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Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters Author(s): Louise Westling Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 510-522 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441199 Accessed: 24/03/2009 13:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hofstra. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century Literature. http://www.jstor.org Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters LOUISE WESTLING On first reading Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh remarked, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable."' She would have been pleased with this reaction because she did not want to be easily identifiable as female. She seemed to think of her art as a force above or outside conditions of gender. When she spoke of "the writer," she always referred to an anonymous, rather objective intellect whose personal life was irrelevant to "his" work. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, she took her aesthetic from Aquinas. In "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" she explained, "St. Thomas said that the artist is concerned with the good of that which is made. [This approach] eliminates any concern with the motivation of the writer except as this finds its place inside the work."2 Yet there is at least one distinctive element in O'Connor's fiction which ultimately calls attention to her motivation as a female and leads us outside the work for explanation. This is the repeated mother- daughter pattern which seems a disturbing force often at odds with the clear purpose of a story. The major elements of the pattern appear in "Good Country People." Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o'clock and lit her gas heater and Joy's. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated.3 In at least six of O'Connor's thirty-one published stories, the plot centers on a mother resembling Mrs. Hopewell and a daughter like Joy. The mother is a hardworking widow who supports and cares for her large, physically marred girl by running a small farm. The daughter is almost always bookish and very disagreeable. The mother is devoted to 510 O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS her nevertheless, but with an attitude of exasperated bafflement at her perversity and oddness. Variations and echoes of this mother-daughter motif appear in so many other stories besides those in which it is central, that the emphasis appears almost obsessive. Flannery O'Connor said that literary vocation "is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively. The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not." (M&M, p. 27) Her sour, deformed daughters and self- righteous mothers certainly live, but we must ask why it is such char- acters whom she can invest with vivid being and why they appear so often. If we examine their characteristics I believe we will find that their distortions express a passionate but inadvertent protest against the lot of womankind. Flannery O'Connor can make these women live because she is one of them. Almost all of O'Connor's families have been truncated in some way. Often fathers or grandfathers or uncles have charge of children whose other parents have disappeared. Most frequently, however, the parent figure is a woman who has been left to raise truculent, unruly sons and daughters. These stranded women prove tough and resource- ful in their dealings with the outside world, providing comfortable if modest homes for their children. The side effects of their struggle are a degree of stinginess and smugness, wariness of strangers, and deter- mination to see things in a cheerful light. A clear example of the norm is Mrs. Cope in "A Circle in the Fire." As the story opens she is weeding her flower bed as vehemently as she attacks every problem on her farm. "She worked at the weeds and tfit grass as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place" (p. 175). Her constant companion is Mrs. Pritchard, the tenant farmer's wife, who delights in telling stories of horrible and lingering illnesses, calamities, and deaths. Mrs. Cope always tries to change the subject with cheerful cliches. She is profusely thankful for her blessings and proud of her accomplishments. "I have the best kept place in the county," she tells Mrs. Pritchard, "and do you know why? Because I work. I've had to work to save this place and work to keep it" (p. 178). Mrs. Pritchard, who says she has only four abscessed teeth to be thank- ful for, is wryly resentful and skeptical of such complacency. In other stories it is the children who cringe, glower, or make snide remarks when their mothers indulge in such platitudes. When a young Bible salesman calls on Mrs. Hopewell in "Good Country People," she 511 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE exclaims, "Why, good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. That's life!" Her daughter's sardonic response is, "Get rid of the salt of the earth, and let's eat" (p. 279). O'Connor's widowed mothers care for their children, but neither sons nor daughters mature successfully. The sons grow up to be intel- lectual drones who live at home. In "Why Do the Heathen Rage," a son snarls at his mother, "A woman of your generation is better than a man of mine" (p. 485). He sees this as a shameful reversal of normal male superiority, and O'Connor intends it to demonstrate his bitter under- standing of his own failure. Similarly, daughters fail to live up to their mothers' expectations or examples. They are socially crippled, being not only physically unappealing but also too intelligent, well educated, and sourly independent to ever assume "normal" roles as wives and mothers. O'Connor makes certain that we notice the younger girls' glasses, ugly braces, and extra pounds, the mature daughters' wooden legs, bad hearts, and tendency to wear ridiculous sweat shirts or Girl Scout shoes. In "A Circle in the Fire" we meet Sally Virginia Cope, "a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning squint and a large mouth full of silver bands" (p. 181). At one point in the story, we find her wearing a pair of overalls pulled over her dress, a man's old felt hat pulled down so far on her head that it squeezes her face livid, and a gun and holster set around her waist (p. 190). "Good Country People" provides a mature example of the type. At thirty-two, Joy Hopewell suffers from a bad heart and a resentful disposition which her mother blames on her wooden leg. In an act of typical perversity Joy changes her legal name to Hulga because of its ugly sound, and dresses "in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it" (p. 276). All day she sits "on her neck in a deep chair," reading nihilistic philosophy. "Sometimes she went for walks but she didn't like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity" (p. 276). What do Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Hopewell do with such daughters? Mostly they try to be understanding and patient, subtly suggesting more positive attitudes and manners. Sometimes, however, they explode in frustration. This happens when Sally Virginia dons her overalls and felt hat. Mrs. Cope watched her with a tragic look. "Why do you have to look like an idiot?" she asked. "Suppose company were to come? 512 O'CONNOR'SMOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS When are you going to grow up? What's going to become of you? I look at you and I want to cry!" (p. 190) One interesting variation in this pattern appears in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Both mother and daughter are named Lucynell Crater, but that is their only resemblance.

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