Flannery O'connor's Fractured Families TONY MAGISTRALE
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Notes and Comment 111 Flannery O'Connor's Fractured Families TONY MAGISTRALE It becomes immediately apparent to even the most casual reader of Flannery O'Connor's fiction that her tales and novels tend to rely on a variety of recurring patterns and themes. There are, for example, few landscapes in her stories; they are set either in the backwood, agrarian environments of the rural South or in the heart of modern American cities. Representing these vastly different worlds are O'Connor's two major groups of protagonists: the middle-aged agrarian landowner and the young urban intellectual. And just as she maintained and resketched these backdrops and personality types throughout her literary career, O'Connor fashioned most of her characters, regardless of their philosophical orientation or environmental background, from fragmented families, wherein they are either the only child or the sole parent. Although several critics have noted the writer's proclivity for drawing fictional situations involving characters from these deliberately truncated family units, no scholar has yet adequately established why O'Connor incorporates these relation ships so frequently into her work, much less explained their larger relevance to her themes and viewpoints.1 Louise Westling's argument that O'Connor's own family life parallels those of her characters is often cited and generally accepted.2 Yet it appears that such an explanation is a little too simplistic for a writer as complex and subtle as O'Connor. More important, such an assumption tends to overlook the affectionate, if unsentimental, portrait of O'Connor's own relation ship with her mother, Regina, described so vividly in The Habit of Being: The Tetters of Flannery O'Connor. Her fictional daughters share no similar attraction toward their mothers. While Westling's interpretation goes on to add a feminist perspective to the growing body of O'Connor scholarship, it ultimately considers the writer's women characters in a strictly secular context, which was not O'Connor's intention at all. A more comprehensive assessment of her familial associations can perhaps be established only when these relationships are viewed in the light of the religious perspective from which O'Connor composed them. O'Connor's literary families are sometimes headed by uncles, grandfathers, and fathers who have charge of children whose other parents are not present. But with the exceptions of Mr. Head, Rayber, and Sheppard, O'Connor's single parents are usually widowed mothers with one child. The writer's widows and widowers are steely, independent types who somehow manage to hold their homes and farms together, but often at the expense of understanding and aiding in the development of their children. However, in those tales where the children are old enough to 1 See Joan T. Brittain, "The Fictional Family of Flannery O'Connor," Renascence, 19 (Fall 1966), pp. 44-52 and Walter Shear, "Flannery O'Connor: Character and Characteriza tion,' Renascence, 20 (Spring 1968), pp. 140-146. 2 Louise Westling, "Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters," Twentieth-Century Literature, 24 (Winter 1978), pp. 510-522. 112 Notes and Comment have attended college, yet are still too immature to leave home, the elaborate examples of familial miscommunication indict the child as well as the parent, for the former appears convinced that an academic degree is an entitlement to worldly scorn and condescension. In either case, the failure of the parent-child affiliation - for there are no healthy, psychologically balanced families in O'Connor's fiction - underscores the deeper spiritual limitations of the individuals involved. In her tales the inability to cohabit with, and demonstrate affection for, a blood relative is the primary indication of a selfish and mean-spirited temperament. Furthermore, in keeping with the religious dimensions of O'Connor's vision, familial disaffection ultimately evolves into a metaphor for describing the alienation of humankind from God. While the fundamental design of the parent-child relationship parallels the Biblical god-man affiliation, the inability of O'Connor's protagonists to sustain love on a human plane serves to underscore their attitude toward the Divine. In the short story "The Lame Shall Enter First," for example, Sheppard's refusal to identify and sympathize with his son's pain over the death of his mother is an indictment of the father's own capacity for love. Unable to accept Norton's inconsolability, Sheppard expresses only contempt for his son's suffering, inter preting it as an expression of the boy's "selfishness. She had been dead for over a year and a child's grief should not last so long. "You're going on eleven years old, he said reproachfully."3 But it is not merely that Norton, unlike Sheppard, has not adjusted to the loss of his mother; the child refuses to accept that he will never see his mother again, and his relentless curiosity over the current status of her soul is an insult to the atheistic tenets of Sheppard's secular humanism. Thus the parent-child relationship in this tale serves to highlight not only the failure to communicate between father and son, but also Sheppard's repudiation of a non-material realm: "his lot would have been easier if when his wife died he had told Norton she had gone to heaven and that some day he would see her again, but he could not allow himself to bring him up on a lie" (p. 461). Sheppard's existential rejection of God, expressed through his stubborn unwillingness to consider Norton's spiritual crisis, gives immediate credibility to Rufus Johnson's theories on heaven and hell. While Sheppard remains soulbound in his scientific rationalism, Johnson believes in the unseen world, and manages to fill Norton's void with the promise that his mother is alive "in the sky somewhere, but you got to be dead to get there. You can't go in no space ship" (p. 462). True to his principles while remaining impervious to his son's needs, Sheppard becomes ultimately responsible for Norton's suicide. He not only invites Rufus into their home as a surrogate son ? "What was wasted on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish" (p. 45 2) - but his consequent betrayals of Norton throughout the tale force the child toward Johnson's dark philosophy of death.4 What begins as a story rooted in the secular conflict of a father struggling with his son's personal 3 Flannery O'Connor, " The Lame Shall Enter first," The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), p. 447. All textual references to any of O'Connor's short stones refer to this collection and will hereafter be cited parenthetically. 4 See especially p. 469, as Sheppard chooses to ignore Norton's gesture of confidence in order to avoid "breaking Johnson's trust." Notes and Comment 113 depression, enlarges into a parable condemning Sheppard's world-view and the narrowness of his spirit. At the core of O'Connor's nuclear families is an admixture of resentment and perversion. Her characters, initially unaware of this fact themselves, often rebel against their responsibilities as parents and children. The tale "A View of the Woods" offers an appropriate illustration of the self-destruction that accompanies rejection of a blood relative. Early in the story we are informed that Mary For tune Pitts bears an almost identical resemblance to her grandfather, Mr. Fortune. Moreover, their similarities are not limited merely to physical characteristics, as "she had, to a singular degree, his intelligence, his strong will, and his push and drive. Though there was seventy years' difference in their ages, the spiritual distance between them was slight" (p. 336). Both granddaughter and grandfather are destroyed, however, when Mr. Fortune fails to reconcile his goal of material progress with her sanctifiction of the woods that surround their home. When his granddaughter refuses to support his scheme for transforming "the lawn" into a modern city, Fortune finds himself isolated and miserable. Throughout the story Fortune is unwilling to confront the struggle between nature and progress that is internalized, however dimly, within the old man himself and given symbolic representation in his relationship with Mary. Consequently, at the end of the tale when Fortune and his granddaughter engage in physical combat, "he seemed to see his own face coming to bite him from several sides at once" (p. 355). Fortune's dream of a materialistic future is so encompassing that it overwhelms both his dedication to Mary and the sanctity of nature : " He looked out the window at the moon shining over the woods across the road and listened for a while to the hum of crickets at treefrogs, and beneath their racket, he could hear the throb of the future town of Fortune" (p. 349). The old man negates the mysteries of blood: the blood that ties individual family members together and the blood of Christ that inviolates and unites all living organisms in the world. Ironically, it is a heart attack, subsequent to his deadly confrontation with Mary, which eventually kills Fortune - the final interruption of his blood. The acknowledgement of familial bonds and responsibilities seldom occurs in O'Connor's fiction prior to the conclusion of a particular tale. The dramatic, frequently violent action(s) which precipitate the acute awareness of a child's love for a parent or a parent's failure to provide adequate care for its progeny, establishes new associations among individual family members. In tales such as "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "The Lame Shall Enter First," and "The Comforts of Home," reconciliations between parents and children occur at the very moment of death, too late to salvage the relationship.