; my son-in-law, Michael; and my grandsons Liam and Seth. Thanks go to Tom Frazier for listening to my ideas, reading and rereading my drafts, sharing his responses, and always being supportive. My dissertation has been strengthened because of the guidance of Dr. Will Brantley and Dr. Allen Hibbard of Middle Tennessee State University. I appreciate the many hours they have devoted to this process, their consistent encouragement, and their advice. For financial and personal support, I express gratitude to the administration of University of the Cumberlands, MTSU for an English fellowship, and Georgia College and State University for a Flannery O'Connor Junior Fellowship. Nancy Davis Bray and the staff of the Special Collections at GCSU deserve special thanks for all their assistance during my two week visit and subsequent emails. The Flannery O'Connor Special Collections Letter File and Vertical File provided valuable unpublished materials for this dissertation. O'Connor's manuscripts from the Flannery O'Connor Special Collections at GCSU are noted by their File number as listed in The Manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor at Georgia College by Stephen G. Driggers and Robert J. Dunn with Sarah Gordon. The librarians at Norma Jean Perkins Hagan Memorial Library of University of the Cumberlands faithfully helped me track down elusive O'Connor articles. I also thank my student worker, Stefanie Canada, who spent many hours filing information, locating ii articles, proofing text, and helping me with daily responsibilities in the office to allow me extra time to write. The staff of Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library also willingly assisted me during my research of Flannery O'Connor-Betty Hester Letters and O'Connor Papers. Several other libraries fulfilled my email requests for O'Connor materials: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University; Weinberg Memorial Library, University of Scranton; Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia; Department of Special Collection at McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, and The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. All of these libraries with the exception of University of Scranton were noted in Postmarked Milledgeville: A Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Correspondence in Libraries and Archives, compiled and annotated by R. Neil Scott and Valerie Nye. Final acknowledgements go to Mary Flannery O'Connor whose Southern grotesque literature captured my interest many years ago. Without her works, both published and unpublished, this dissertation would have been impossible. in Abstract "Between the House and the Chicken Yard": The Masks of Mary Flannery O'Connor By Jolly Kay Sharp Mary Flannery O'Connor's personal idiosyncrasies and literary talents enabled her to don multiple masks that both concealed and revealed segments of herself as she desired. While O'Connor's personal and social masks were shaped by her Southern and Catholic roots, her vivid imagination and artistry fashioned her literary masks, allowing her to explore life's grotesqueness. Many of O'Connor's literary characters shelter features of her own disposition and purpose. This study uncovers O'Connor's personal and social masks and then explores her self-identification with six characters: Enoch Emery, Nelson Head, Joy/Hulga Hopewell, Hazel Motes, Old Tarwater, and Rufus Johnson. It considers the manner by which O'Connor distorted traditional Southern myths to formulate her own sense of the Southern grotesque. It analyzes O'Connor's self-definition through her mentoring of other writers and concludes by highlighting the maturation of O'Connor's masks from her first published story to its final reworking late in the author's life. O'Connor's masks emerge as metaphorical embodiments of her veiled autobiography. This study underscores the ways in which they illuminate O'Connor's regional critiques, her reactions to family, friends, and acquaintances, her insights into her own writing, and her successes and growth as an artist. iv Preface On 5 July 1958, Flannery O'Connor wrote to Betty Hester, commenting that "there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy" (Habit 290-91). O'Connor was definitely mistaken in her premature assessment of how her life would be analyzed as the multiple articles, essays, books, dissertations, theses, movies, and, yes, biographies attest. However, the concept of communing with the chickens was not new. In a letter to Maryat Lee on 9 January 1957, O'Connor wrote, "the parental presence never contributes to my articulateness, and I might have done better at answering some of your questions had I entertained you in the hen house. That's a place I would like to keep two cane- bottomed chairs in if there were any way to keep the chickens from sitting on them in my absence" ("Letters" 1020). Throughout her life, O'Connor felt an affinity to unusual, solitary, or stubbornly independent birds, as evidenced by her choice of Andalusia farm companions. Always in "awe" of the peacock ("King" 6), O'Connor dreamed of peacocks and their disquieting scream (20), which comparably echoes O'Connor's own unusual, solitary, stubbornly independent, and often grotesquely articulated voice. The comfort zone that O'Connor experienced with her peacocks, pheasant cocks, chickens, and other peafowl paralleled or even surpassed that of her closest human friends. In 1961, discussing with Hester her consternation about the request to write a promotional introduction for a new edition of Wise Blood, O'Connor declared that having to give "explanations" or "directions" regarding the perception of a book is "terrible" (Habit 442). She continued, "In the future, anybody who writes anything about me is going to have to read everything I have written in order to make legitimate v criticism, even and particularly the Mary Ann piece" (442). By this time, O'Connor had written more than one novel and knew that she would "be judged" (442), at least by some readers or critics. When the Sisters at the Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta asked O'Connor in 1960 to write about Mary Ann, a young girl whose "beautiful brave spirit" had influenced their lives, O'Connor agreed only to edit the Sisters' manuscript (O'Connor, "Introduction" 4, 7). While she was intrigued by "the mystery, the agony that is given in strange ways to children" (Habit 394), O'Connor "did not want to imbibe Mary Ann's atmosphere" ("Introduction" 5). Nonetheless, Mary Ann's picture and the Sisters' rendition of Mary Ann's life represented "all the other examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie" that haunt O'Connor's own stories (20). O'Connor's introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann recounts the historical impact of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's founding of the Dominican Congregation of nuns that dedicated their lives to the care of terminal patients, Rose's accounts of some of the patients, as well as incidents within Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark," his sketches in Our Old Home, and his notebooks that deal with human defects and human reactions to them. The combination of grotesqueness, death, and human elucidation surrounding the story of Mary Ann would have touched not only O'Connor's interest but also her soul. In fact, after reading the Sisters' manuscript, O'Connor recorded that the literary technique was totally askew but that "the mystery of Mary Ann" was successfully communicated ("Introduction" 14). O'Connor insisted that "[a] story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality," but that understanding of mystery begins "with reality" ("Writing" 90-91). Even though the memoir was not written in a dramatic fashion, O'Connor still experienced what the Catholic Church calls the Communion of vi Saints, "a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state" ("Introduction" 20). While she admitted that individuals often mask their evil with "dispassionate" faces (17), O'Connor questioned human capability to understand their own grotesqueness since most people manage to "soften their real look" behind a mask "full of promise" (18).