Flannery O'connor's Unique Influence on Fargo and Three Billboards

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Still Searching for the “Good Man”:

Flannery O’Connor’s Unique Influence on Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,

Missouri

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of

the Graduate School

of Millersville University of Pennsylvania

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

of Master of Arts in English

By Shannon J. Metzler

August 2019 This Thesis for the Master of English Degree by

Shannon J. Metzler

has been approved on behalf of the

Graduate School by

Thesis Committee: Signatures on file

______Timothy Miller, Ph.D. (Thesis Advisor)

______Caleb Corkery, Ph.D.

______A. Nicole Pfannenstiel, Ph.D.

______August 12, 2019

Date

ii ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Still Searching for the “Good Man”:

Flannery O’Connor’s Unique Influence on Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,

Missouri

Shannon J. Metzler

Millersville University, 2019

Millersville, Pennsylvania

Directed by Dr. Timothy Miller

We all eventually come to a recognition that we are a part of something greater than ourselves. By the very act of living, we participate in larger stories of infinite number: the stories of our families, of our communities, of our cultures, of our time. In writing the following pages, I became a part of a larger conversation about Flannery O’Connor, who herself was aware of greater truths surrounding her own life and work. She was certain of the story in which she played a part, and she was both confident and humble in her role. Of course, it is not her dedication to her purpose that leaps from the pages of her fiction but rather an original vein of literature that most of her biographers and critics place within the American Southern Gothic tradition. My initial inquiry began with the recognition of what I deemed to be O’Connor’s style in two particular films: Fargo (1996) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).

While a description of “Gothic” might suit both films given their deranged characters and grotesque worlds, I found them evoking O’Connor’s methods and themes specifically; as with her work, the effect of each was more akin to a slap in the face than the slow, insidious,

iii realizations of a Gothic tale. She has created something distinctly different from her predecessors and contemporaries, and when drawn upon for inspiration this brand of storytelling cannot be mistaken. As this idea has developed throughout my research and writing, I have remained most interested in the particular influence of O’Connor’s oft-examined short work “A Good Man Is

Hard to Find” on current filmmakers as we—as society, culture, humanity—continue our search for a “good man” in the increasingly chaotic world. What transpired in the process led me to an exploration of whether O’Connor and the filmmakers who cite her influence differ in their postmodern views of the immutable ideas of goodness, evil, violence, and justice in the world; whether defining such concepts is only possible by defining their opposites; and whether an ultimate definition is possible at all.

Signature of Investigator ______Shannon J. Metzler Date ______August 2019

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….iii

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………...v

Introduction: A New Definition………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 1: Flannery O’Connor

An Observation of a Measured Life…………………………………………………….5

A Patient Literary Vision………………………………………………………………..22

In But Not Of Her Era……………………………………………………………..29

Chapter 2: Defining the Language of the Inquiry

The Debate of What Is “Good”…………………………………………………………36

Biblical Influence on a Seemingly Godless World…………………………………...42

Chapter 3: An Examination of the Primary Texts

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”…………………………………………………………47

Fargo……………………………………………………………………………………....58

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri…………………………………………...61

Chapter 4: An Analysis of O’Connor’s Stylistic Influence on the Films

Remote Roadside Reckonings: A Shared Sense of Place………………………….65

The Good, the Bad, and the Grotesque: A Shared Treatment of Character………...72

Words Without Worth: A Common Dearth of Communication……………………..81

Chapter 5: Still Searching for the Good Man…………………………………………………..86

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………97

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………100

Introduction: A New Definition

Flannery O’Connor once delineated the nature of her craft against one of its popular myths: “I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system” (O’Connor, et al. 77-78).

Perhaps no literary movement has so embodied the contradictorily simultaneous “escape from” and “plunge into reality” as the tradition of Gothic writing. Many scholars date the Gothic genre from Horace Walpole's 1765 publication of The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and later

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818 (Riquelme 585). The mid-1800s saw writers Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe expand the genre’s parameters, and the modern era ushered in names such as H. P. Lovecraft and William Faulkner to the ever-growing list of contributors.

Prominent areas of focus include a search for identity, struggle with alienation, confrontation with guilt, desire for truth, and interaction with the supernatural. Given these parameters, however, many argue that Gothic sensibilities have always appeared in literature, since literature has always concerned itself with the human condition. The subtitle of Shelley’s Frankenstein declares her character The Modern Prometheus in direct reference to Greek mythology’s embodiment of human aspirations; Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” reimagines the Faust legend of the 1500s; and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet certainly fit the descriptions of supernatural events, guilt, suspicion, and terrifying circumstances. Although all of these works may incorporate supernatural deviations from reality, they also probe the deepest recesses of human nature.

Throughout this tradition, regardless of its origin, writers have penned their characters into confrontations with the darkness of humanity. The pursuit of such themes has led many

Gothic writers to contemplations of the self and the other, individual identity and opposing

forces. Ronald Schleifer, in his 1986 essay “Rural Gothic,” explains that the Gothic novel “seeks extremes” and “presents precisely the need to discover origins,” supernatural origins that “raise the question of identity” for the characters (Schleifer 82-83). This search for identity leads to uncovering the truth of the warring nature within the individual: in binary thought, good versus that which is not, and in deconstructed thought, the gradation of man’s many positive and negative qualities. Discussion of mankind’s nature and how it affects his relation to the world necessitates certain definitions and distinctions. O’Connor once wrote that “[t]o know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks” (O’Connor, et al. 35), and although she was speaking of the fiction writer’s relation to his region and country, the universal truth of her statement applies here. To recognize darkness requires an equal recognition of light; to confront what we might term as evil requires a separation of what is considered evil from what is considered good; and to achieve such a separation requires an instrument of division, a measure with which to sort the theoretical and philosophical matter. Writers who subscribe to particular religious ideologies establish this line within the schema of those ideologies, but others have also employed religious frameworks without necessarily assuming the beliefs upon which they rest. American literature has no shortage of the latter. Nathaniel Hawthorne explored the nature of man and sin through the beliefs of his Puritan ancestry, and countless Southern writers approach the topics of sin and judgment so familiar to a Bible-belt South. But few masters of the genre have produced work so undeniably and self-admittedly tied to their theological declarations as one young woman in

Georgia. Her work not only inhabits but also expands what we term Gothic, and this phenomenon of her contribution to American literature has largely gone unnoticed.

By the time Flannery O’Connor established herself among mid-twentieth century

American fiction writers with the publication of her first novel in 1952, the young Catholic had

already given much consideration to the necessary task of recognizing one’s moral code as a writer. She would later define this similarity amongst Southern Gothic writers, whether believers or not: “...I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God” (O’Connor, et al. 44-45). As she invokes the words from Genesis—“And God created man to his own image...” (Gen. 1:27a

DRB)—O’Connor asks unbelieving Southern writers to recognize the unconscious revelations that pervade their work, the acknowledgement of a higher divinity that emerges from the stories they tell of a damaged humanity.

O’Connor understood the irony that that much of literature owes a great amount to the

Christian traditions it may often seek to dismantle. In her essay “Novelist and Believer,” she details the working tension between those two designations: writer and believer. She asserts that all novelists are limited by their own pasts and the traditions those pasts have contributed to the larger society. In doing so, she reveals the reason why no writer can completely separate an examination of mankind from spiritual concerns:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the west; we are bound to it by ties which

may often be invisible, but which are there nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our

secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism. For my part, I shall have to

remain well within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I shall have to speak, without apology,

of the Church, even when the Church is absent; of Christ, even when Christ is not

recognized. (O’Connor, et al. 155)

“Without apology” absolutely summarizes the approach she employed. In “O’Connor’s

Challenge to Her Readers,” Marilyn Chandler McEntyre notes that O’Connor never attempted

“to make Christianity accessible, comprehensible, or palatable to a contemporary audience;” rather, the writer cuts directly to the most contradictory, polarizing, and provoking portions of the doctrine “and challenges us to begin our reflection there” (44). The scholar uses the verse from Isaiah to further her point: “And we are all become as one unclean, and all our justices as the rag of a menstruous woman…” (Isa. 64:6a). In order to understand such a statement as divine and ultimate truth, McEntyre contends, “requires a radical reordering of our understanding of human values and notions of the virtuous life” (44). In short, O’Connor well knew that her beliefs aligned with truths difficult for others to swallow: that mankind is deserving of hell and cannot escape that fate without the grace from God which it cannot earn, that “there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), and that her faith in Him

“is the substance of things to be hoped for” and the evidence of what cannot be seen (Heb. 11:1).

Nevertheless, the inconvenience of these truths to others held no bearing on how she chose to present them. If her readers doubted their own creation in “the image and likeness of God,” she sought to remind them, with shock value. Contemporary writers seem to demonstrate the fear

O’Connor notes, that God indeed exists, as their work displays evidence of a worldview that relies upon a recognition of “the image and likeness” of some superior moral force, because to argue the darkness of humanity and its need for good from an atheistic standpoint begs the question of whether or not “goodness” can ever be separated from a spiritual context, whether or not it is possible to declare what is right without an absolute measure of what is not.

Just as literature owes much to these Christian beliefs, several contemporary writers owe much to O’Connor specifically. Although writers have employed the characteristics of Gothic literature for centuries—modern storytellers seem particularly inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s trademark nuances. Joel and Ethan Coen and Martin McDonagh are just some of the talented

writers and directors that bring their own grotesque blend of the comic and the violent to the cinema screen, and all three filmmakers have cited O’Connor as an influence in their work.

Among many other works in their combined repertoire, the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996) and

McDonagh’s more recent Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) both undeniably employ a number of the Southern writer’s characteristic features and beg the same questions of humanity—of violence, evil, and justice—however without her preoccupation with sin and grace. I will analyze this connection and its implications through an examination of O’Connor’s life, religious influences, and place in literary history; a consideration of the definition of “good” outside and inside of O’Connor’s Christian context; a detailed interpretation of her short story “A

Good Man Is Hard to Find”; and interpretations of both films. This examination will show that, while the filmmakers do not share O’Connor’s evangelistic agenda, their work highlights the continued search for meaning in the face of the same corruption and depravity recognized by the mid-twentieth century writer. Both Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri exhibit Flannery O’Connor’s redefined and expanded brand of the Gothic in their sense of place, treatment of character, and dearth of communication as they propose postmodern views of the good man within an evil world.

Chapter 1: Flannery O’Connor

An Observation of a Measured Life

The life lived precipitates the work created. However, although she wrote and spoke about her work throughout her life, O’Connor once disclosed her own subscription to the idea of the death of the author, even though Roland Barthes’ essay of the same phrase was not published until after her death. In her essay on “The Teaching of Literature,” she reveals this view of art

and authorship: “Actually, a work of art exists without its author from the moment the words are on paper, and the more complete the work, the less important it is who wrote it or why. If you're studying literature, the intentions of the writer have to be found in the work itself, and not in his life” (O’Connor, et al. 126). Perhaps she will forgive this investigation of her life and beliefs; her intentions are undeniably found in the work itself, as this inquiry will address, and this investigation of their origins seeks instead to set her apart from her contemporaries as well as from writers today.

The young writer so often cited as an honored touchstone of postmodern Gothic work came from modest beginnings. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925 to her

Catholic parents, Edward F. O’Connor, Jr. and Regina (Cline) O’Connor (Walters 11). Her life began in Savannah, Georgia (“Flannery” 13), a town whose embodiment of historic Southern culture provides an appropriate backdrop for the story of the Southern author. The South became one of many identities O’Connor would balance as a writer. In both her fiction as well as in the reflections she would come to write, O’Connor offered the South as a microcosm of all humanity, and she had much to say about the art of writing about it with fidelity and often brutal honesty.

Biographers have often remarked that O’Connor’s younger years bore early indications of her preoccupation with the oddities of life, the anecdote most popularly cited being that of the

New York newspaper photographer sent to the family farm to document five-year-old Mary’s pet chicken who could walk forward and backward. It is easy to imagine that what was surely a trivial novelty assignment to the photographer represented much more to young Mary. In her self-reflective essay “The King of the Birds,” O’Connor remarks that this event turned “a mild interest” in fowl into a “passion” that prompted a growing collection of chickens for which she

even sewed clothing (O’Connor, et al. 3). Eventually, this collection would lead to her now famous affinity for and collection of peacocks. The academic world’s posthumous examination of her life marks these details as indications of O’Connor’s tendency toward the absurd, but perception always informs reality and we see what we intend to see. Other biographies simply reveal that young Flannery “rode horseback, designed lapel pins that she sold at a local store, and raised a tame goose and a quail named Amelia Earhart” (“Flannery” 13-14), and in this context the innocent wonder at and care for the birds seems more endearingly childlike than eccentric.

Growing up, as it always does, brought change and loss. In 1938, when O’Connor was thirteen, the family moved across the state from Savannah to Milledgeville and, in the same year,

Edward was diagnosed with disseminated lupus (“Flannery” 13). In the month before

O’Connor’s sixteenth birthday, on February 1, 1941, her father died of the disease just three years after his initial diagnosis (Walters 11; “Flannery” 14). Biographers have little to say about the particular effects of this loss on the young woman—and rightfully so. Speculation about repercussions need not surpass the fact that she was an only child left with only her mother at the threshold of her post-secondary academic pursuits, her young-adulthood and independence. She had suffered a loss that—as all writers and indeed all persons do—she used to fuel pursuits of life. The one certainty may be the comfort she would have taken at the time in her religion, given her dedicated defense of its centrality to her life in later writings. O’Connor’s Catholic beliefs and Biblical teachings informed her “that whosoever believeth in [Christ], may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (John 3:16b), and “[t]he fear of the Lord is a fountain of life” (Prov.

14:27a), not the fear of death. In the same year as her father’s passing, O’Connor entered

Georgia State College for Women, graduating from the school in 1945 with a B.A. in Social

Science (Drake 8). After her first short story, “The Geranium,” found publication in Accent in the

summer of 1946, her works appeared increasingly in quarterly publications like Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar (Drake 9). In a short time, her life had taken a turn toward a notoriety she could not have anticipated.

Contrary to the subject of her eventual fame, O’Connor’s dream as a young woman was not to publish stories. The student newspaper at Peabody High School in Milledgeville boasts the honor of her first published works—cartoons. In point of fact, she was seeking publication in The

New Yorker for her art when the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop offered her admission in 1946 on the merit of her short story writing (“Flannery” 14). The concentric circles of art and academia owe much to this early interest of O’Connor’s; her stories’ characters display the undeniable influence of her skill as a cartoonist. Biographer Dorothy Walters notes that

“[c]artoons characteristically make a serious statement through ostensibly comic means, using exaggeration and emphasis to achieve their effects” (15), and the parallels to O’Connor’s work are many: the hyperbolic physical characteristics of her characters liken them to vegetables and animals; her skies are paradoxically cloudless and sunless or have clouds shaped like turnips; and terse, punctuated dialogue characterizes her comical traveling Bible salesmen, one-legged intellectuals, and escaped convicts. From her career’s humble beginnings to its humble end, she indeed used comic tactics to make her serious statements. The director of the Writers’ Workshop at the time, Paul Engle, noted that O’Connor’s story submissions for his class were “‘quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weaknesses, hard and compassionate’” (qtd. in

“Flannery” 15).

Not all of her critics and biographers have agreed with Engle’s lattermost term. Even her earliest work seemed to cut directly to mankind’s most damning shortcomings and lay bare his inadequacies and darkest selfish nature. In his foreword to the chapter on O’Connor in his book

Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of American Fiction, Granville Hicks notes that in his reviews of the writer’s work he has alternately called her compassionate and not, and although he wishes to be correct in the former statement he expresses his fear that the latter is indeed more accurate: “...I am afraid that, by and large, compassion was not among Miss O’Connor’s many virtues. She was more concerned with understanding the truth about people than in feeling sorry for them. She did not pity herself, though she had what would seem to be reason to, and she was not inclined to pity others” (136). Hicks seems to confuse compassion with sympathy. While

O’Connor certainly showed no signs of feeling sorry for her characters, it would be a misinterpretation of her purpose to read their often violent encounters as uncaring on the part of the author. She brings many of her characters to confrontations with truth, however painful and unpleasant, and she likely would find it uncompassionate to leave them in their ignorance instead of bringing them to enlightenment.

Therefore, O’Connor’s compassion, as perhaps Engle implied, was found in her honesty about the world and its temporary inhabitants. As Louis D. Rubin, Jr. notes in his 1985 essay

“Two Ladies of the South,” she refrained from the approach of a pitying sentimentality:

Never once is she sentimental about a character: this is the situation, this is the person,

this is what happens. There is a great deal of compassion in her work, but it is always

compassion for characters because they are human beings with human limitations, not

because they have limbs missing or have lost their jobs or are otherwise discomfited. The

moral consciousness that runs throughout [her first collection of short stories] can accept

evil, but not try to find excuses for it. (Rubin 27)

Countless similar observations in the wake of the author’s life and career have rightly assessed the purpose of and genius behind her style, but this matter-of-fact approach in her prose did not

always immediately impress. In a 1964 article, Allen Tate recalls his reactions to reading a small portion of Wise Blood when he was a visiting writer and critic at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in

1947 (67). He had labeled her simple declarative sentences a “dull” style but—with the advantage of hindsight—notes that he “hadn’t the vaguest idea of what she was up to” (Tate 67).

In his essay “Platitudes and Peacocks,” Tate cites O’Connor’s “flat style,” “cranky grammar,” and “monotonous sentence-structure” as the writer’s unique and “necessary vehicles of her vision of man” (67).

With these scholarly reactions surrounding the beginnings of her work, O’Connor graduated with her Master’s of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1947, her master’s thesis being a collection of short stories, The Geranium, titled after her first published work

(Drake 9; Gordon). She was invited to Yaddo, an artist’s retreat in New York, and then briefly spent time in New York City and Milledgeville before moving into Sally and Robert Fitzgerald’s garage apartment in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1949 (Gordon; “Flannery” 16). This arrangement of almost two years established the Fitzgeralds as close friends who would one day become

O’Connor’s literary stewards. In the opening chapter of her 1970 biographical study, The World of Flannery O’Connor, Josephine Hendin assesses that “the ‘shy, glum girl’ Fitzgerald describes seems to have needed isolation, thrived on friendships maintained through letters or kept with married friends over friendly drinks” but also contradictingly presumes that O’Connor “seems never to have been deeply close with anyone” (8). In Sally Fitzgerald’s 1979 publication of a collection of O’Connor’s written correspondence, her own introduction combats Hendin’s view.

Fitzgerald remarks that the letters craft a portrait of the writer as she came to know her during their time together: “...calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and

honest in a way that restores honor to the word” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald xii). During her time in Connecticut, the balance of solitude and friendship O’Connor found at the Fitzgeralds seemed to be precisely what she needed for herself and her work as she met the struggle of an emerging career in writing (Gordon).

The majority of O’Connor’s fiction, however, would be produced parallel to quite a different struggle. In December of 1950, this arrangement became interrupted by O’Connor’s first major attack of lupus, the incurable disease that would truncate her life and creative work soon after she reached the age of thirty-nine. She was twenty-five years old at the time (Walters

11). Unaware of her condition, the Fitzgeralds sent O’Connor to Milledgeville for the holiday.

Sally Fitzgerald recalls the rapid transformation of O’Connor’s health in that fateful trip home:

“When … I had put Flannery on the train for Georgia she was smiling perhaps a little wanly but wearing her beret at a jaunty angle. She looked much as usual, except that I remember a kind of stiffness in her gait as she left me on the platform to get aboard. By the time she arrived she looked, as her uncle later said, ‘like a shriveled old woman’” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 21-22).

After O’Connor received medical attention for her condition once in Georgia, Regina O’Connor called the Fitzgeralds to relay the news that Flannery was “dying of lupus” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 22).

Despite this assessment, in her first recorded letter written to a friend the same month,

O’Connor speaks of the ailment as rheumatoid arthritis and refers to its limitations with her characteristically wry humor: “[It] leaves you always willing to sit down, lie down, lie flatter, etc. But I am taking cortisone so I will have to get up again. These days you caint even have you a good psychosomatic ailment to get yourself a rest. I will be in Milledgeville Ga. a birdsanctuary for a few months, waiting to see how much of an invalid I am going to get to be”

(O’Connor and Fitzgerald 22). O’Connor spent the next nine months in an Atlanta hospital receiving blood transfusions and injections of ACTH, a hormone used to regulate cortisol levels

(“Flannery” 16; “Medications”). From 1951 on, O’Connor would live with her mother in

Milledgeville, Georgia (Walters 11). Sally Fitzgerald notes the tone of O’Connor’s letters during that time, remarking that “[o]nce she had accepted her destiny, she began to embrace it, and it is clear from her correspondence that she cherished her life there and knew that she had been brought back exactly where she belonged and where her best work would be done” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald xvi). From the onset of her illness, O’Connor certainly maintained her wit and a candid attitude toward the disease. She wrote to a friend in 1951:

I got your letter a long time ago when I was at Emory Hospital. I stayed there a month,

giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, all hours of

the day and night, but now I am at home again and not receiving any more awful cards

that say to a dear sick friend, in verse what’s worse. Now I shoot myself with ACTH

oncet daily and look very well and do nothing that I can get out of doing. I trust you are

as well. (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 24)

Although it may seem ironic that she would treat such a debilitating illness with concealing humor when she was in the business of writing about truth, in actuality it perfectly parallels her literary approach: a marriage of the dark and the comic.

After the lengthy hospital stay, the O’Connor women, Flannery and Regina, moved to the family farm, Andalusia, when the writer could no longer climb the stairs in her mother’s

Milledgeville home. As O’Connor settled into a daily routine that involved three hours of writing, lunch in town with Regina, and afternoons tending to her growing flocks of fowl, her condition seemed to improve; however, the daily injections of ACTH were damaging her hip

bones, so by 1955 her mobility would rely entirely on crutches (“Flannery” 17-18). Fairly early in this new mode of living, in 1952, O’Connor published Wise Blood, the novel she had been working on at the Writers’ Workshop (Walters 11).

By this time, O’Connor was no stranger to confounded critics and misconstrued reviews.

Her poised indifference to evaluations that, as she saw it, clearly missed the essential nature of her work was evident as early as her February 1949 response to criticism of her early draft of

Wise Blood by John Selby of Rinehart publishing company:

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the

limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the

quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you

will, of the experience I write from. ...In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within

the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished

book, although I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters

you have now. The question is: is Reinhart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

(O’Connor and Fitzgerald 10)

Selby would later release O’Connor from her contract, leading the writer to sign with Robert

Giroux for the 1952 publication (“Flannery” 16). The letter serves as an effective touchstone for the writer’s attitude toward the whole of her work and its public reception. As she would later write, she found “that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one”

(O’Connor, et al. 66). Quite explicitly, and quite often throughout her career, O’Connor found herself defending “what [she was] trying to do” and avoiding persuasion “to do otherwise.” In a way, the body of her work eventually became a manifestation of the grotesquely talented chicken

from her youth and her readers the curious newspaper photographer, the former alluring in its oddity and the latter with piqued interest but somewhat failing to see what is before them.

Scholars were not the only audience O’Connor confounded at times. From its inception, her work has never experienced a shortage of literary consumers who also miss her intent. The publication of Wise Blood marked the beginning of increasing recognition and “serious attention by an ever widening group of readers” and a time during which O’Connor received several grants and honors including “a Kenyon Review fellowship, a grant from the Ford Foundation, and several O. Henry awards” (Drake 10). In contrast, other reactions to her work ranged from inquires as to why she did not choose to write about “nice people” to one reader who declared to her in person, “‘That was a profound book. You don’t look like you wrote it’” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 54, 65). The author never seemed to be out of clever responses to these ill-conceived complaints. She later wrote about one such instance and the insight it gave her concerning the audience for whom she wrote her fiction: “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up”

(O’Connor, et al. 47-48). She knew that writing about “nice” people produced “nice” fiction: easily digestible and easy to approach with one’s preconceived notions of the world. Her fiction betrays no desire to be taken so easily. To a consumer of literature expecting their fiction to be the warmth of an afternoon tea, O’Connor’s stories are a stinging shot of Southern bourbon. But from the start of her career, she recognized that many readers were unwilling to be hit so hard by fiction. In the same essay, she would go on to accept this tired reader as a member of her audience:

You may say that the serious writer doesn't have to bother about the tired reader, but he

does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn't be so

bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a

book club. I used to think it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the

people who attend universities and sometimes know how to read, but I've since found that

though you may publish your stories in Botteghe Oscure, if they are any good at all, you

are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of a

Federal Penitentiary or the state insane asylum or the local poorhouse, telling you where

you have failed to meet his needs. (O’Connor, et al. 48)

It must have come as a strange irony to the young author that she should ever be chastised for failing to give readers what they wanted when she wrote with such a passionate conviction that she was giving them what they needed. They simply did not know it yet. So as O’Connor came upon the literary scene and began to make her space within it, she continued to ask more and more of her audience. She would later add in the same essay, “I hate to think of the day when the

Southern writer will satisfy the tired reader” (O’Connor, et al. 50).

For O’Connor’s part, there seemed to be little evidence of tiring of her craft, regardless of the occasional feedback from a lady in California or the progression of her illness. Sally

Fitzgerald notes that, during this time of growth living with her mother in Andalusia, “If

[O’Connor] had a long struggle accepting loneliness, and the reality of a permanently curtailed life, or if she felt resentment or self-pity … she gave no sign of such feeling to any of us”

(O’Connor and Fitzgerald xvi). In a letter to friends in 1953, O’Connor wryly wrote, “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer,

or so I tell myself” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 57). The writer saw her life and means as sufficient for her purpose: to write fiction that cut to the bone of life. Because the sphere of her life was smaller, she examined it more carefully; because her time was measured, she wasted little. From this carefully considered life, she produced some of the most shocking short fiction in America’s literary history.

Out of her work in her new context, O’Connor published her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955 (Walters 11). The collection of ten stories, dedicated to her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, added an artificial-leg-stealing Bible salesman, a fair tent hermaphrodite, and a one-armed car thief to her repertoire of Southern

Gothic freaks and effectively secured her place among the great fiction writers of the American

South, a position with which she was not always comfortable. In a July 1958 missive to friend and writer John Hawkes, which whom O’Connor corresponded by letters for much of her adult life, she spoke of her discomfort with aligning herself with other Southern Gothic talents, including William Faulkner: “Probably the real reason I don't read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens all together”

(O’Connor and Fitzgerald 292). But the young Georgian girl with the affinity for strange birds was much like her homely peafowl with their disinclination to display their majestic tails on command. Her plain life concealed the fact that she had developed an art of her own unique style: exceptional, disquieting, and beautiful.

Academics of O’Connor’s work have varying theories of just how this style and signature view of the world developed in and emerged from a writer with so few liberties in her life. In her

1970 publication The World of Flannery O’Connor, Josephine Hendin acknowledges the effects of O’Connor’s confinement to Andalusia and writes that “O’Connor’s disease did not radically

change her life” but that “[i]ts horror was that it prevented her life from changing at all” (Hendin

9). However, this stagnancy of place did not produce a stagnancy of creative work; rather, it produced quite the opposite. Contemplating O’Connor’s brilliance in the year of the author’s death, writer Katherine Ann Porter proposed an answer to the “question that everybody always asks himself about genius,” that is how such a person with such a limited scope of experience could come to understand and so acutely convey the difficulties of the human race (65-66).

Porter relates a scene of Southern society women in which one guest casually referred to

Flannery as “‘that little girl who writes’” (66). This guest, of course, must not have considered the craft of writing to be of much consequence. She must not have recognized the company in which the young O’Connor had begun to establish herself, a company of literary predecessors who knew, as Milton wrote, that the story became “‘a life beyond life’” (qtd. in Miller, “Some”).

O’Connor later wrote in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” that “a good deal of popular criticism” assumed that “all fiction has to … depict average ordinary everyday life, that every fiction writer must produce what used to be called ‘a slice of life,’” but she warned that “if life, in that sense, satisfied us, there would be no sense in producing literature at all” (O’Connor, et al. 79-80).

Rather than a slice, O’Connor packed the whole pie into each product of her pen. The misinformed Southern society guest could not have understood that O’Connor’s craft was not an escape from a quiet life but a probing of it. But this singular anecdote of her dismissive remark summarizes the space O’Connor moved within as she lived, wrote, and developed the ideas she then shared with the world. Porter goes on to describe the benefit of this environment:

I myself think it was a very healthy, good atmosphere because nobody got in her way,

nobody tried to interfere with her or direct her and she lived easily and simply and in her

own atmosphere and her own way of thinking. I believe this is the best possible way for a

genius to live. I think that they’re too often tortured by this world and when people

discover that someone has a gift, they all come with their claws out, trying to snatch

something of it, trying to share something they have no right even to touch. And she was

safe from that: she had a mother who really took care of her. And I just think that's

something we ought to mention, ought to speak of. (Porter 66)

Perhaps Andalusia and the physical limitations impressed upon the young writer were precisely the atmosphere needed for her sharply focused fiction of violent circumstances and eternal implications. Perhaps her talents needed life on the farm to be comfortable enough to display its beautiful tail feathers.

Scholars can only speculate what effect O’Connor’s relationship with her family had on her work and her beliefs. Her relationship with her mother, whether or not it was affected by the loss of her father in her teenage years, certainly seemed a strong connection in her life. In Sally

Fitzgerald’s introduction to the published collection of O’Connor’s written correspondence, The

Habit of Being, she notes, “When she lived with us, she took a daily walk to the mailbox, half a mile away at the bottom of our ridge. One thing it always contained was a letter from Regina

O’Connor, who wrote to her, and to whom she wrote, every single day” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald xii). These letters are not included in The Habit of Being, but O’Connor mentions her mother often in other correspondence, sometimes in matter-of-fact updates about Regina’s operations on the farm and other times in humorous anecdotes of their lives together as Flannery became a notable literary figure. In a letter to the Fitzgeralds in 1952, she humorously characterized their literary conversations:

Regina is getting very literary. “Who is this Kafka?” she says. “People ask me.” A

German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. “Well I

can’t tell people that,” she says. “Who is this Evalin Wow?” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald

33)

And again to the Fitzgeralds in 1953:

My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took

place over some Modern Literary books that I had just ordered:

SHE: “Mobby Dick. I’ve always heard about that.”

ME: “Mow-by Dick.”

SHE: “Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What’s it about?”

ME: “An idiot.” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 55-56)

Undoubtedly, many readers of The Habit of Being can trace the humorous remarks of a young woman who dearly loved her mother: her caretaker and friend. In her last words to Sally

Fitzgerald, O’Connor remarked that her one fear was that her mother would die first, so averse was she to imagine what she would do without her (O’Connor and Fitzgerald xii). In contrast, some biographers and critics hypothesize that the forced arrangement was equally as crippling as

O’Connor’s disease. In her essay “Flannery O’Connor’s Rage of Vision,” Claire Kahane cites the combination of the writer’s beliefs and psychological state, arguing that “the obsessive nature of [O’Connor’s] concerns imposed limitations on her work … which critics with a theological perspective seem not to recognize” (129). She goes on to argue that O’Connor’s permanent parent-child living arrangement “[h]aunted” her and that, “torn by a desire for independence but by fear of the essential estrangement it involves, she could not portray the responsibilities of the autonomous personality in a social context” (129). Even if this psychological assessment were true, it could be said that O’Connor’s apparent inability to portray truly responsible, autonomous personalities served her stories well. Her characters, as all mankind, suffer from an absence, a

deeper need and hunger that cannot be assuaged by human relationship. Within her first collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a young boy gives his life up to a river and drowns in search of the baptism a beguiling preacher has promised, a thirty-two year old woman with an artificial leg so despairs in her rudimentary home life that she falls prey to a traveling con man, and a serial killer brings an old woman to acute awareness of her own shortcomings. Regardless of the effects of O’Connor’s living arrangements on her psyche and her work, today’s scholars and readers are left with the brilliant aftermath.

Years after O’Connor’s death, Kathleen Feeley visited Regina O’Connor and Andalusia, as other biographers did, in search of what insights could be wrought from the milieu of the writer’s home. In her 1972 publication, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock, Feeley wrote of the impressive library O’Connor had collected over her thirteen years at the farm: “The living room has one large bookcase; the dining room, a large case and a small one; and, in the bedroom-study where Flannery worked, eight bookcases line the walls” (10). Surrounded by an extensive collection of religious, philosophical, and literary texts, O’Connor wrote and etched out her own place among them in the history of letters. Feeley notes the presence of O’Connor’s markings within many of the texts, confirming her interest in works from the theological works of Augustine and Aquinas to the philosophical ideas of Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein

(Feeley 10). The influence such writers had on O’Connor can be glimpsed in many of her letters.

In one missive to a dear friend in 1956, she invoked both literary and theoretical predecessors:

I suppose when I say that the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of

God, I mean about the same thing that Conrad meant when he said that his aim as an

artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe. For me the visible

universe is a reflection of the invisible universe. Somewhere St. Augustine says that the

things of the world poured forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds

of the angels and physically into the world of things. (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 128)

Interestingly, in comparison to the theoretical and religious works, far fewer of the literary works in O’Connor’s collection contain any annotations (Feeley 10). However, the academic world does have the benefit of several publications of O’Connor’s words about her own work and creative process: the 1957 publication of Mystery and Manners, a collection of her essays on writing; the 1979 publication of her collected letters in The Habit of Being; and, most recently, her personal prayer journal published in 2013.

Where annotations do exist within O’Connor’s extensive library, as with the artifacts left behind by any artist, additional pieces of her life may be drawn, such as this one noted by Feeley:

“In her copy of Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Flannery marked this sentence: ‘There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire.’ No one will know the terms of her payment, because Flannery was characteristically silent—or nonchalant—about her crippling disease” (13). Some of her correspondence reveals that O’Connor read her friend Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The

Odyssey in 1958: “The Odessey [sic] arrived to my great improvement. Caroline says the trouble with me is I ain’t got a classical education and I say I got as much as I can out of Fitts and

Fitzgerald” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 267). She must have identified with Odysseus in Chapter

XIII when Athena instructs him not to reveal himself to the suitors who have overtaken and disgraced his home: “‘Be silent under all injuries, even blows from men’” (Homer 13.366-367).

She must also have found comfort in the words of her faith, such as 2nd Corinthians 4:8: “In all things we suffer tribulation, but are not distressed; we are straitened, but are not destitute…” She endured in silence, and too soon her tribulation brought her life to an end.

O’Connor only shared her divine gift with the world for less than two decades. When the writer underwent surgery for a fibroid tumor in 1964, it antagonized the lupus and sent her into a debilitating bout of the illness for several months. She died on August 3, 1964 in the Baldwin

County Hospital and was buried beside her father in a Milledgeville cemetery (Gordon). Her publisher released Everything That Rises Must Converge posthumously in 1965 (Walters 12), and a 1972 publication of her complete stories would later win the National Book Award

(Gordon). In the words of critic C. Hugh Holman, O’Connor was “a brilliantly gifted writer whose death at the age of thirty-nine silenced one of the finest voices of American fiction” (58).

Just why she continues to be read, remembered, and emulated seems to lie in many facets of her work. The Gothic qualities of her writing, her dark humor, and her theological purpose all combine to produce her unique style, but the lattermost of those continues to set her apart in her critical treatment. Holman goes on to define what multiple scholars acknowledge as critical to

O’Connor’s identity as a writer: “The crucial difference between Miss O’Connor and most of her fellow Southerners lies in a simple fact, which she seldom passed up an opportunity to emphasize. She was a Catholic novelist in the Protestant South” (65). Holman borrows from

O’Connor’s own essay titled with the same phrase, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant

South,” in which she details the tension between what the Church believes to be good Catholic literature and what she believes ought to be produced, the tension between the Catholic writer and his “region in which he is both native and alien” (O’Connor, et al. 197).

A Patient Literary Vision

These tensions between religion and region made O’Connor seem indeed alien at times to readers and critics, but the source of her fiction remained fixed: a desire to transpose the truths of

her faith onto the fabric of Southern life, often shocking the reader in order to bring those truths into focus. In his 1986 article “Flannery O’Connor and the Fiction of Grace,” Arthur Kinney recalls O’Connor’s personal committment to her religion, reminding that the writer’s short life was one spent in religious devotion as she sought to articulate the complexities of her faith:

“...throughout her adult life, O’Connor attended Mass whenever she was able, daily said the prayers in her missal, and nightly spent a quarter hour or more reading the writings of Aquinas before retiring” (77). These religious influences laid the foundation of the stories that would ultimately make her one of America’s most significant writers of short fiction, and they always laid at the heart of her literary and authorial purpose.

Her own indirect literary mentors point to the development of her themes. Kinney also points out O’Connor’s admiration and emulation of Hawthorne, noting that all of her stories, like his, “are parables of sin and grace” (75). It should be noted that “parables” were also Christ’s primary method of instruction with his disciples; as well, to the Georgian writer, this foundational recognition of sin and grace was also a critical part of her craft. In her essay of the self-disclosing title “Novelist and Believer,” O’Connor reminds her readers that all true drama relies on sin as a foundation for the story: “The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character”

(O’Connor, et al. 167). As O’Connor notes, a character’s flaw has been the crux of great storytelling since Aristotle defined it, and in her personal life, she knew about shortcomings. As noted, some of her biographers even suggest that O’Connor’s impulse to write fiction came more from the combination of her life experiences and disease than from her religion (Hendin 4), a combination that would develop a true understanding of flaw, hardship, and limitations. Human frailty then became not only the catalyst to her writing, but also her subject matter: “While it may

be true that O’Connor’s disease and the personal tragedies she suffered led her to develop her comic impulses as a defense, what is more important is that her suffering led her to identify with human frailty. She both judged and loved her characters. Her capacity for love and sympathy was expanded by daily experience of physical weakness” (Paulson xi). With this understanding of imperfections, with both judgment and love for humankind, O’Connor wrote about its most damning defect: sin.

Scripture told O’Connor that “the wages of sin is death” but there is “the grace of God, life everlasting, in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23), that while man succumbed to sin and temptation in the Garden of Eden, Christ took sin upon himself and “we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7). In her essay “Novelist and Believer,” first delivered at Sweetbriar College, Virginia a little over a year before her death, O’Connor discusses the importance of this belief to her work: “The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future” (O’Connor, et al. 167). She made this same distinction between belief in the scriptures and all other diluted attempts at morality many times in her writing and always refused to mitigate the significance of the choice: “Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe” (O’Connor, et al. 167). So she crafts works of absurdity in order to get at truth, episodes of hilarity that point to the grave subject of sin and its consequences. Her own words confirm the intentional nature of this common effect of her stories: when events are so brutally shocking to the reader that they then become humorous.

Equally as consistent as sin in her stories, although perhaps not as plainly evident, is the presence of grace. Although she saw the Biblical fact of God’s grace as a certainty as real as the sin it redeems, from her study of Augustine O’Connor understood that “man must choose to cooperate with grace [implying] that he can also refuse to accept or acknowledge grace” (Kinney

78). In his Confessions, Augustine recognized and wrestled with this concept of free will, asserting in Chapter VI of Book Two that the choice to ignore God resulted in taking up refuge in a distorted and corrupted truth: “...the soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee, and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee. All things thus imitate thee—but pervertedly—when they separate themselves far from thee and raise themselves up against thee” (Augustine). Although man may choose to deny God,

Augustine furthered, such a denial contains an unconscious acknowledgement of His sovereignty: “But, even in this act of perverse imitation, they acknowledge thee to be the Creator of all nature, and recognize that there is no place whither they can altogether separate themselves from thee” (Augustine). Man’s ability to choose his cooperation with or refusal of grace appears throughout many of O’Connor’s short stories, including “Good Country People,” “The Life You

Save May Be Your Own,” and her often-examined “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Describing this preoccupation with grace in her essay “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” O’Connor explains that the Catholic writer of fiction focuses on the three basic “theological truths” of “the

Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment” (O’Connor, et al. 185). She then illuminates the resulting challenge:

These are doctrines that the modern secular world does not believe in. It does not believe

in sin, or in the value that suffering can have, or in eternal responsibility, and since we

live in a world that since the sixteenth century has been increasingly dominated by

secular thought, the Catholic writer often finds himself writing in and for a world that is

unprepared and unwilling to see the meaning of life as he sees it. This means frequently

that he may resort to violent literary means to get his vision across to a hostile audience,

and the images and actions he creates may seem distorted and exaggerated to the Catholic

mind. (O’Connor, et al. 185)

So O’Connor demonstrates the interaction of sin and grace in the world through these “violent literary means,” leaving readers feeling much like the character of Mrs. McIntyre at the end of

“The Displaced Person” when she beholds a hired man’s body after a farm tractor runs him over:

“She only stared at him for she was too shocked by her experience to be quite herself. Her mind was not taking hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body where natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance” (O’Connor, “The Displaced Person” 235). Aware that much of her “hostile audience” would “not tak[e] hold of all that was happening” in her work and think nothing of the theological truths she held so dear, O’Connor was content in others’ temporary misunderstanding. She once wrote that “every serious writer” concurs with Arthur Koestler’s remark “that he would swap a hundred readers now for ten readers in ten years and … swap those ten for one in a hundred years” (O’Connor, et al. 187). Continuing to paint sin and grace with vibrant colors on the page, she waited for her readers’ understanding to catch up to her vision.

Even if readers and critics did not always succeed in understanding her meaning, they recognized that O’Connor’s work—although Catholic in its inspirations—was not apologetic. In a letter dated May of 1963, the writer herself criticized those who wished for her work to represent Catholicism in this way: “The best of them think: make it look desirable because it is

desirable. And the rest of them think: make it look desirable so I won't look like a fool for holding it. In a really Christian culture of real believers this wouldn't come up” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 516). Fellow writer Alice Walker once noted that O’Connor “believed in all the mysteries of her faith” but “was incapable of writing dogmatic or formulaic stories. No religious tracts, nothing haloed softly in celestial light, not even any happy endings. It has puzzled some of her readers and annoyed the Catholic church that in her stories not only does good not triumph, it is not usually present” (36). Of course, it would be difficult to conceive of an abundance of happy endings when the devil is so often involved in her stories, and O’Connor certainly did not shy away from placing the devil and his evil at the center of her fiction. In “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” she posits that “[t]he demand for positive literature” that she criticizes her fellow Catholics for so often displaying “comes about possibly from weak faith and possibly also from this general inability to read” but ultimately she makes a stronger assertion: “...I think it also comes about from the assumption that the devil plays a major role in the production of fiction. Probably the devil plays the greatest role in the production of that fiction from which he himself is absent as an actor” (O’Connor, et al. 188-189). To O’Connor, the absence of the devil, evil, or sin from a story was a false representation of the world, and she wasted no time with half-truths.

Indisputably, theology heavily inspired and influenced the writer’s work, but—as

Suzanne Morrow Paulson remarks in the preface to her study of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction works, “whatever version of O’Connor critics adopt, there is some evidence of a contrary version” (ix). Josephine Hendin’s book argues an alternative explanation for the sharp observations and violent energy of O’Connor’s stories, saying that “[t]o assume that her work is merely a monologue on redemption is to see it only in part, to ignore much of its meaning, and to

lose sight of the believer behind the belief” (17). As Hendin concludes, O’Connor did not merely write about Redemption; writing itself was redemptive for her (17). At the beginning of her career, the young O’Connor wrote in her journal about not only her desire for God but also her desire to create something worthy and beautiful:

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in

the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like

this today. ...When something is finished it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be

possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing struggle but only

when the struggle is cherished & directed to a final consummation outside of this life is it

of any value. I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.

(O’Connor, Prayer 29)

She believed that God would write through her, that she could be an instrument of His grace by way of producing excellent work. O’Connor’s success in this pursuit now seems obvious.

Although essential to her fiction, her Catholic influence should not overshadow an appreciation of her work from a purely literary standpoint. Her stories “‘stand securely on their own,” apart from religious interpretation, “as renderings and criticisms of human experience’” (Howe qtd. in

Hendin 18). Readers do not have to see God or the devil in the stories in order to see good and evil, and this should remind any scholar or reader of O’Connor why contemporary works are so riddled with her influence. O’Connor’s beliefs were potent and uncompromising, but as Robert

Drake noted in a biography a few years after the writer’s death, “[s]he was not trying to ‘sell’

Christianity; she was—as indeed any writer is—trying to ‘sell’ her particular perception of life in this world as valid” (15-16), as accurate to human experience, so we might find ourselves in its pages and consequently pay attention to what she has to say.

Clearly, readers and scholars still open the pages to O’Connor’s “particular perception of life” and have much to say in return. In his introduction to a collection of critical essays on

O’Connor published in 1985, Melvin J. Friedman notes that there had been “disturbed rumblings of late” about the volume of commentary and criticism concerning a writer who had produced as slim a collection of works as O’Connor (2). He includes Robert Coles’ question, in his own 1980 publication, of how much longer such attention should continue before the literary world recognizes the need for “‘a bit of a pause’” (Coles qtd. in Friedman 2). Several decades from these remarks, and over half a century beyond O’Connor’s death, perhaps the need for the pause has passed. Perhaps new artists are seeing in new ways a new world—or an old one still very much the same—and a return to O’Connor’s world might help to understand theirs. By employing aspects of O’Connor’s unique brand of Gothic, although absent of her beliefs, do these writers arrive at similar answers to life’s questions? Is there implicit spirituality in their postmodern searches for good in an evil world?

In But Not Of Her Era

O’Connor’s place in the history of American Literature positioned her at the shift from modern to postmodern thought, a particularly unique niche given the ideas that each movement entertained. In the wake of World War I, modernism mourned the loss of traditions and romanticised the past. Taking an example from one of the most academically famed works from the year of O’Connor’s birth, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the American dream comes to naught and any presence of a higher power is reduced to the gawking stare of a billboard displaying giant eyes encircled by a pair of glasses. In all of Gatsby, only the character of George Wilson displays a belief in God’s existence when he stares at the billboard while

recalling having told his wife that she “‘couldn’t fool God’” (Fitzgerald 159). As it beholds the novel’s most profane events, the bespectacled billboard symbolically tells us that either God is silent, or the world is godless. By the time O’Connor becomes a young woman, Hitler has made his mark on world events, and the Holocaust’s displays of human depravity and brutality led the artistic and academic world back to the question of evil among us. It is no longer that “the centre cannot hold,” as Yeats wrote in 1919, but that there is no center to speak of at all. So as postmodernism looked ahead to the absurdity of human existence, a young Catholic writer from

Georgia began her career.

Some critics mistake O’Connor’s theological honesty for a tone of hopelessness that matches well with her contemporaries. Often violent and dark, the outcomes of her stories may seem bleak. One biographer argues that, “[a]gainst an optimistic view of life in which man is perfectible by reason and technology, [O’Connor] sets a blacker image of life as unredeemable pain—of man as simply an organism containing juices in irreversible flow” (Hendin 3). For this view, O’Connor would have found little opposition among her postmodern literary contemporaries, but her stories point to order rather than chaos and to a Divine design rather than abandonment. Melvin J. Friedman further describes the literary age that surrounded her and also brings to light the interim of American works into which O’Connor’s brilliant contribution falls:

The deities of modernism were gone, with their tidily finished, neatly patterned,

mythically ordered texts, like The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, and Absalom

Absalom! The “disruptive” gestures of the so-called postmodernists, who brought with

their experiments an irreverence and uncertainty about even the function of print on the

page, were not yet in focus… [O’Connor] wrote understated, orderly, unexperimental

fiction, with a Southern backdrop and a Roman Catholic vision, in defiance, it would

seem, of those restless innovators who preceded her and who came into prominence after

her death. (3-4)

So O’Connor sits at her unique place in the literary timeline, before—as Friedman noted—the

“restless innovators” of postmodernism. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 would be published just a few years before O’Connor’s death, Thomas Pynchon would publish The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five would release in 1969. On the cusp of these literary markers, O’Connor offered her view of existence; without bending time or reality, she painted pictures of sin, grace, and redemption as they carry themselves out in the world.

The postmodern company in which O’Connor found herself may lead to the question of how she managed to be in but not of this literary movement. Other writers—as the filmmakers seem to display—saw a senseless, godless world, but to O’Connor, this godlessness was man’s own doing. To postmodern writers, life was absurd; to O’Connor, it was absurd in man’s attempt to celebrate, pursue, or achieve anything absent of God. For postmodernists, the absurdity pointed to a meaninglessness; to O’Connor, the absurdity was merely an amplification of man’s dark nature when separated from God’s redemption and grace. In her analysis of good and evil in

O’Connor’s works, Suzanne Morrow Paulson addresses this feature of the author’s writing:

Depicting the worst in human nature is for O’Connor an act of faith, a repetition of God’s

intention to shock us into “grace.” What some readers see as cynical and distorted views

of human life, O’Connor sees as honest representations—however exaggerated and

symbolic—of human suffering and sin repressed by the community in order to assuage

the guilt of individual members. (86)

We would rather not look directly at our darkest natures or experience our guilt without the repression Paulson mentions. Fully aware of this, O’Connor created her collection of freaks,

rascals, and misfits—not distorted at all—to depict human life in all of its irony when in ignorance of God’s grace. As she explains in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” she sets out to make what desensitized, unbelieving readers find normal in the postmodern world seem unusual and odd:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are

repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an

audience which is used to seeing them as natural; And he may well be forced to take ever

more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can

assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use

more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you

have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for

the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. (O’Connor, et al. 33-34)

Whether or not they perceived her intentions, readers of the era would not necessarily have considered these deformities as without peer in the literary world. Certainly, Hawthorne, Poe, and others had created their share of unnerving antiheroes. The most notable and academically mentioned might be O’Connor’s similarities to Nathanael West’s work of two decades prior. In

1962, in his essay “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil,” John Hawkes called O’Connor and West “very nearly alone in their employment of the devil’s voice as a vehicle for their satire or for what we may call their true (or accurate) vision of our godless actuality” and “unique in sharing a kind of inverted attraction for the reality of our absurd condition” (93). Although both writers indeed portray “the reality of our absurd condition,” in his comparison, Hawkes neglects to acknowledge the history of religious works of which we must consider O’Connor a part. The

Morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also boasted the devil as a speaking

character who could be both comic and serious (Young 29). Still, over twenty years after

Hawkes’ assertion, in 1985, Warren Coffey drew his own scholarly comparison of O’Connor’s characters to those of West:

If she has no girls without noses, she has them with artificial legs and with acne-blued

faces. She has one-armed men and men covered with tattoos, and she is fond of thrusting

this grotesque part of humanity into confrontations with characters more comfortably

housed in the flesh. …[T]hese violent confrontations and the violent action that grows out

of them show her willingness to take a chance on the assertion that behind their

grotesquerie and violence a God presides. West, using the same surreal methods,

questioned that assertion. (39-40)

So even in her own time, O’Connor used similar grotesque methods to declare an opposite claim than that of her contemporaries: she saw the absurdity as ironic and tragically comic, given the solution of grace and salvation, and they saw the absurdity as a manifestation of the godless world. She saw what they did not, as scripture taught her, that “faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not” (Heb. 11:1). Her beliefs set her distinctly apart, closer to Medieval English religious dramas than her contemporaries. Today, we must question why those, such as the filmmakers, who still write of man’s absurd condition cite

O’Connor—and not writers such as West—as influence. Is it simply her success at ranking more favorably in posthumous literary fame? Or are they drawn to deeper concerns of O’Connor’s writing that point to more than the farce of a postmodern life without God?

In his same 1962 essay, Hawkes later remarks that when he “suggested to Flannery

O'Connor … that as [a] writer she was on the devil's side she responded at once—and of course to disagree” (95). In a letter written the previous November, the then established writer had

indeed responded to Hawkes’ remark, and in doing so she may have touched upon the reason that so many still mimic her style and approach to addressing the absurdity of the world:

You haven't convinced me that I write with the Devil’s will or belong in the romantic

tradition and I'm prepared to argue some more with you on this if I can remember where

we left off at. I think the reason we can't agree on this is because there is a difference in

our two devils. My Devil has a name, a history and a definite plan. His name is Lucifer,

he's a fallen angel, his sin is pride, and his aim is the destruction of the Divine plan.

(O’Connor and Fitzgerald 456)

O’Connor refers here to the Biblical teaching that Satan was cast “like lightning” (Luke 10:18) from Heaven from the “iniquity” and vanity in his heart (Ezek. 28:16-17). Because Satan

“sinneth from the beginning,” Christ came to the world to “destroy the works of the devil” (1

John 3:8). O’Connor continued with a description of Hawkes’ devil:

Now I judge that your Devil is co-equal to God, not his creature; that pride is his virtue,

not his sin; and that his aim is not to destroy the Divine plan because there isn't any

Divine plan to destroy. My Devil is objective and yours is subjective. You say one

becomes “evil” when one leaves the herd. I say that depends entirely on what the herd is

doing. (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 456)

Just as she declares the difference in their Devils, so O’Connor defines her ideas of good and evil versus the secular world’s definition: the former is objective while the latter is subjective. Her beliefs inform an absolute truth about good, evil, and the path to redemption. Those who ignore her God must flounder in the question of how to navigate a world without a solid touchstone of these abstract ideas. Is there any kind of redemption from an “evil” which cannot claim its relation to a moral absolute? In a later letter in 1963, O’Connor mentions the disagreement with

Hawkes to another correspondent: “Jack Hawkes’ view of the devil is not a theological one. His devil is an impeccable literary spirit whom he makes responsible for all good literature. Anything good he thinks must come from the devil. He is a good friend of mine and I have had this out with him many times, to no avail” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 507).

With her decidedly theological foundations, O’Connor’s short fiction seeks to bring characters to a moment of recognition within their grotesque worlds. Literature concerns itself with the human experience, and human experience remains the same that it has been in all of history: the individual facing the ultimate. The universal ultimate of man’s mortality has always illuminated his true nature, regardless of spiritual belief in meaning and order beyond human life on earth. In life and in literature, these moments have been termed “‘Meet Yourself

Experiences’” as the individual is brought to a recognition of his essential identity (Miller,

“Homer’s”). Through the threat of their deaths, characters discover their true selves; when faced with his death, the player shows his hand and his honest cards lie upon the table for all to see. At some point, in some way, postmodern characters must face the absurdity of their environments, a confrontation that often leads to a death. For O’Connor, the difference lies in the purpose behind this confrontation, in characters being forced to recognize their own absurdity and, for some, to emerge from “their petty superiorities and their would-be aristocratic and genteel trappings” and

“realize their vulnerability, their ridiculous condition” (Ochshorn 114). This acknowledgement that solidifies the postmodernists’ notions of the absurd is used by O’Connor to point to the need for higher assistance, the need for grace on a spiritual level. She believed we must not “cast … away the grace of God,” that “if justice be by the law, then Christ died in vain” (Gal. 2:21). She believed that we desperately needed what Paul so often prayed for in his letters: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen” (2 Thes. 3:18). She believed that, in the face of the

world’s absurdity, God is the only true source of grace and good. What is more, she had the courage to stand up and say it.

CHAPTER 2: Defining the Language of the Inquiry

The Debate of What Is “Good”

Before we observe the O’Connor-like features used by the filmmakers, we must first recognize that if they too subscribe to a belief in what O’Connor called Hawkes’ non-theological devil, an agent of evil, it would follow that they also assume the existence of an opposing source of good. In the same way, this non-theological evil itself conjures an assumption of a non- theological goodness as its opposite. But what are the rules and natures of these agents of evil and good when defined in secular terms? By the time of her small feud with Hawkes, O’Connor had long since secured recognition for her first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to

Find; however, in order to understand a secular conception of the word good, we must ask: in the milieu of the world aside from religious definitions, what constitutes a good man?

This question has a long and complex linguistic history, but some points in its evolution may shed their own interesting slants of light on the reception and perceptions of O’Connor’s literary search for the “Good Man.” Given their historical influence on the governing of mankind, the philosophers and scholars of Greek and Roman times unsurprisingly added key concepts to the use of the word “good” in their rhetoric. Plato called goodness one of his

“Forms,” essences from which all other things are an imitation or copy. At one point in his

Republic, he writes that the good is “that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower” and calls it “beautiful,” placing it even above truth: “...science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honour yet higher”

(Plato). Around 340 BCE, in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sought to define “the chief good.” He posed the question of whether goodness was inductive or deductive—“Are goods one, then, by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good…?”—and whether it had anything to do with what man would choose when alone: “What sort of goods would one call good in themselves? Is it those that are pursued even when isolated from others, such as intelligence, sight, and certain pleasures and honours? … Or is nothing other than the Idea of good good in itself?” (Aristotle). Others entertained the idea of not only worthy pursuits but characteristic actions of a “good” man. The concept of the citizen orator originates with Cato the

Elder’s definition of an orator as “bonus vir dicendi peritus,” which translates to the idea of a good man speaking well (McCartney 29). The Roman rhetorician Quintilian expanded upon this idea in his Institutio Oratoria from the first century CE: “The orator then … shall be the orator as defined by Marcus Cato, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking.’ But above all he must possess the quality which Cato places first and which is in the very nature of things the greatest and most important, he must be a good man” (Brinton 167). So while Cato believed “that only a good man skilled in speaking could be a true orator,” addressing merely the goodness of the man’s skills,

Quintilian took that a step further in declaring that a man could not hope to develop into a

“perfect orator without being a good man,” linking internal character to external actions

(McCartney 29-30). In his essay “A Wider Application of Cato’s Ideals for the Orator,” Eugene

S. McCartney traces this concept throughout other thinkers and succeeding centuries, including

Plato, Shakespeare, and even Emerson. In 1488, Giambattista Cantalicio could not “‘conceive of a poet who is not first a good man,’” and—continuing the connection of skill with words to the possession of goodness—nineteenth century religious writer Theodore L. Cuyler remarked that

“‘[a] good book is the very essence of a good man’” (McCartney 30). Aside from the problem

that these examples are all quite public—orator, poet, author—and therefore complicated by other motivations, each of these theories also rests upon the understanding that good works and skills will emerge as a manifestation of some yet mysterious inner quality of goodness, the same essence that Plato posited could not be fully defined or understood.

Regardless of these limitations, we continue our attempts at a definition, including ones in which we question the idea of a universal definition at all. In Paul Bloomfield’s essay “The

Rules of ‘Goodness’: An Essay on Moral Semantics” published in 2003 in American

Philosophical Quarterly, he uses the Twin Earth thought experiment—first posited by Hilary

Putnam in the 1970s—to illustrate the complexity of defining goodness. The thought experiment assumes a hypothetical situation in which a Twin Earth exists that is in every way identical to the

Earth humans inhabit. The only difference between the two planets lies in the fact that Twin

Earth does not have water, in the form of H20, but rather a substance that functions equivalently on Twin Earth while being chemically different to Earth’s H20—for the sake of the experiment, a substance with the fabricated make up of XYZ. The inhabitants of Twin Earth call this substance

“water” just as Earth’s inhabitants call H20 “water.” The experiment questions whether both definitions of the word can be true. Although an inhabitant on each planet would call his respective substance “water” and reason identical meanings of that term, H20 and XYZ are physically different substances; therefore, the exercise concludes with the determination that meaning cannot be deduced solely from one’s ideas or experiences concerning a concept

(Bloomfield 197).

Bloomfield then expands this hypothesis to apply it to the idea of goodness, recognizing the vast differences between the two ideas “good” and “water,” but also raising the question of the hypothesis’ effects on the ideas of moral relativism:

There is no reason to suppose … that what makes for a good human life will be what

makes for the good life of any rational creature. If there are other intelligent or rational

forms of life in the universe, we cannot assume that there is some necessary overlap

between their good and ours…. Slipping into the thought experiment again, we have

encountered Twin Earthlings who have a different morality than ours; they predicate

“good” differently than we do. The realist should respond like this: either there is a

relevant difference between us and the Twin Earthlings that accounts for the difference in

our moral theories and predications (and no one has made any mistakes, even though we

don't all give the same answers), or there is no such difference and either we’ve gotten it

wrong or they have. Or, of course, it is also possible that both us and the Twin Earthlings

have gotten it wrong, just as we have been wrong about many empirical matters in the

past. (Bloomfield 202)

After summarizing several other attempts by theorists to define good, such as the idea that goodness lies in an actual physical makeup of “a certain kind of stuff” or that good is what a

“rational” and “fully informed” individual would choose to do, Bloomfield argues that these theories are flawed in their attempt to identify goodness by its distinct qualities (202-203). This, he concludes, “is a strong form of absolutism” that believes that what is defined as good in one world must denote what is defined as good in another, and none of the belief systems he mentions acknowledge “the possibility that both us and the Twin Earthlings have not made any errors, even though we do not agree on all matters of morality” (Bloomfield 203).

Of course, in the Catholic understanding to which O’Connor subscribed, there is only one world and one absolute truth. She would dismiss the idea of defining goodness with the answer that the task has already been completed in the scriptures, and—as Dan Curley pointed out in

1970—modernity did not necessitate a reformation of these ideas: “Whatever else may be obscure in Flannery O’Connor’s work, her opposition to moral relativism is clear and unchanging from first to last. Time after time she points out the inappropriateness of applying the ideas of progress, advance, and reform to eternal truths” (159). As the work of God, scripture is therefore the absolute authority on all matters of life. O’Connor’s definition then, regardless of whether others would agree to its origins, is quite clear cut and much like the absolutism

Bloomfield decries. Although some may argue that defining the Biblical idea of goodness proves almost equally as subjective due to the linguistic complications of various translations, this complication exists for all ancient texts and would not affect O’Connor’s notions of good as she derived them from the texts of her faith. For the sake of this argument, the Douay-Rheims Bible will be used as a representation of the text from which O’Connor would have derived her

Catholic understanding.

Of its seven hundred ninety-two instances in the Douay-Rheims Bible, the word “good” first appears in the fourth overall verse: “And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4). In its first Biblical appearance, goodness is a quality that

God is able to determine, and the association of “light” with “good” implies an equal association of “darkness” with negative qualities. By the third chapter of Genesis, the serpent tempts Eve with the idea that eating the forbidden fruit will give her this same godly knowledge. In the beginning, God’s words speak life, but—mere pages later—words become weapons of deception from the mouth of the serpent: “...your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Although, as today, the word “good” appears in various parts of speech, as noun or adjective, and comes to mean different ideas in different contexts—such as a

“good distance” meaning a particularly measurable amount—the word eventually becomes

associated with other more explicit qualities further along in the holy text. In Micah, it says, “I will shew thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requireth of thee: Verily, to do judgment, and to love mercy, and to walk solicitous with thy God” (Mic. 6:8). Here, justice, forgiveness, and humility join the growing definition. With this understanding established, the term often becomes associated with a type of action for the benefit of others: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). So one’s works can and should illustrate one’s goodness, or result naturally from true goodness. A further verse in Titus marries these two concepts of the works and the qualities of the individual performing the works: “In all things shew thyself an example of good works, in doctrine, in integrity, in gravity, The sound word that can not be blamed: that he, who is on the contrary part, may be afraid, having no evil to say of us” (Tit. 2:7-8). This verse acknowledges the opposite quality of “evil,” which, according to the scripture, no one should be able to attribute to a person who displays the “good works” of uncorrupt, sincere behavior. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, these good works are an extension of love—“And let us consider one another, to provoke unto charity and to good works…” (Heb. 10:24)—such that it seems one cannot fully perform good works without love as the motivation. O’Connor’s reading of Aquinas reinforced this teaching, that charity—the Latin caritas—is the love of and friendship with God, a virtue that unites us with God (Clark 416). In James, “good” is directly opposed with

“sin”—“To him therefore who knoweth to do good, and doth it not, to him it is sin” (Jas. 4:17)— introducing another key factor of the Catholic understanding of good as well as O’Connor’s perennial theme: sin.

While goodness does not necessarily stir up religious definitions in all contexts, other terms such as sin do inherently imply a Biblical foundation. Yet sin, faith, evil, and even

redemption all regularly appear in secular contexts, especially as writers in today’s world seek to discover sources of hope and means of coping with the world and its current state.

Biblical Influence on a Seemingly Godless World

An attempt to investigate the aforementioned occurence of contemporary storytellers exploring the human concerns of violence, evil, and justice, demands first defining O’Connor’s understanding of them: her cognizance of Biblical sin, grace, and redemption as informed by her faith. As Robert Drake notes, “She apprehends man’s predicament in terms of classical Christian theology; and she uses the traditional terms without flinching: sin, grace, redemption, Heaven,

Hell, and all the rest” (Drake 15). However, to the filmmakers, these truths are not as foundational and critical as they were to O’Connor; nevertheless, artists in literature, film, and otherwise still use Biblical terms such as these to define moral realities in what they see as an apparently Godless world.

The most essential of the “traditional terms” O’Connor uses are sin, grace, and redemption. As noted, the book of James connects goodness to sin in the sense that one sins when one knows to do good and chooses against it (Jas. 4:17). First mentioned in the fourth chapter of Genesis just before Cain slays his brother Abel (Gen. 4:7-8), sin comes into focus in the New Testament as mankind’s essential flaw for which it needs a savior. The Gospel of

Matthew first previews that the virgin Mary “shall bring forth a son” whom the people will call

Jesus because “he shall save his people from their sins” (Mat. 1:21). As the Apostle Paul summarizes in Romans, “the wages of sin is death,” but “the grace of God, life everlasting” is found in “Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). This, then, is the ultimate example of grace,

God’s ultimate act of forgive and forget that always finds its definition in Christ’s death on the

cross: “I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that is given you in Christ

Jesus…” (1 Cor. 1:4). Grace is both a quality of God and an extension of His love, and its effect is redemption. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he uses all three words, saying, “...Unto the praise of the glory of his grace, in which he hath graced us in his beloved son. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace…” (Eph.

1:6-7). These are the words of a doctrine which O’Connor took quite seriously, and yet their secular use is perhaps better understood by most individuals; in secular usage, a sin is an act of immorality; to extend grace is to show courtesy, respect, and politeness; and redemption is absolution—perhaps from the act of immorality. But only the spiritual need for that absolution explains the use of the term. Therefore, by the power of linguistics, the connotations of the words remain inescapable and any context in which we find them will be colored by scriptural influence as a result. Indeed, the power of language prevents otherwise.

We can say with certainty that O’Connor’s beliefs aligned absolutely with scripture; additionally, her own words reveal the important distinction she saw in her Catholic beliefs versus other interpretations of Christianity, particularly Protestantism. In 1959, she remarked in a letter that “[t]he Catholic finds it easier to understand the atheist than the Protestant, but easier to love the Protestant than the atheist” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 341). Protestants, in sharp contrast to the structure of the Catholic church, believe in sola scriptura, that the Bible is the sole instrument of religious instruction a believer needs (Zauzmer). Where Catholics hold firm beliefs in the authority of the Church to instruct and inform, Protestantism does not subscribe to the necessity of such structure. John Burt uses an examination of O’Connor’s primary character in

Wise Blood to discuss the writer’s belief that “[t]he problem of Protestantism and the problem of the authority of the imagination … are linked” because “the rejection of external authority leaves

the character of the internal authority which replaces it indeterminate” (139). He cites her letter to William Sessions, dated September 29, 1960, which gives insight into her treatment of her

Protestant characters and the differences she draws between what they believe and doctrine of the Catholic Church:

When the Protestant hears what he supposes to be the voice of the Lord, he follows it

regardless of whether it runs counter to his church’s teaching. The Catholic believes any

voice he may hear comes from the Devil unless it is in accordance with the teachings of

the Church…. One of the good things about Protestantism is that it always contains the

seeds of its own reversal. It is open at both ends—at one end to Catholicism, at the other

to unbelief. (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 410-411)

At its worst, this openness to whatever might be most convincing, this “seed” of Protestantism’s reversal, becomes the precursor to moving farther from belief. At its best, according to

O’Connor, it moves one toward Catholicism and truth. Clearly wary of religion that extends too much interpretive freedom to its believers, the writer remained firm on this point throughout her life and writing.

The unyielding position O’Connor took on these matters of truth further complicates our examination of those who emulate her literary style but not her spiritual foundation, but as we have noted, she was prepared for this. In “Novelist and Believer,” after acknowledging the effect of the Judaeo-Christian tradition on Western thought and literature, however invisible, she adds that “[w]e live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual” and continues to detail three types of modern man: one “who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself” and therefore “become[s] his own ultimate concern;” a second “who recognizes a divine being” but “does not believe that this being can be known

anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally” and therefore cannot reach

God; and a third “who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God” (O’Connor, et al. 159). Against these types of “modern” men—the self-absorbed, the despondent, and the irresolute—O’Connor persisted with her fiction. In doing so, she stood up to a world that had borrowed the language of her faith to use as it pleased, to a company of fellow writers who portrayed life’s chaos without acknowledging the cause.

Given the prevalence of Biblical terms in non-spiritual definitions of moral realities and the ever-present influence of religion on Western thought, perhaps O’Connor held out the most hope for the third man she defines, the one who searches in his experience for a God that seems to have been lost. She concludes her definitions of modern approaches to God with a recognition of the power of this curiosity when embedded in fiction:

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discovers, and at its worst, an age that has

domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. The fiction which celebrates this

last state will be the least likely to transcend its limitations, for when the religious need is

banished successfully, it usually atrophies, even in the novelist. The sense of mystery

vanishes. A kind of reverse evolution takes place, and the whole range of feeling is

dulled. (O’Connor, et al. 159-160)

So she celebrates those who question, whose curiosity and willingness to probe possibilities places them where they might encounter truth. At the crux of this elaboration, O’Connor asserts that those searching for the lost God in the lost world have a decided effect on those who have already found Him: “These unbelieving searchers have their effect even upon those of us who do believe. We begin to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness, to

purify them in the heat of our unbelieving neighbor’s anguish” (O’Connor, et al. 160). However absent of spiritual beliefs a work may be, its very act of questioning maintains and propels a mystery in which O’Connor recognized great possibility. As we will examine, the filmmakers of both Fargo and Three Billboards betray this characteristic searching in their work, the “anguish” of uncertainty that O’Connor would have seen as a precursor to understanding.

If the modern storytellers we consider here do affect believers in this way, it is because

O’Connor first influenced them with her unapologetic examinations of man’s struggle with sin, grace, and redemption. Belief is not a requirement for this influence, as Granville Hicks reminds readers in his August 1955 review of the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find:

...it is clear that Miss O’Connor regards human life as mean and brutish and that she

makes this judgment from an orthodox Christian point of view. But one does not have to

believe in [Original Sin, Adam and Eve’s defiance of God and turn toward sin,] to be

affected by these stories. Miss O’Connor’s vision of life is presented with such

conviction and such intensity that, for the moment at any rate, it authenticates itself. (139)

Even without reconciling the Biblical understanding of O’Connor’s often-used terms with the secular, each story engenders its own authority, teaches its own rationale, such that—like many of O’Connor’s characters—there is no prerequisite for the reader to be brought to the recognition she intends. In “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” O’Connor reveals that this quality of her fiction comes from a conscious attention to it:

The Catholic who does not write for a limited circle of fellow Catholics will in all

probability consider that, since this is his vision, he is writing for a hostile audience, and

he will be more than ever concerned to have his work stand on its own feet and be

complete and self-sufficient and impregnable in its own right. When people have told me

that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that

because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist. (O’Connor, et al. 146)

Perhaps this self-authenticating quality is the very facet of her work that so draws other artists to its questions even without sharing O’Connor’s belief in the eternal importance of the answers.

Chapter 3: An Examination of the Primary Texts

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”

As the title story of her debut short story collection, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” serves both as an optimal example of O’Connor’s style, themes, and talents and also as a touchstone from which we can better understand her influence on contemporary writers such as the Coens and McDonagh. In it, we find evidence of her faith in “one God” and the “one mediator of God and men … Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5); as well, we see the characteristic means by which she conveys this truth. Of her popular short work, O’Connor once wrote that “...there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate” (O’Connor, et al. 109).

The story that could be written in no other way found its origins—appropriately—in reality. Several of O’Connor’s personal letters collected in her posthumously published The

Habit of Being demonstrate her attention to multiple publications, including Atlanta’s

Constitution. In his 1982 article “The Genesis of Flannery O'Connor's ‘A Good Man Is Hard to

Find,’” Victor Lasseter notes that several elements within “A Good Man”—in particular, the defining details of the story’s serial killer—can be found in various newspaper clippings from

The Constitution between 1950 and 1952. One story marvels at two burglars who seemed

uncharacteristically concerned with the comfort of their captives, another reveals a man’s plan for ordination into the ministry after receiving a one hundred twenty year prison sentence for multiple robberies, and numerous others describe patricides, floggings, and prison escapes

(Lasseter 227). Lasseter further reasons that if O’Connor closely followed the political race in the fall of 1952, as her letters indicate, she must also have read the same-page publications about the state-wide police search for kidnapper James Francis “Maniac” Hill (229). Hill’s response to the classic question Why did you do it? appeared in the Constitution’s November 1st, 1952 issue:

“‘I faced more time than I could make anyway, so I decided I might as well have some fun’”

(Lasseter 229-230). Hill’s saga came alongside several other articles detailing stubborn Southern characters, and, as Lasseter notes, “[f]rom these front page beginnings, O’Connor created her story of spiritual rebellion colliding with spiritual complacency” (230).

One should consider that in O’Connor’s introduction to her own reading of the story at

Hollins College, Virginia less than a year before her death, she expressed that “[a] story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind” (O’Connor, et al. 108). Indisputably, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” resists successful paraphrase, although such will be attempted here for the purpose of establishing the key example of her short fiction from which to draw comparisons and connections. In the same 1963 introduction, O’Connor restated her claim another way: “A story that is any good can't be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four”

(O’Connor, et al. 102). At times, for this particular text, the answers to that equation seem to be infinite.

A careful revisitation and study of the text will unearth its particular aspects we will find mirrored in the Coens and McDonagh’s work in the films. The story opens with the immediate characterization of a grandmother—who “didn’t want to go to Florida” (O’Connor, “A Good

Man” 117)—her only son, Bailey, and his family with whom she lives as a passive-aggressive dispute ensues about the destination of the family road trip. Before the end of the first paragraph, the grandmother, whose absence of any other name in the story invites the reader to find themselves within her character, attempts to dissuade her son from the southernmost option with the deterrent that an escaped convict, “The Misfit,” is on the loose and heading in that direction.

When she remarks that she “couldn’t answer to [her] conscience” (117) if she took her children into harm’s way, her words forecast more than she realizes, becoming—in a sense—an unconscious revelation of events to come.

Descriptions and dialogue immediately become indexes to character as the exposition quickly characterizes Bailey’s wife—“whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage”

(117)—as submissive and dull and the oldest children, John Wesley and June Star, as bratty, poor-mannered, and overtly selfish. When the family piles into the car the next morning, the grandmother, bringing her cat as a secret passenger for the trip, is dressed to the nines: “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”

(118). Following the story’s title, we quickly encounter several obvious references to measures of value early in the text: the grandmother’s appalled remarks concerning The Misfit and

Bailey’s willingness to endanger his family, this comment on the grandmother’s attire and her belief that her appearance denotes her gentility, and a car ride story-telling in which the grandmother describes a long-lost beau who “was a very good-looking man and a gentleman” and eventually died very wealthy (117-120).

The thread of defining goodness continues as the family stops for lunch at The Tower, and the family converses with the owner, Red Sammy Butts, and his wife. Here, when Red Sam begins a platitude-ridden dialogue and laments that “‘These days you don’t know who to trust,’” the grandmother is quick to call him “‘a good man’” (122) for allowing a few passing customers to charge their gas. She appears blind to his curt remarks to his wife about serving the drinks rather than making conversation, furthering our suspicion of her sincerity and ability to discern true goodness. When the family returns to the road and the grandmother soon finds herself recalling an old plantation house she remembered from years past, her certainty that it stood nearby equals her certainty that Bailey would waste no time for such a detour. In an explicit demonstration of dishonesty for one so concerned with the positive virtues of others, she tells a flat lie to the children about the house containing “‘a secret panel’” (123), eliciting their enthusiasm and in turn succeeding in getting a reluctant Bailey to change course. En route to the plantation, the grandmother has the striking realization that the house “she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125), and her physical jolt at her surprise sends the stowaway feline onto Bailey’s shoulder, causing him—within a single sentence—to roll the car over in a ditch. Her deception leads to her fate, makes way for her encounter with the truths she has chosen to dilute with a counterfeit sincerity.

The tone of the narrative carries on in the writer’s characteristic grotesque detail as

“Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of the pine tree,” the vegetable-like mother sits in the gulch with a cut face and broken shoulder, and June Star darkly laments that, although they have suffered an accident, “‘nobody’s killed’” (125). O’Connor shifts the descriptions of the environment as well, such that in more ways than one the family finds themselves not at all where they intended to travel: “Behind the

ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep” (125). Almost immediately, a “hearse-like” (126) car appears on the horizon, stops atop the scene of the accident, and introduces the story’s pivotal character, The Misfit, and his two accompanying henchmen. The shift in tone implies another world. From this point, the grandmother and her family meet the depravity of reality, the truth that underlies her gentility and their fatuous lives.

The second exclamation out of the grandmother’s mouth identifies the criminal, and his casual response implies the irreversibility of this shift in her awareness: “‘Yes’m,’ the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, ‘but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me’” (127).

At once from his introduction, the killer displays an almost overstated politeness, a demeanor adding dissonance to O’Connor’s already discordant descriptions of his physical appearance—without “any shirt or undershirt” and “blue jeans that were too tight for him” but at the same time sporting “silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look” (126). When the grandmother begins an immediate attempt for the family’s salvation with words the reader has come to recognize as meaningless to her—“‘I know you’re a good man’” (127)—The Misfit responds with genteel, calm agreement, with dialogue punctuated by the courtesies of “‘Yes mam’” and “‘I pre-chate that, lady’” (127-128). As the criminal directs his associates to take

Bailey and John Wesley toward the woods and the executions begin, the grandmother turns ever more to her empty declarations—“‘I just know you’re a good man….You’re not a bit common!’”

(128)—to save, as her words increasingly reveal, herself. Meanwhile, The Misfit, perhaps oddly conversational but in a style of full disclosure somewhat true to a typical villain, uses the grandmother’s pleas and questions to ruminate aloud about his upbringing, his past, and particularly his issues with the law and its penalties. The reader recognizes the ironic contrast

between the grandmother’s notions of goodness and the way in which—faced with her own mortality—she claims the same word over the man who may take her life. In a sense, The Misfit becomes the good man O’Connor offers in her story. In his 1964 essay “Flannery O’Connor: A

Prose Elegy,” Thomas Merton notes the similarity of this story’s questions to those O’Connor often elicits in her fiction:

Her beings are always raising the question of worth. Who is a good man? Where is he?

He is ‘hard to find.’ Meanwhile you will have to make out with a bad one who is so

respectable that he is horrible, so horrible that he is funny, so funny that he is pathetic,

but so pathetic that it would be gruesome to pity him. So funny that you do not dare to

laugh too loud for fear of demons. (70)

And indeed it becomes difficult not to laugh at the grandmother, painfully transparent in her attempt to explain away the killer’s wrongdoings and highlight his familial background and good sense as indications of his quality character. As she urges The Misfit to “‘[p]ray, pray’” (130) and offers that “‘Jesus will help [him]’” (131), her captor, waxing theological, reasons that

“‘Jesus thrown everything off balance’” and that he “‘can’t make what all [he has] done wrong fit what all [he has] gone through in punishment’” (131). After this moment, distant gunshots confirm that, of the family, only the grandmother remains.

The grandmother’s demonstrations of her own theory of goodness throughout the story are critical to an analysis of her position at the story’s climax. In his 2001 analysis “A

Contrasting View of ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,’” Stephen C. Bandy posits that “[t]here are really only two characters in this story: the Grandmother and the Misfit. The rest are wonderfully drawn … but they do not figure in the central debate” (Bandy 124). However, although much of the story’s subsequent criticism and analysis certainly focuses on the dialogue between these two

characters as the heart of O’Connor’s argument, the writer herself once wrote of the importance of every line of a text in her essay “Writing Short Stories”: “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate” (O’Connor, et al. 96). O’Connor used this to defend against extracting a single theme from a work, and its validity should be noted in any serious consideration of this story and its implications.

Nevertheless, the events and dialogue in the last pages of the story have certainly received the most critical attention. After acknowledging Christian doctrine in his declaration that “‘Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead’” (132), The Misfit reiterates that this has offset the order of the world, and reasons that, if the gospel stories of Jesus are accurate, then the obvious choice is to “‘follow Him’” (132), but if they are not, only meanness can bring pleasure in life. He implies, through his consideration of this if-then dilemma, that the world is not

Godless, or at the very least, he is prepared at a moment’s notice to operate as if it is not. This belief that lingers below the surface ties him to the searcher O’Connor described and to our film characters as they seek to delineate between good and evil in their “Godless” worlds but betray their agnosticism with hope. After the grandmother suggests that perhaps Jesus never did raise the dead—a key reversal in her professed beliefs that perhaps should garner more attention—The

Misfit reveals the crux of his unbelief: “‘I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,’ The Misfit said.

‘I wish I had of been there,’ he said, hitting the ground with his fist. ‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known’” (132). O’Connor surely knew how this declaration would cut directly to her readers’ deepest misgivings about faith. They audaciously request a front row seat to the proof before offering their belief. The Misfit becomes the Biblical doubting Thomas, the disciple that needed to touch Jesus’ wounded hands and side in order to

believe in His resurrection (John 20:27-29), and as his complaint continues, the story reaches its climax:

Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I

wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head

cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were

going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own

children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if

a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun

down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them. (132)

As the henchmen return from the dark woods, O’Connor describes The Misfit’s eyes—whereas previous detail had only been given to his glasses—as “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless- looking” (132-133). One of the other men makes an offhand comment concerning the grandmother’s talkative nature, and The Misfit remarks that the woman would have been good if there “‘had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (133). In the story’s final line, he reverses his previous statement about meanness and declares that there is “‘no real pleasure in life’” (133), subtly indicating that the episode has changed him, marked him in some way.

The story serves particularly well as a primary example of the style, elements, and context O’Connor used to communicate her ideas about life, man, and God. As arguably every artist of literature has done, she used her work as a vehicle through which to explore the concerns which most possessed her, for her, the theological truths that she saw in the rawness of the world.

Although she predicted misinterpretations of her work and fielded them throughout her life,

O’Connor also believed that readers would respond to these truths on a deeper level perhaps

unconscious to themselves as a result of the fundamental fact of their own participation in humanity, its limitations and its redemption, whether aware of it or not. She once wrote that the reader “may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him” (O’Connor, et al. 99), an effect not unlike the unconscious revelations of the characters themselves.

One can safely assume that the violent turns of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” as well as the pivotal moments of others of O’Connor’s short fiction works, have an effect on readers whether or not the impression is theological. In her 2001 essay “Emblematic Moments in

O’Connor’s Fiction,” Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner argues that, given O’Connor’s Biblical influences, the shocking violence in her work should be expected:

No matter how you read it, the gospel contains birth in a cold, dirty stable and violent

death in Golgotha. The Incarnation finds its actual fulfillment in the Resurrection, but

resurrection requires death. O’Connor understood that this is one hard fact humankind

would rather ignore, and her characters show extraordinary initiative and ingenuity in

finding ways to avoid confronting their frailties, the chief of which is their own mortality.

(51-52)

In keeping with memento mori, the Latin phrase for the idea demonstrated in philosophy and works since antiquity, characters must remember that one day they must die (Miller, “Some”).

Baumgaertner remind us that “only when a character smacks flat up against death [is] the necessity of salvation … finally apparent,” which “is why so many of O’Connor’s stories reach a violent climax, forcing the characters to see grace in a new and terrible way” (52). The grandmother’s “initiative and ingenuity” in her attempts to avoid her death certainly suggest an attempt by O’Connor to call the readers’ attention to their own distorted moralities in which

appearances and misled theories of goodness replace Biblical truth. It is the grandmother’s “Meet

Yourself Experience.” Biblically, it recalls the words of Isaiah 64:6; like the filthy rags of our righteousness that cannot earn us Heaven, the grandmother’s pleas and coercions are worthless in her struggle for mercy from The Misfit. Her moment of seeing “grace in a new and terrible way” occurs just before her death when she decides to reach out toward the criminal, physically and emotionally. Frieling notes, as many scholars have, that “[w]hen the shirt of her son is later worn by the Misfit, it helps, emblematically, the grandmother recognize the Misfit as her ‘son’…”

(114-115). O’Connor called this the “gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story” which makes the story work (O’Connor, et al. 111) but also insisted that the moment must be understood on the anagogical level. In an explanation of her work, O’Connor reveals her authorial intention that the grandmother realizes “that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far” (O’Connor, et al. 111-112). Her insincere religion has begotten his deficit of faith. Therefore, any serious interpretation of the work that includes the author must recognize O’Connor’s aim that the Misfit not be seen as the devil but rather a would-be prophet for whom the grandmother’s gesture might make a pivotal difference (O’Connor, et al. 112-113).

Rather than the agent of evil, he is merely another person in the story in search of answers to the big questions: What are the rules of this life? And How can I know for certain?

But while the Biblical interpretation of this story clearly stands out given an understanding of the author’s purpose, the other enduring thread comes back to the words of the title. While O’Connor’s comment on sin, grace, and redemption implies a comment on the

Biblical meaning of good, the idea of the good man invites a conversation in which believers and nonbelievers alike can take part. Thomas Merton argued that O’Connor saw that we have

convinced ourselves “that we respect ‘everything good’” although “we know too well that we have lost the lost elementary respect for ourselves” (69). He believed that she recognized our perversion of respect until it became itself a grotesque:

She wrote in and out of the anatomy of a word that became genteel, then self-conscious,

then obsessive, finally dying of contempt, but kept calling itself ‘respect.’ Contempt for

the child, for the stranger, for the woman, for the Negro, for the animal, for the white

man, for the farmer, for the country, for the preacher, for the city, for the world, for

reality itself. Content, content, so that in the end the gestures of respect they kept making

to themselves and to each other and to God became desperately obscene. (Merton 69)

The grandmother’s descriptions and dialogue in the story trace the very pattern Merton suggests.

She cares more about her appearance as a lady than carrying out what might be considered actions of actual goodness such as disciplining the smart-mouthed children into decent behavior or aiding the Negro child on the side of the road rather than thinking she might paint a picture of him. She exclaims a fear and hatred for The Misfit after reading about his notorious escape in the newspaper, but she pretends to befriend, compliment, and even mentor him when her life is at stake. None of these gestures appears sincere until the extension of her hand. She meets her true self in that moment. And indeed, the fake gestures of respect that preceded the moment appear obscene, a grotesque, deformed notion of what one misled woman determines to be respectable and good—if not offensive to a God, at least offensive to the rest of mankind in search of true goodness.

O’Connor would say that such a search cannot succeed outside of an understanding of the gospels. Holman summarizes that “the order [O’Connor saw] in the world, the order which redeems it from chaos and gives it community, is fundamentally religious” (66), a fact apparent

from the history of her life and work. So when non-believing theorists attempt to wrestle out notions of goodness and worth, “the tragedy she sees is the failure of the seeking soul to find rest in an adequate God…” (Holman 66). O’Connor might also point out that the history of our attempts to define goodness apart from spiritual or Biblical terms only proves our restlessness with the results. We refuse to accept the idea that there may be no answer, and our dissatisfaction prevents apathy toward the question. Unmistakably, particular modern Gothic storytellers have read O’Connor’s parable of the grandmother and The Misfit, and while they seem to do just as she suspected and dismiss greater spiritual implications of the questions it raises, they still attempt to make sense of the world and acknowledge a wrestling between good and evil.

Fargo

Just as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” has served here as a vehicle for analysis of

O’Connor’s unique style and purpose, two films will serve as examples of these Gothic elements in modern filmmaking: Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Both films function as representatives of postmodern themes and works whose plots operate within worlds that lack a recognition of a divine moral code. Characters are still compelled toward good and discomfited by evil even as both concepts exist as constructs within the postmodern world. These films—and those in the same artistic vein—jar the viewer, disquiet him in some unmistakable manner such that they might be described in much the same way that Alice Walker once described the extremes of O’Connor’s works: “After her great stories of sin, damnation, prophecy, and revelation, the stories one reads casually in the average magazine seem to be about love and roast beef” (38). We will consider these films as demonstrations of O’Connor’s particular influence on writers today by noting their emulation of her expanded brand of the

Gothic in place, character, and dialogue that parallels their own pursuits to identify goodness in the world.

Since their emergence onto the filmmaking scene in 1984 with the independently funded

Blood Simple (Coughlin), Joel and Ethan Coen have become fixtures of contemporary cinema and storytelling. Their early love of creating amateur home movies, Joel’s experience at NYU

Film School, and Ethan’s study of philosophy at Princeton formed a creative and academic context from which the brothers began writing, directing, producing, and editing achievements such as Fargo, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, and No Country For Old Men (“Coen”). This ownership of their process highlights their influences, and readers appreciative of and familiar with O’Connor can easily perceive the Coens’ “admiration for Southern writers like William

Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor,” although they self-admittedly “don’t share her interest in

Catholicism” (Ciment and Niogret 26). While Ethan Coen praises O’Connor’s “great sense of eccentric character” in her grotesque tales, his brother clarifies that their characters have

“terrestrial” rather than “mystical obsessions” (Ciment and Niogret 26-27). Although Coen makes it clear that their work has been influenced by her style but not by her spiritual purpose, their characters undeniably move within grotesque worlds reminiscent of those of O’Connor’s creation.

In Fargo, one of those characters, like the grandmother, seems to damn himself from the outset. For collateral on a $320,000 loan, Jerry Lundegaard has used fictitious vehicles from the dealership where he works as a manager. With this plan quickly unraveling, he meets with two small time criminals, Gaear and Carl, to stage the kidnapping of his wife and a subsequent ransom demand to his wealthy father-in-law. Viewers first suspect that this ill-conceived scheme will turn comically dark when the fake kidnapping becomes more violent than planned, and this

suspicion solidifies when a police officer pulls over the criminals with the bound and gagged

Mrs. Lundegaard in the backseat. Gaear murders the officer to silence him and proceeds to murder two witnesses in a passing vehicle. The stakes go up along with the price they demand of

Jerry for the complications: from half of the $80,000 ransom to demanding it in full. Like the lie and the car accident that land the grandmother in the ditch and lead her to her confrontation with fate, Jerry’s ill-considered plan turns equally grim.

The film then introduces Marge Gunderson, the Brainerd chief of police and the character who embodies O’Connor’s searcher who “feel[s] about in all experience” for meaning and for

God (O’Connor, et al. 159). Despite her extremely pregnant condition, she assesses the triple murder scene and begins a calculated investigation. The film draws comedy from Jerry’s comic and tragic inadequacies, Marge’s unwavering resolve to crack the case, and the many ludicrous characters between them. When her inquiries lead Marge to Jerry’s dealership, he hurries her away with lies. Soon after, although Jerry has insisted that the kidnappers will only deal with him, his father-in-law determines to take the one million dollar ransom to the kidnappers’ meeting point, a snow-covered parking garage, on his own. When he demands to see his daughter before handing over the money, Carl pulls out his gun, shooting the father dead, but not before sustaining his own grotesque injury of a bullet to the jaw. Jerry shows up to the garage as the kidnappers flee and dejectedly pops the trunk of his vehicle to make room for his father-in- law’s body, another freakish turn in the plan gone horribly wrong.

Jerry’s choice to operate within the laws of an absurd world, through deception fueled by fear, results in increasing chaos. As Marge closes in on the case, a personal encounter reminds her not to take everyone at face value, a suggestion by the film that a benevolent and trusting approach cannot effectively combat the world’s evil. Meanwhile, the film’s body count continues

to tick higher. Carl hides true contents of the briefcase from his partner, gives Gaear his share of

$80,000, and buries the briefcase along a snowy highway. Upon his return to the hideaway cabin where they have kept Mrs. Lundegaard, Carl finds that Gaear has killed her, gets into a petty argument with him about the car, and soon dies at the hands of Gaear and an unfortunately- placed axe. Meanwhile, Marge confronts Jerry, who flees from his own car lot, and she is soon after led to the cabin, where—in the film’s darkly iconic scene—she approaches Gaear shoving the rest of Carl into a woodchipper which showers a steady red rain over the snow-laden lawn.

The film’s quieter moments following this climax ask the unsettled questions. The film wraps up as Marge wounds a fleeing Gaear in the leg and brings him in by means of her police cruiser, chatting offhandedly with the brutal criminal about the questionable worth of all of this killing and destruction. Authorities apprehend Jerry in a motel, and—in the final scene—Marge settles into bed with her husband as if it were the close of an ordinary day. Through the pregnant police chief, the film wrestles with the presence of evil in the world and tries to make sense of it.

Unlike the grandmother, Marge’s initially faulty judgement of who is good or bad does not lead to her own death, but it does lead to the same questioning of her world. For its dark humor, unforgettable characters, and Minnesota-accented one-liners, the film has become a cult favorite.

For its implications of how we respond to a chaotic world, it stands as an example of O’Connor’s methods without her message.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

As with Fargo, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri also demonstrates

O’Connor’s meaning sans the message. This analysis joins the two films by means of detailing their disquieting manners and clear imitations of O’Connor’s style, although they incidentally

share another connection. Twenty-three years after its release, Fargo remains perhaps the Coens’ most recognized work, winning two of its seven Academy Award nominations that year—for best screenplay and best actress performance by Frances McDormand (“Coen”). Twenty-one years later, McDormand repeated her Academy Award win with her portrayal of Mildred Hayes in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, only the third feature-length film from the London-born Irishman. Although he shares O’Connor’s familiarity with religion, having attended Irish Catholic schools as a child, McDonagh abandoned those beliefs by the age of twelve (O’Toole). Not long after, he began creating original stories, as with the first one he told his brother at the age of sixteen, in which an old man claims to give a boy a gift that he will not immediately appreciate and then proceeds to cut off his toes: “The man is the Pied Piper, who saves Hamelin from the plague but kidnaps the local children when the town’s elders refuse to compensate him for his efforts. The boy is the only one of Hamelin’s children to survive, because he cannot keep up with the other kids, who follow the Piper out of town” (O’Toole).

This early thread of the grotesque repeatedly surfaces in McDonagh’s professional work. As we continue to consider these modern filmmakers as subscribers to O’Connor’s approach, this examination of Three Billboards will further our evidence and lay the foundation for our final comparisons and conclusion.

Fans of O’Connor cannot mistake the resemblance to her unique Gothic traits within

Three Billboards, punctuated by an early glimpse of advertising agency employee Red Welby reading a copy of her collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In this opening scene, Mildred

Hayes enters the seemingly struggling agency office and pays for three dilapidated billboards on the outskirts of her town to read RAPED WHILE DYING, AND STILL NO ARRESTS?, and HOW

COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? Seven months prior, Hayes’ daughter, Angela, was raped and

murdered, and Hayes decision to take matters into her own hands arrests the angered attention of more than just the chief. While the film characterizes Willoughby as a respectable family man dismayed by his inability to reignite the investigation, officer Jason Dixon begins a juvenile and destructive course of action in retaliation to the billboards that reveals his alcoholism, racism, and generally base nature—introducing a juxtaposition of two characters apparently ruled by good and bad inclinations, respectively.

Mildred, of course, believes herself to be on the right side of good and evil, but reactions to Mildred’s intentions become complicated by the news that Chief Willoughby has terminal cancer. As the film unravels, a host of opposition confronts Mildred one at a time—her ex- husband, her son, her priest—but she does not waver. The whirlwind of chaotic events resemble those of Fargo. Her dentist threatens her with a drill in his hand and she puts it through his thumb. The billboards succumb to arson. Willoughby commits suicide to spare his family a close view of his slow death to cancer, but not before writing several letters to his wife, Mildred, and

Dixon and anonymously paying for the billboards to remain up another month. Dixon throws the advertising employee out of a second story window in anger and subsequently is fired. Like

Fargo’s Jerry and O’Connor’s grandmother, Mildred’s actions determine her fate; unlike those characters, Mildred’s actions are driven by an impulse toward doing what is right and therefore good.

The moment of realization and reckoning belongs to a different character in the story. In the wake of the chief’s death, Dixon sits at his old desk in the police department reading his touching letter from Willoughby just as Mildred arrives—at the peak of both her own darkness and the night’s—to bomb the department with a Molotov cocktail. In his desperate escape from the building, Dixon emerges with severe burns but also Angela Hayes’ case file. The billboards

are lovingly restored with a spare set a friend reveals to Mildred, a hopeful love interest gives her an alibi for the night of the police station destruction, and Dixon seems to have had a change of heart as a result of Willoughby’s letter. Soon after, Dixon initiates a bar fight with a man whom he overhears bragging about a rape and murder much like Angela’s and he revels in the idea of being able to do good by catching the killer, but when the DNA test results are returned they prove no connection to Hayes’ case.

As Francine Prose writes in her film review, “McDonagh shares many of O’Connor’s preoccupations: obsession, fanaticism, eccentricity, violence, physical deformity, the lifelong legacy of guilt that can result from a family conflict, and the unexpected, even shocking ways in which the faithless can stumble upon redemption.” However, like the Coens’ work and unlike

O’Connor’s, McDonagh’s picture of this redemption is more earthly than spiritual. Regardless of the negative DNA test, Dixon invites Mildred to join him on a drive to Idaho to kill the man he overheard, reasoning that it might not be Angela’s killer but that the man still did something bad:

“I know he idn’t your rapist. He is a rapist though. I’m sure a’ that.”

“What are you saying to me?”

“Got his license plate. I know where he lives.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Lives in Idaho.”

“That’s funny. I’m driving to Idaho in the morning.”

“Want some company?”

“Sure.”

The two characters drive away together at the film’s close in pursuit of not only a criminal but also a goodness in themselves and their world, with little more than this relative moral logic that

O’Connor so clearly denounced. Even so, in many ways, both their pursuit and the film’s ending are more akin to O’Connor’s work than not.

Chapter 4: An Analysis of O’Connor’s Stylistic Influence on the Films

Remote Roadside Reckonings: A Shared Sense of Place

While O’Connor’s expansion of Gothic elements appears in the place, character, and dialogue of these modern Gothic films, a distinct sense of place translates most easily from her written page to the cinematography of the Coens and McDonagh. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor explains the necessity of establishing such a setting:

The Catholic novel that fails … is a novel which doesn't grapple with any particular

culture…. a novel in which there is no sense of place, and in which feeling is, by that

much, diminished. Its action occurs in an abstracted setting that could be anywhere or

nowhere. This reduces its dimensions drastically and cuts down on those tensions that

keep fiction from being facile and slick. (O’Connor, et al. 199)

What O’Connor notes for the Catholic novelist holds true for all writers; all successful stories must be grounded in a time and place. From elementary fairy tales which begin Once upon a time in a land far, far away to the prologues of Shakespeare’s plays, readers find themselves conditioned to need a stage before the action. Just as something that statistically could happen to anyone does not gain emotional weight until it happens to the individual, stories that could occur anywhere carry more weight when rooted firmly in their somewheres. The tone set by a story’s landscape remains with the reader and establishes particular expectations.

The setting of any story transports the reader from his current reality to a different one, from his immediate now to a sometime past. The experiences of the characters in this other

reality characterize the humanity whose reality the reader shares. Literature has always taught us more about ourselves, and often the greatest lessons come from a close look at a setting far different from our own. O’Connor understood that the geography of her stories would impart a particular impression on her readers, that descriptions of the dusty South she knew well would provide the stage she needed for her stories of sin and redemption. In his essay published not long after O’Connor’s death, critic Robert Drake remarked on the literary company in which the writer found herself through her recognition of the power of place: “...like all genuine artists, she knew that her real—and inevitable—subject lay at her own doorstep, indeed was hardly to be found anywhere else. Baldwin County, Georgia, was her Wessex, her Yoknapatawpha, even, finally, as ironic as it might seem, her great good Hemingway place” (Drake 11). Like her literary company, O’Connor knew that gritty was just another way of saying unapologetically real, and she was willing to embrace the dirt of her “great good” home. She once wrote: “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you” (O’Connor, et al. 68).

The stories within O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find collection seem to be searching for the elusive, unknown title character in similar places, searching for goodness in stark landscapes where it might be laid bare. As one scholar notes, each story is “so palpably anchored in a particular time and place as to color her readers’ perceptions of the place itself” and any notions of exaggeration or overly fantastic descriptions on O’Connor’s part likely only come from those who “are unfamiliar with the rural South of which she wrote” (Humphries 111-

112). On the opening page of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” when the elder Lucynell

Crater “shad[es] her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand” and watches “Mr. Shiftlet

[come] up their road” (145), the rural setting establishes itself immediately, and a wide world of

terror suddenly becomes possible in the story’s rural environs. The vastness of the landscape offers no protection from harm, whether from nature or a traveling outsider. The openness establishes more fear than freedom, a stronger feeling of being trapped than of being in control.

As we have noted, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the grandmother’s longing for a pit stop at the “old plantation that she had visited in [the] neighborhood once when she was a young lady”

(123) ultimately leads the group to their inescapable confrontation with evil. With the family en route to the imaginary plantation, O’Connor even sets a single-sentence description of the changing setting as its own paragraph: “The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months” (124). On the next page, as they recover from the wreck, the family finds themselves in a transformed setting—“The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it” (125)—in a pocket of their earlier reality, the treetops their only glimpse of life as it once was and will never be again. Out in the open of the deserted road, as

The Misfit’s vehicle slowly winds its way toward them in the distance, the family waits, sitting ducks in an alien environment.

O’Connor’s primary influence had its own stories that married roads with reckoning. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan who shows mercy to an injured man along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho (Luke 10:30-37). Later in the same book, two disciples encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus but do not realize with whom they speak (Luke

24:15-32). And perhaps the most disturbing juxtaposition of the treatment of Christ also occurs on two roads: the road to Jerusalem to which “a great multitude” flocked “forth to meet him” crying praises (John 12:12-19) and the road to Calvary on which he was “mocked” and led to his crucifixion (Mark 15:20). Roads beget reckonings. Dusty, forgotten avenues lead to truth.

O’Connor’s literary heirs continue this feature, even though the reckoning on the road is purportedly not one with Christ. On the stories’ rural pathways, as Alissa Wilkinson observes about “O’Connor’s South and [...] Ebbing, Missouri” in her film review, readers and viewers confront a “wild and violent” world, “a [G]othic mid-space … located somewhere between heaven and hell.” Fargo and Three Billboards also land “somewhere between heaven and hell,” in a “mid-space” of time and eternity. Noticeably, both films in question use their locations for their titles—although in actuality Fargo’s events occur mostly in Brainerd—and concentrate action in the remote landscapes surrounding each. Like “A Good Man” with its family road trip driving toward destruction, the films’ Gothic storylines quickly formulate around similarly godforsaken roads. Fargo’s opening shot establishes a bleak, 1980s midwest with the white backdrop of a snowy highway as violins add a somber effect to a lone car pulling another in tow before the scene fades to black. Three Billboards opens similarly on the highway that boasts the film’s namesakes, followed by a slow montage of nostalgic advertisements that construct the verisimilitude. The boards are stripped of half of their sheets and, as a result, some mix more than one forgotten advertisement: “Ebb” as part of some accolade to the town, “Diner” and

“Gas” barely readable through alternating sheets of an illustration of a young boy, and the ending words of a pathos-laden promise “—of your life!” During these establishing shots, the soundtrack adds the hauntingly beautiful vocals of operatic performer Renée Fleming singing

“The Last Rose of Summer” (Salazar), a choice which sets up an appreciable air of beauty and peace. Aside from the eerie contrast this introduction composes against the rest of the film’s events, the setting also highlights the emotional atmosphere. Mildred’s passionate actions assert that more than simply these billboards have been abandoned; she fights for a justice that seems as outdated as the nostalgic advertisements, for ideals she sees as also deserted by the side of the

road. She seems to operate on the hope that—as in the Biblical stories—the roadside might indeed be where she finds them again.

The Coen brothers further establish a fabricated reality in Fargo with their now-famous falsification of the “true story” title card. Writing for The Atlantic, Christopher Orr clarifies that

“[t]he intent [...] was to present a film that very clearly took place in the ‘real’ world, in contrast to the stylized universes of their previous films,” adding that Fargo has “an almost documentary feel compared to their earlier work.” The feigned “true story” promise sets up the concept that the succeeding events could have happened, did happen, do happen in reality. It asserts: This is the comic depravity of real life. As in O’Connor’s work, as the characters’ decisions propel the unraveling of their fates, viewers of Fargo may be inclined to see the events as exaggerated and shocking, unlikely occurrences within a fictional world blanketed in a midwest snow. Gaear’s murder of the police officer and two passersby leaves a bloodied scene in sharp contrast to the bright white landscape. Jerry arrives at the scene of the botched ransom exchange and simply places his father-in-law’s body in the trunk of his Oldsmobile. Carl’s crimson blood spews out of the woodchipper and into the air against a bleak winter sky. Like the grandmother speaking the circumstances of her death into motion from the first paragraph of “A Good Man,” these events confirm that characters precipitate their own fates.

The Coen brothers craft these points of their storyline with the same purpose as

O’Connor. Their “desecrated landscape”—in their case, usually of dark blood upon bright snow—shows, as Carter Martin wrote of O’Connor’s, a “preoccupation with the ugliness of reality” (92), the ugliness of the events. They share O’Connor’s “close, hard, objective vision” of the world that informs that the “unpleasant realit[ies]” of life “need not be distorted to appear grotesque” (Martin 92). For both the Georgian writer and the filmmakers, this ugliness of their

places and people are distinctly the result of man. Robert Drake notes that “[a]nother aspersion against Miss O’Connor, often made along with the charge of her insistence on deformity, is that her stories have little that is beautiful in them. … But more often it is not nature itself which is ugly here but, rather, what man has made of nature” (Drake 39). Marge’s character touches upon this idea at the end of Fargo with her disillusioned narrative to a silent Gaear as she drives him toward presumable justice in her patrol car. After tallying the body count of the film’s events— five dead, all of whom her captive is responsible for—she contemplates aloud: “And for what?

For a little bit a’ money” (Fargo). Her comment assigns blame for the chaos to what O’Connor would have recognized as a cardinal sin—greed—and with an expression that seems to betray her effort to hold back tears, the experienced police chief continues: “There’s more to life than a little money, ya know” (Fargo). The camera cuts to Gaear as he looks out his window just as the patrol car passes a towering Paul Bunyan statue that has appeared in several of the film’s establishing shots, a directorial choice that highlights an image of a fictional man while Gaear and Marge roll along in the grotesque throes of the real world. Marge continues again, although her expression has changed such that it seems she truly asks him the question: “Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day” (Fargo). Police sirens sound in the distance as she punctuates her thoughts with one last statement: “Well, I just don’t understand it” (Fargo). The sirens become louder as the film closes on shots of the emergency vehicles battling through the blinding whiteout of the winter snow—a picture of the wake of man’s meanness within a landscape otherwise beautiful and pure.

Within these settings in her short fiction, O’Connor’s additional tendency to begin in medias res further establishes the reader in an existing world, presumably with its own order and possibility. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” immediately informs the reader that “[t]he

grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (117) and proceeds to establish a nearly immediate characterization of the entire “Good Man” family via their disagreement over travel plans. Like

O’Connor, “the Coens tell us almost nothing about what has taken place before [Fargo] begins”

(Orr). Jerry enters the King of Clubs bar and engages in a fumbling interaction with the hired kidnappers, but not then or ever does the narrative explain “how in the world Jerry has fallen hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt” (Orr). We only know that he has the wrong time for the ominous rendezvous: “I’m sure sorry. Shep told me 8:30. It was a mixup I guess” (Fargo).

After the camera shots of the billboards that establish a sense of place, the first moments of

Three Billboards introduces Mildred as she puts her car in reverse to consider the three deteriorating advertisements alongside the barren road, and the first interaction between characters shows her confrontation with Red Welby of the Ebbing advertising office in which she inquires about renting the three seldom-passed billboards that no one has used in decades. In all three stories, the first moments introduce the reader or viewer to a character bent on a particular mission and the gaps of information paradoxically reinforce the sense of place. These environs demands that we catch up with the already advancing series of unfortunate events and assume that the world in which these events take place contains a certain order and possibility.

Given these comparisons, Coen perhaps misspoke his point when he implied that

O’Connor’s obsessions were not also just as terrestrial as they were mystical (Ciment and

Niogret 26-27). Certainly, O’Connor has her own “terrestrial” obsessions and owes them to her own influences. Warren Coffey, in an analysis of several writers to whom he believes O’Connor owes artistic debt, notes that William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was evidently one of the few works the young Georgian writer would adamantly pass along to her friends (38). Coffey calls

O’Connor’s literary relation to Faulkner “plain,” citing “her refusal to deal with life in

abstractions” as well as “her power with regional detail” and “gritty concreteness of language that are the badge in narrative and in style of that refusal” (38). Likewise, if the Coens’ and

McDonagh’s work share an adjective with O’Connor’s, it is gritty. It serves as an accurate descriptor of each writer’s landscapes as well as their characters.

Treatment of Character: The Good, the Bad, and the Grotesque

Against these backdrops, the Gothic artists develop their grotesque characters, flawed and exaggerated in precisely the way necessary for readers and viewers to recognize themselves in the story’s misshapen world. Characters within Fargo and Three Billboards display particular patterns of O’Connor’s work, including grotesque characterizations, disturbing encounters with or affinities for violence, and self-created moral codes.

As with everything in her work, O’Connor’s use of the grotesque in the very definition of her characters has the explicit purpose of pointing toward her eternal truths. In her essay

“Writing Short Stories,” she used Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as an illustrative example of grotesque exaggeration and its purpose, saying of the text that “[t]he truth is not distorted here, but rather, a certain distortion is used to get at the truth” (O’Connor, et al. 97-98). O’Connor sought to do the same in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” clearly focusing “her story on what is sinister in The Misfit and satirical in the grandmother and her family” (Ochshorn 114). In her

2003 essay “A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and

Flannery O'Connor,” Sarah Gleeson-White examines the particular use of the female grotesque by several Southern authors:

…[T]hese freakish women that so loudly dominate these stories engage in a politics of

dissent. And this occurs on two levels. Firstly, the raucous women in Welty’s,

McCullers’, and O’Connor’s fiction challenge idealised and, needless to say, oppressive

visions of white southern womanhood—the southern lady and the southern belle—that

have dominated southern gender regimes from the antebellum period right up to the

present. Secondly, the contorted and fragmented bodies that fill these writers’ stories at

the same time own up to a tragic history in which they have partaken, even if in silence.

(46)

As the freakish woman of her story, the grandmother may not consciously challenge her culture’s ideas of “white southern womanhood,” but she becomes a distortion of the definition precisely by trying to follow it so closely. Her preoccupation with her own presentation and appearances, her ignorance of others’ blatant moral shortcomings, and her ultimate selfishness when faced with the possibility of her death all mock the pious, poised image of a lady which she so believed that she embodied. Gleeson-White also notes that while remarking to the Misfit that he certainly would never shoot a lady the grandmother “seeks the image of the southern lady as a kind of cordon sanitaire, protecting her from the world” and “The Misfit answers her appeal with a bullet to her head” (52). After the grandmother’s death, O’Connor writes that she “half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (132). Having lost in her attempt to save her life, she lies as grotesquely in death as she lived when standing, an ugliness in her final pose that reflects the ugliness of her insincere life that failed to demonstrate the goodness she would have liked to claim.

Both of the filmmakers’ heroines also demonstrate a departure from cultural norms that appear as their own brand of grotesque. Even with the rampant murders, half-baked schemes, and general chaos that abounds among Fargo’s characters, it does not go unnoticed that Marge is

a female police chief whose pregnancy and midwestern accent underscore the humorous oddity of her character—especially for one in a hero role. Although Jerry remains a grotesque of a family man and the kidnappers’ own peculiarities become running jokes throughout the screenplay—“Well the little guy he was kinda funny-lookin’.”—it is Marge’s differences from the expected character of a hard-nosed chief of police, like her disbelieving final monologue in the patrol car with Gaear—that point toward the film’s deepest implications. Likewise, Three

Billboards’ Mildred transgresses the idea of a typical lady in every way, most notably with her unchanging attire from the film’s beginning to end: a navy jumpsuit. For every role she could play, she bears the opposite description: a wife whose marriage has now ended, a mother who has now suffered the loss of her child, a community member whose pain now pushes her toward a desperate fight for justice while commiting crimes of her own. These powerful female characters carry the weight of their stories with a gritty resolve unmatched by those around them.

Invariably, the weight of those stories is realized through violent means, a violence not entirely unwarranted. In his 1963 article “The Acid of God’s Grace: The Fiction of Flannery

O’Connor,” Jonathan Baumbach asserts that O’Connor’s “central characters do not fall from innocence;” instead, “[t]hey are fallen from the outset and move, doomed, through an infested world proliferating its evil” toward a moment of redemption (334). The grandmother in “A Good

Man” hypocritically prides herself for being “a lady” (118) who makes up for “not telling the truth” with internally “wishing that she were” (123). Her ignorance of her own hypocrisy, if not complete in this moment, peaks perhaps by the time of her shameless supplications to The Misfit which culminates in a denial of the beliefs she professes to maintain: “‘Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,’ the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her” (132). The confrontation has seemed to

bring her to the brink of exhaustion, the brink of herself, when any internal notion not firmly and deeply planted then becomes questionable. This returns to O’Connor’s frequent profession that reaching such characters—and an equally contrary audience—requires drastic action and

“violent literary means” (O’Connor, et al. 185).

These violent means, in turn, return to the concept of “Meet Yourself Experiences.”

While defining the Gothic traditions O’Connor’s work employs, Ronald Schleifer notes that “the act of ‘facing oneself’ is the recurrent action of O’Connor’s stories, the action of Gothic romance” (86). In her closing remarks on the story at her 1963 Virginia reading of “A Good Man

Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor discussed the revealing nature of violence:

We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in modern fiction, and it is

always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and meant to be an end in itself. With the

serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best

reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are more

interested in what we are essentially than in the tenor of our daily lives. (O’Connor, et al.

113-114)

With this remark, O’Connor deviates from her postmodern contemporaries, as the Coens and

McDonagh deviate from theirs, in declaring that violence is not its own end but a means toward a revelation. As she continues, O’Connor uses the language of her faith:

Violence is a force which can be used for good or evil, and among other things taken by

it is the kingdom of heaven. But regardless of what can be taken by it, the man in the

violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities

which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this

story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with

them. In any case, I hope that if you consider these points in connection with the story,

you will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the

way to Florida. (O’Connor, et al. 113-114)

What the grandmother takes with her is a destruction and reordering of the way she used to view the world, a recognition of her faulty definitions of goodness which it took an awareness of her mortality to bring about.

Before delineating the way in which the filmmakers introduce violent situations in order that their characters also face themselves at the brink of—not O’Connor’s “eternity” but—death stripped of religious explanation, it should be remembered that O’Connor knew the reality of what she spoke. In a sense, for the better part of the end of her life, she underwent this violence herself. As Alice Walker points out in her essay, “The First Great Modern Writer from the

South,” the origin of the word lupus is Latin: the word for “wolf” (31). Although O’Connor may have minimized her chagrin for the disease’s perennial symptoms, she knew the slow violence of lupus upon her person, and it is not far-reaching to imagine that she knew herself quite well as a result.

For O’Connor’s characters, violence is often the closest they come to connection with others as well as themselves. As a result, some characters seem to display an affinity for violence to occur. As the family in “A Good Man” emerges from the car wreck, June Star and John

Wesley mark the event with childish exclamation—“‘We’ve had an ACCIDENT!’ the children screamed in a frenzy of delight”—followed by June Star’s unsettlingly disappointed clarification: “‘But nobody’s killed’” (125). In grotesque form, O’Connor uses the typically innocent—the children—to indicate a pivoting of events toward brutality. The audacity of these young characters echoes in Fargo when Jerry’s son suddenly uses appalling profanity against his

soft-spoken mother after she suggests he give up hockey until his grades improve. Similarly, in a flashback scene of Three Billboards, Mildred’s daughter delivers the shocking counter after her mother denies her the use of the car, saying she will walk and that she hopes she gets raped on the way there. Viewers know that this flippant, insincere wish horrifically comes true in a disturbing example of unconscious revelation. Each of these incidents precedes an act of violence that shapes the story: the grandmother’s meeting with The Misfit, the botched kidnapping of Jerry’s wife, and the rape and murder of Mildred’s daughter. As the stories find their center in these violent occurrences, the characters find themselves.

In the face of this violence or as part of it, O’Connor’s characters use a self-created moral code in the abandonment of a religious one, exercising the moral relativism she so staunchly rebuked: “Her crazy people while remaining as crazy as they can possibly be, turn out to be governed by a strange kind of sanity” (Merton qtd. in Kinney 71). Claiming to have “been most everything,” O’Connor’s Misfit cites gospel choirs, railroad work, and undertaking as previous pursuits (129). Despite those apparent choir years, the man seems to have developed his own code of beliefs. Kinney posits that The Misfit’s knowledge of God “seems only to have betrayed him” (90), evidenced by the criminal’s claim that “‘Jesus thrown everything off balance’” by raising the dead (131). He requires ownership for wrongdoings, rejecting grace’s interference in logical justice, and can only understand the world through “‘meanness’” (132). Rejecting what he sees as hazy concepts such as hope or salvation, The Misfit characterizes all men in his search for certainty. Hendin assesses that, like other O’Connor characters, all he “can know absolutely

… is isolation, rage, and death,” ideas recurring within his many “absolute statements” (37-38).

He willingly declares early on in his confrontation with the grandmother that he “‘ain’t a good man’” (128), later asserts that “‘somebody is always after you’” (129), and vehemently denies

the accusation by the “‘head-doctor at the penitentiary’” that he murdered his father (130).

Hendin further notes that these declarations only become conditional if-then statements when

The Misfit begins to speak about Christ—“‘If He did what He said…’” (132)—but they still reflect a “rigid logical pattern” (39). Most notably, his desire to equalize his crimes and punishment demonstrates his predisposition for order, a desire also suggested by his commitment of murder, his method for creating “justice” and “equilibrium” in the world (Hendin 37).

Altogether, these actions expose an internal longing for a moral code he cannot seem to find in his Godless world.

The Coens’ and McDonagh’s characters demonstrate similar self-made moral codes. In

Three Billboards, as a grieving mother on the edge of sanity, Mildred rebukes her former religious code—one her visiting priest leads viewers to assume she once had—and instead takes up one all her own. She offers Chief Willoughby her rational solution for bringing justice to rapists and murderers like the one who robbed her of her daughter: “If it was me, I’d start up a database of everyone who’s ever lived. And as soon as he done something wrong, cross reference it, make a hundred percent certain it was a correct match, and kill him” (Three). Her favor toward absolute certainty and absolute punishment resembles O’Connor’s calculating criminal. She seems to be creating her own redemption, her own justice, having lost faith in a higher judge. In an epitome of this concept, Welby informs Mildred that he can have the billboards up by Easter Sunday. “That’d be perfect,” she replies, her comment highlighting her efforts’ symbolic replacement of any redeeming help from a higher power (Three). The billboards will rise on Easter Sunday as her own form of salvation. Perhaps Mildred’s most obvious expression of Misfit-level honesty occurs during her slow, deliberate monologue toward

Father Montgomery when he shows up in her home to chastise her actions. Her words

criminalize the hypocritical church and its coverup of child abuse: “[...] you’re culpable because you joined the gang” (Three). The Misfit would agree with Mildred; that deserves punishment.

In these ways and others, Mildred seems as if she were drawn by O’Connor herself. Her meanness appears as a manifestation of her criticism of her world’s existing systems of justice and standards of virtue. Like The Misfit, Mildred believes she can do better herself, better than religious institutions or the work of the Ebbing police force. Hers is a determination not unlike what O’Connor saw in her South and wrote into her characters, an observable mannerism which she detailed in a letter to John Hawkes in September 1959:

The religion of the South is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I as a Catholic find

painful and touching and grimly comic. It's full of unconscious pride that lands them in

all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments. They have nothing to correct their practical

heresies and so they work them out dramatically. If this were merely comic to me, it

would be no good, but I accept the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and

judgment that they do. (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 350)

Although her words in the letter aim to combat a Protestant mentality, the openness to individual interpretation of scripture that runs so contrary to Catholic teaching, O’Connor would argue with

Mildred that she also cannot fix the meanness on her own. McDonagh, however, does not allow his protagonist to take refuge in a religious faith, and as we follow her struggle, we experience empathy for the character on the screen. We recognize her pursuit of order and justice as our own. In the same letter to Hawkes, O’Connor wrote that “...the Misfit knows what the choice is—either throw away everything and follow Him or enjoy yourself by doing some meanness to somebody, and in the end there’s no real pleasure in life, not even in meanness” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 350). In the absence of religious recognition, Mildred only knows a choice between

action or passive acceptance. In her commitment to the former, however violent it becomes, she aligns herself with other unlikely characters, like Dixon, who perhaps achieve the most good of any.

Fargo also demonstrates this contradiction of the disruptive character exhibiting more logic than the good in its depiction of kidnapper Carl, portrayed by actor Steve Buscemi, who initially acts less criminal than principled. As Orr notes in his film analysis, “...it’s fascinating the way that Buscemi [...] operates as [...] the ‘sane’ one despite his criminality, untouched by the weirdness of ‘Minnesota Nice,’ who merely wants everything to go as planned, and who bit by bit comes violently unglued as it doesn’t.” By the time of the chilling scene wherein the ransom drop-off goes awry with the arrival of Jerry’s father-in-law, there has been no precedent for Carl’s quick pull of the trigger—a reaction more realistically expected of his monstrous partner, Gaear. Carl displays more incredulity at the unexpected switch than intimidation, but shocks the viewer by instigating a murderous shoot-out in broad daylight, resulting in a grotesque gunshot to his jawline (Fargo). As in the case of The Misfit, when the grandmother

“reached out and touched him on the shoulder” and he “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest” (132), another character forces the criminal’s hand toward violence. In Three Billboards, this idea appears when Mildred, frustrated with the continued lack of action, sets fire to the police station, a move she would say she was forced to take. Their adopted relative moralities inform their actions as they attempt to live as best as they can in the absurd world.

The O’Connor motif continues that “‘[t]he “good,” the “right” and the “kind” do all the harm’” (Merton qtd. in Kinney 71) as they carry out representations of these self-fabricated moral codes. Perhaps most tragically in the film, Chief Willoughby’s life ends by his own hands

as a result of his decision that his slow, painful death by disease would be more traumatic to his family than finding him with a bullet. Although Willoughby seems the hero police officer from the outset of the film, the characterization of officer Jason Dixon takes precedence in the wake of

Willoughby’s death. The film’s beginning sets up the grotesque characterization of Dixon, a man who should presumably exhibit goodness given his profession, by repeating the town’s collective knowledge that he once tortured a black man in custody. Further scenes introduce the racist, loud-mouthed mother with whom he lives and additional odd details like his possession of a pet turtle. In every way, he appears the dimwitted villain, but it is Dixon who will have the change of heart and join Mildred in her efforts by the end of the film, a change of heart influenced by

Willoughby’s letter to the young officer: “Because through love comes calm, and through calm comes thought, and you need thought to detect stuff sometimes, Jason. It’s kinda all you need.

You don’t even need a gun. And you definitely don’t need hate. Hate never solved nothing”

(Three). In Willoughby’s advice, Dixon finds an order he can follow. In the violent police station fire that he emerges from immediately after reading the letter, he finds himself, or perhaps at least a version that he can live with.

Through their violence and constructed moral codes, many characters in these stories prove to be not entirely as they seem at the outset, further obscuring our search for goodness.

Their grotesque qualities arrest our attention, their violent actions bring others to reckonings of self, and their self-created moral codes point to a lack of faith in a higher order.

Words Without Worth: A Common Dearth of Communication

With these complexities, these characters carry out the events of their stories with a dearth of effective communication—broken speech, half-thought dialogue, and silences—that

deepens the disquieting mood of the Gothic tales. In a sense, they become another aspect of the landscape, an auditory layer to each story’s established sense of place. Benign conversations become like the silence of a horror film, filling the void until broken by violent action.

Throughout O’Connor’s A Good Man collection, characters display a seeming inability to recognize and carry on a constructive conversation. In “A Good Man,” the first family member to respond to the grandmother’s attempts to discuss a change of travel plans is eight-year-old

John Wesley—“‘If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?’” (117)—and the other adults never actually enter the discussion. On the road the next day, the grandmother essentially has several conversations with herself, the kind which are offered to fill the air with whatever topic about which the speaker decides her listeners should care. In “The Life You Save

May Be Your Own,” wandering stranger Mr. Shiftlet has a conversation with farm-owner Mrs.

Crater that seems to simultaneously discuss her car and her daughter:

“How old is she?” Mr. Shiftlet asked casually.

“Fifteen, sixteen,” the old woman said. [...]

“It would be a good idea to paint it too,” Mr. Shiftlet remarked. “You don’t want it to rust

out.”

“We’ll see about that later,” the old woman said. (151)

Each character harboring his or her own objective—hers a husband for her daughter and his a car—they speak over one another in disjointed comments. In “Good Country People,” the banality of the discourse between Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman serves to characterize the two women and underline the exhaustion Mrs. Hopewell’s daughter has with them:

“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.

“It takes all kinds to make the world.”

“I always said it did myself.”

The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner;

sometimes they had it for supper too. (273)

Among such trite conversation, that which might be potent with meaning will likely go unnoticed. The vapid discussions juxtapose the pointed remarks of other characters, notably those of the perceived villains. Kinney identifies this distinction between The Misfit and the other characters of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “His own feelings may be abstractly or symbolically put, but they are urgent and real. Next to them, the grandmother's more conventional manners seem selfish and superficial [...] In their lack of communication lies

O'Connor's whole sense of religion” (91). After pages of examples of the grandmother’s ineffective and selfish words with others, O’Connor uses the collapse of communication between the two pivotal characters to expose the grandmother’s fraudulent faith as her erratic interjections—“Do you ever pray?” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 129)—fail to move her situation from crisis. As The Misfit’s words increasingly characterize his assurance of his actions, her words increasingly demonstrate a scrambling for anything that might trigger a change of course from her captor. Many O’Connor stories use this breakdown of communication to show a corruption of religion, a debasement of true faith; her most self-assured and well-spoken characters, like The Misfit, are the farthest from a belief in God or grace.

Like O’Connor, the writer-directors include these occasions of characters’ broken conversations with more than comedy in mind. In his article on the Coen brothers, Paul Coughlin notes that “[w]ith Fargo [...] the Coens have extended this philosophy of miscommunication to an ailment of society in which inarticulacy is an observable symptom.” In both films, this

inarticulacy inhibits the investigations. Marge never acquires a more detailed description of Carl than him being “kinda funny-lookin’” (Fargo). Three Billboards echoes this indistinct and ineffective means of description with Officer Dixon’s own inability to articulate when he refers to two witnesses as “a lady with a funny eye” and “fat Dennis.” Although plainly humorous, the lines manifest the failure of language, a notable point considering the way communication becomes such a key factor in the investigations within both films. Mildred’s very tactic for generating justice for her daughter relies on the power of clear, bold language resolutely arranged on three forgotten billboards. Like The Misfit, Mildred becomes the lone character able to speak directly to her point, the character whose lines occasionally deliver a gut punch to both other characters and the reader or viewer. In a pivotal Three Billboards scene, the angry mother admits to Chief Willoughby that she already knows he is dying of cancer. When he asks why she still put up the berating billboards, her answer is comic but incisive: “Well they wouldn’t be as effective after you croak, right?” (Three)

The absence of effective communication works with each story’s sense of place and grotesque characters to round out the O’Connor style so easy to recognize amongst artists like the Coens and McDonagh. Coughlin observes that the Coens use “the application of an appropriate regional dialect” in conjunction with their carefully crafted sense of place and—like

O’Connor—feature its malfunction, “construct[ing] dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy [that] is not merely a joke at the expense of their characters but rather the critical interrogation of communication breakdown” (Coughlin). This malfunction demonstrates more than broken communication; it points to a broken world. Clearly, Fargo does not use the typical language of other films with equally substantial body counts. Jerry’s initial meeting with the kidnappers is wrapped up with, “I got every confidence here in you fellas” (Fargo). When Fargo’s kidnappers

are pulled over by the cop with Jerry’s wife tied up and gagged in the backseat, Carl fumbles a warning: “...keep it still back there lady or else we're’ gonna have to, you know, shoot ya.” Later, when clarifying to his father-in-law that the kidnappers are “calling the shots” and require full cooperation for the ransom, Jerry adds a less-than-threatening, “You’re darn tootin’.” Even with this language containing an “absence of meaning” (Coughlin) or threat, real evil lurks among the counterfeit; as in the case of the grandmother and The Misfit, one character’s inability to communicate highlights the grotesque nature of the more violent agent in the story. If Carl is

Fargo’s inept criminal, his partner Gaear provides the contrast that pays homage to the

O’Connor-like marriage of the comic and the terrifying. Carl’s humorous, dumbfounded “Oh daddy” in reaction to Gaear’s murder of the cop who pulls them over is immediately followed by

Gaear’s frenzied, terrorizing drive after the witnesses—a chase that ends in two more dead.

Later, in the cabin, Carl ridiculously swats and swears at the broken television while the camera focuses a long, uneasy shot on Gaear silently staring at Jerry’s wife bound and blindfolded in a kitchen chair. Three Billboards also parallels this mix of the comic over the traumatic; Dixon humorously jams to his headphones and plays with a magnifying lens before becoming aware of the other mens’ grieving over Chief Willoughby’s suicide. As in O’Connor’s work, the ignorant words of some characters accent the gravity of others.

Although all three stories share this final similarity, O’Connor’s beliefs would have led her to see even more in this particular aspect than the Coens or McDonagh. While all fiction writers understand dialogue as an indication of character, O’Connor’s faith uses language far more powerfully, as a means of creation. As the first chapter of John declares, “[i]n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1) and in

Christ “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In the Catholic

understanding, language is a means of life, God spoke creation into being, and Christ is the incarnation of the Word. In the absence of recognizing God, O’Connor’s characters demonstrate man’s corrupt version of Creation, a world of broken communication, disturbing silences of truth, and arguments of moral relativity.

Chapter 5: Still Searching for the Good Man

From their grounding in Gothic settings to their use of odd characters and sometimes inconsequential dialogue, Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri clearly share a great deal with O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” but no similarity is so potent as each story’s palpable search for goodness. At the end of her study of the writer, Dorothy Walters’ ultimate conclusion reminds her readers that, for O’Connor, “the center of being is God, not man; and [O’Connor] dismisses as absurd humanistic attempts to delineate reality with man- made instruments, or to assess human behavior in terms of a relativistic ethic” (154). Walters’ use of “absurd” rings a bit ironic here, as O’Connor’s postmodern contemporaries who would deny the existence of God crafted, and continue to craft, a literature defined by precisely that word: literature of the absurd. Indeed, what else can they call their attempt at order? Goodness, when not divinely defined, must be sought and found. When Mildred and Dixon drive away from

Ebbing in the final scene of Three Billboards in search of the criminal they hope to kill, they impart meaning to their lives in defiance of a world that has offered them none:

“Hey Dixon. Are you sure about this?”

“About killin’ this guy? Not really. You?”

“Not really. I guess we can decide along the way.”

As they drive off with the aim to do “good” and achieve a fabricated justice by killing someone whom they have decided is definitely “bad” although not Angela’s rapist, the film’s final lines of dialogue suggest that the two characters still question the substance of their vigilante brand of justice. The film ends with only the possibility that they might act on it. Possibility is what

McDonagh and the Coens offer in lieu of O’Connor’s absolutist message. Through their shared elements of the Gothic genre, O’Connor crafts her stories with explicit spiritual purpose concerning the chaotic events, while the filmmakers force us to draw our own conclusions as we attempt to reconcile a paucity of goodness with the undeniable presence of evil.

But while some critics have focused on O’Connor’s inflexible purpose, calling her, as

Walters did, “an absolutist in an age which has embraced relativism on all levels” (154), others have given the writer more grace. Hendin writes simply, “She was, I think, more artist than preacher” (3). The writer’s adamant subscription to her faith does not procure certainty; in fact, certainty is faith’s opposite. In the opening pages of O’Connor’s prayer journal, published to the public in 2013, she writes of the struggle to maintain a desire for, love for, and certainty of God:

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that

I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The

crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but

what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the

whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. (O’Connor,

Prayer 3)

O’Connor understood that hope and trust establish the foundations of faith, “the substance of things to be hoped for” (Heb. 11:1). She trusted that she could not understand the immensity of her God but exhibited hope in her supplications for help. In his essay “The Heresy of Flannery

O’Connor,” André Bleikasten points out this contradiction of O’Connor’s work and her religion which she surely well understood, the idea that literature—like faith—resists the idea of certainty:

A devout Roman Catholic, Flannery O’Connor was not reluctant to acknowledge her

Christian position as a novelist. A hazardous position for a writer to adopt: literature and

orthodoxy—religious or otherwise—make uneasy bedfellows. He who knows, or thinks

he knows, the answers even before the questions have been asked, may be sincere as a

person but compromises his honesty as a writer. Literature has its own truths, elusive and

modest; truths it generates in close cooperation with each individual reader outside the

massive certainties and ready-made patterns of fixed beliefs. (138)

It is through this truth of literature that other artists like the Coens and McDonagh can be so influenced by a writer whose purposes are so unlike their own. For all the explicit statements of

Biblical truths within O’Connor’s essays and personal correspondence, her stories hold those truths in a far less obvious fashion, incubating them in honest text about the realities of grotesque life until their power might come to ripen in the minds of her readers. In Bleikasten’s words, the mysteries and paradoxes of religious faith can only successfully permeate literature “at the cost of temporary suspension” (138). He continues, citing religious writers who have gone before

O’Connor and noting the means of their success:

What has prevented Bernanos, Mauriac, T. S. Eliot, and other so-called “Christian

writers” from becoming trapped in apologetics is the fact that in their best work the

demands of writing clearly prevailed over their private preconceptions, impelling them,

whatever their avowed goals, to use language in such ways as to make it an instrument of

questioning rather than of affirmation, and to produce texts whose plural significance no

amount of exegesis is likely ever to exhaust. (Bleikasten 138)

For this reason, although a serious reader of O’Connor knows her inspirations well, O’Connor’s work itself never answers the question of who or where the “good man” is. To point out the obvious, her title is not a statement of his identity but rather a statement of either his scarcity or his elusive nature. Her intention is to bring us to the state of questioning, to lead us to the search, so that—as she hoped for Protestants with their faith “open at both ends” (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 411)—we might find truth at one end of our exploration rather than returning to our unbelief. Given their employment of similar storytelling features and their own searches for goodness, the filmmakers readily agree with this mystery O’Connor provides, this “questioning” rather than an “affirmation.” So the very quality that makes O’Connor’s work so successful and rich, an inherent questioning, is the same that causes, as she predicted, not only misinterpretations, but also works by non-believing authors who demonstrate the influence of her style and are inspired by the same potent questions: What are the rules of this life? And How can

I know for certain?

O’Connor knew that these eternal ideas and questions would work their way into any story concerning humanity, that any observation of the human condition would inherently touch upon aspects such as sin regardless of those aspects being given divine definitions. In her essay

“The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she declares that truth will come through in fiction organically and unforced:

What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself

cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps

more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to

do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can

transcend its limitations only by staying within them. (O’Connor, et al. 145-146)

Furthermore, she saw this restriction to the concrete as a mirror of the salvation story itself, in which Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man” (Phil. 2:7). She argues that, regardless of his belief, the artist uses the same understanding of the importance of the concrete and the senses when conveying mystical truths within a tangible reality: “Christ didn't redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form, and he speaks to us now through the mediation of a visible

Church. All this may seem a long way from the subject of fiction, but it is not, for the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life” (O’Connor, et al.

176). Elsewhere, in “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” O’Connor broadens this statement, writing that all of “art transcends its limitations only by staying within them” (O’Connor, et al.

171). So with an absence of any supernatural revelations of who or what is truly good,

O’Connor’s work stays within the limitations of “what-is,” conveying the reality of a deceptive world with violent episodes that bring the reader to the place of questioning. Ultimately, she seeks to make us like the searchers, the characters who step back and wonder at what they behold and seek meaning in it. Her work serves as a sign that suggests our direction on the dusty road where we must meet our own reckoning, where perhaps we will be led to discover that the good man is elusive because true goodness is not of the world.

We are in a strange but ample company, as many of O’Connor’s characters are left in this questioning as well. After O’Connor “exposes societies for their deformities” (Askin 57) throughout the stories of the A Good Man collection, her characters consistently fail in their efforts to correctly identify the good man. In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Mrs.

Crater blindly hands her daughter off to a man whose only interest was her car: “‘I wouldn’t pass up a chance to live in a permanent place and get the sweetest girl in the world myself. You ain’t no fool’” (O’Connor, “The Life” 151). In the title story, the grandmother praises the generous actions of Red Sammy even as the man continues to treat his own wife with contempt in front of the family, cutting her off with a curt “That’ll do” and instructions to get back to the kitchen

(O’Connor, “A Good Man” 122). Most obviously, the grandmother throws out the phrase recklessly in an effort to win over her murderer: “‘I just know you’re a good man,’ she said desperately” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 128). In “Good Country People,” Joy/Hulga is shocked to learn that the Bible salesman whom she has allowed to seduce her has a valise full of, not bibles, but only stolen trinkets and booze: “‘Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?’” (290) After each of these revelations, O’Connor’s “endings occur before we can see the effects of grace, before we can see whether the characters have, in fact, achieved the self-knowledge and undergone the reversal they have been offered” (Askin 59). Although for

O’Connor this “grace is an early stage of cognizance” (Kinney 78) that hopefully leads the characters and readers to see Christ as the only true “good,” the stories end before those revelations conclude, leaving just enough of the questioning so necessary for the fiction to remain rich with possibility. The filmmakers share O’Connor’s idea that writing the good man in a story is a practice of misdirection, but when the physical world is all they recognize, they are left to continue to search for him there. As a result, they derive the concept of goodness itself not from religious doctrine but rather from an insufficient contribution of the best that humanity can do.

As with O’Connor’s often misled characters, we still search for the good man in these postmodern stories, seeking a character worthy of redemption as the characters seek the same in

themselves. The filmmakers write characters worthy of the same analysis Marilyn Chandler

McEntyre ascribes to O’Connor’s characters in her essay “O’Connor’s Challenge to Her

Readers”: “O’Connor’s genius is that despite our natural repugnance, we do identify with them.

And the moment we allow ourselves to grasp them from the inside is a salutary moment of acknowledgement that brings us to renewed recognition of our own flawed characters and sinfulness” (McEntyre 43). Viewers search for goodness among the characters of Three

Billboards while hoping to ignore the truths of themselves they uncover as well. Of McDonagh and his work, Prose writes that, “[l]ike O’Connor, he denies his characters an easy entry into a state of grace,” instead “suggest[ing] the possibility of grace, and [the idea] that salvation, even partial salvation, requires thought, work, and struggle.” In Three Billboards, Mildred certainly works and struggles for redemption from her grief, and—divisive as she is—we see good in her pursuit of justice for an evil crime. During the opening scene when she speaks with Red Welby at the advertising office, she notices a bug writhing on its back at the base of the windowsill. The close up of the insect’s agony seems at first a simple B-roll shot, perhaps a magnification of the grotesque, but a moment later the camera cuts back to Mildred turning the bug right side up

(Three). Regardless of her motivation for her actions—actions that gradually seem to be committed more in search of catharsis than justice—she remains admirably assertive against her evil, crafting her own moment of grace rather than waiting for one. Like O’Connor herself,

Mildred accepts her pain and moves on anyway. She stands up to her opposition and owns her beliefs in what is right. If she has not yet found faith, she is terribly close to it.

In this battle, Mildred reveals herself to be most perfectly human in the complex contradictions of her character, the same simple reason that goodness and meanness are so impossible to separate and ascribe to one character or another. Wilkinson notes that, to well-read

viewers, “Three Billboards feels like it could have sprung from O’Connor’s imagination. One of her most famous aphorisms—‘the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it’— is more or less the motto by which Mildred has chosen, or been driven, to live.” The very idea of the billboards and their unapologetically abrasive question highlights this facet of Mildred’s character, but she betrays a more tender side in a scene late in the film. While Mildred tends carefully to potted flowers which she has placed beneath the billboards, almost as one would tend to a gravesite, a lone doe approaches and stops a few yards from her. As Mildred engages in a one-sided conversation, this encounter most clearly exhibits that whether or not the Almighty exists, Mildred is willing to take matters into her own hands if He will not: “Yeah. Still no arrests. How come I wonder. Cause there ain’t no God and the whole world’s empty and it dudn’t matter what we do to each other? I hope not” (Three). Reminiscent again of O’Connor’s

Misfit, Mildred recognizes the possibility of an order to the world established by a higher power, but she is unable to count on it. With a wry look, she warns the deer not to expect her to believe in reincarnation: “Because you’re pretty but you ain’t her” (Three). In a way, Mildred’s conversation here is addressed to whatever higher power may be listening. In the absence of a response, as implied by that navy jumpsuit that she wears throughout the entire film—even on a date—Mildred is on her own mission and ready to do work; she is not holding out for divine intervention.

Viewers of Three Billboards also find goodness where least expected. As Mildred makes enemies, Dixon defends Chief Willoughby to Red Welby during a bar conversation—

“Willoughby’s a good man, Red”—but even the town’s “good man” takes his own life in the film, although not before writing his sincere missive to the disorderly Dixon. Mildred throws the

Molotov cocktail into the police building while the viewer watches Dixon, at his desk, read the

note with Willoughby’s voice over: “What you need to become a detective is love.” Just before

Willoughby’s words “...but things are gonna change for you. I can feel it,” another bomb sends

Dixon to the ground. As he saves the Hayes murder file, emerging from the building engulfed in flames, the viewer recognizes a character shift wherein the grotesque idiot turns noble. After

Dixon is placed in the same hospital room as Red Welby, whom he earlier threw out of a window, Welby’s gift of a hospital orange juice as an act of forgiveness suggests a message that—in the face of the world’s evil—we can only try to do good for each other. But as

O’Connor wrote to Hawkes, this evil and its devil are subjective, as she said, identified by their action of leaving the “herd.” The interwoven herds and digressions from them are endless.

Willoughby takes his life. Dixon’s actions lead to his dismissal. Mildred commits arson. The complex question of which of these actions is right and wrong is left to the viewer. Like water in the Twin Earth thought experiment, the definitions of goodness are as endless as their examples.

Finally, with the negative DNA test and the absence of a real culprit, Mildred and Dixon drive off in search of their stranger who did something bad nonetheless, hoping to be agents of good in a world gone senseless with evil. They reason that some justice is still justice, and the film ends with perhaps its two most polarizing characters in search of it.

Fargo’s Marge Gunderson also exhibits the message of a good person doing what she can in a seemingly godless world; however, as the film progresses and regardless of her skill as a detective, Marge is repeatedly unable to crack the case despite meeting with Jerry early in her investigation. The scene in which she receives a late night phone call from her old friend Mike

Yanagita seems out of place until our good woman arrives at a secret rendezvous a few scenes later. Todd VanDerWerff explains Yanagita’s significance to the plot: “The Yanagita scene [is] an opportunity to challenge the main character on one of her most cherished beliefs, so that she

might rethink something in time to catch a truly pathetic criminal.” During the dinner between

Marge and Yanagita, the man eventually comes on to her, but he quickly apologizes for his unwelcome advancements and explains that he lost his wife to cancer. Several scenes after the date’s embarrassing exchange, another friend reveals to Marge that Mike was lying, and she is visibly dumbfounded: “That’s a surprise” (Fargo). This revelation about the possibility of deception among seemingly respectable people “opens up a tiny little crack in her facade of believing the best about people, and that's what allows her to finally solve the case”

(VanDerWerff). As she approaches the disturbing Gaear in that final, classic scene, Gaear carries out his gruesome act of disposing of Carl’s body—famously, via a woodchipper—in the strikingly bright light of day: “And I guess that was your accomplice in the woodchipper.” The evil and violence is blatant and exposed before Marge, symbolic of its glaring presence in the world. While Marge may have believed in more good within people, may have been more inclined to give others the benefit of the doubt, this characteristic did not make her a good detective. In her search for answers and justice, she must recognize the presence of that unexplainable evil that O’Connor would have identified as sin.

Ultimately, both films question the ability of good, decent people to counterbalance the undeniable existence of darkness and chaos. At Fargo’s conclusion, with Gaear in custody in the backseat, Marge observes a blue sky and ruminates on the crimes in the film’s final lines about there being “more to life than a little money,” the fact that it is “a beautiful day,” and her admitted inability to understand any of it. She cannot reconcile the beauty with the ugliness. The film ends with Marge and Norm lying in bed together, anticipating the arrival of the child she will soon bring into the world: “I love you Margie.” “I love you Norm.” “Two more months.”

“Two more months.” Brian Michael Goss argues that her words are “weak countervailing

force[s]” for the “mayhem” that has transpired throughout the film. He adds that “Marge does not solve the crime so much as the circular firing squad convened by Jerry’s kidnap plot exhausts itself with most everyone dead” (Goss). Like Three Billboards’ long, slow camera shot of

Mildred running the distance between the burning billboards in a desperate but futile effort to extinguish the fires, Marge denies her helplessness to single-handedly defeat the corrupt world around her. But there is something to this running, or else they would not do it. Marge and

Mildred are not characterized negatively as O’Connor presents the grandmother; we root for them. Regardless of religion, of alignment with or denial of the views O’Connor herself professed, we run alongside Mildred to extinguish the burning billboards and tuck ourselves in at night mirroring Marge’s hope. Alongside these characters, we want to believe that Mildred’s determination and Dixon’s transformation lead to a repulsive criminal getting what he deserves and that Marge Gunderson’s small but determined fight matters against the insurmountable chaos that surrounds her. We still search for the good man, among us but also in ourselves, in a desperate belief that his counterbalance will make a difference against the world’s darkness.

In the absence of O’Connor’s religious allegiances, modern Gothic films echo her settings, characters, and dialogue in a world that, although devoid of simple answers, still asks viewers to confront the problems. A character from one of McDonagh’s plays defends that “[t]he only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story” (O’Toole), and the Coen brothers and McDonagh leave their stories in the hands of their audiences, asking them to grapple with the reality of the grotesque world. O’Connor also withheld from her readers the satisfaction of resolution, hoping it would lead them toward thought: “Whatever the limitations of her vision, [O’Connor] is important as a chronicler of the spiritual scrofula that plagues our time. We don’t like to look at our moral sores; [she] rubs our noses in them” (Baumbach 345). Also asking us to face our own

crookedness, these modern Gothic films prove to be less about arriving at divine answers than about facing the terrifying questions and suggest that we need to find peace with a lack of resolution at all.

Conclusion

To illustrate the significance of her beliefs in a letter to a friend dated December 16,

1955, Flannery O’Connor described a small dinner party some years before hosted by a writer who had “departed the Church” and become a “Big Intellectual” (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 124).

O’Connor writes that she remained fairly quiet, since there was “nothing for [her] in such company to say,” until the conversation turned to the Eucharist being the actual body and blood of Christ, a belief of the Catholic faith that O’Connor felt she “was obviously supposed to defend” as the only Catholic present (O’Connor and Fitzgerald 125):

Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the

Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as

a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice,

“Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I

realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that

it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. (O’Connor and

Fitzgerald 125)

We must imagine that the inquiry and conclusions set forth here would elicit a similar response from the writer were she able to engage with it; although, it is equally likely that she would see sin and redemption in the framework of the Coens’ and McDonagh’s work, their unconscious revelation of the same truths she aimed to convey. She might recognize that they indeed

celebrate the “searchers and discoverers” (O’Connor, et al. 159), that the curiosity they imbed in their stories perhaps achieves the same effect she desired.

If the filmmakers’ depictions of Godless worlds with glimmers of hope seem contradictory, O’Connor would have understood that as well, always writing about, as Hendin put it, what she knew best, “what it means to be a living contradiction” (41)—like the contradiction that her own faith was not built upon certainty, but hope (Heb. 11:1):

If she set out to make morals, to praise the old values, she ended by engulfing all of them

in an icy violence. If she began by mocking or damning her murderous heroes, she ended

by exalting them. She grew to celebrate the liberating power of destruction. O’Connor

became more and more the pure poet of the Misfit, the oppressed, the psychic cripple, the

freak—of all of those who are martyred by silent fury and redeemed through violence.

(Hendin 42)

Perhaps the filmmakers have done precisely this: appreciated O’Connor’s literature regardless of their inability to share her spiritual assumptions, embodying a contradiction of their own.

Perhaps this is absolutely why and how her work continues to thrive in a world of voices proclaiming moral relativism far-removed from her Catholic beliefs. Speaking to the truth of this claim, Robert Drake notes at the beginning of his analysis that O’Connor “has never lacked commentators; she has needed—and still needs—more disinterested ones who will approach her work with a genuine spirit of good will, willing … to grant her as an artist her donnée, even when they cannot share all her fundamental assumptions about man and God” (8). As their imitation functions as their commentary, the Coen brothers and McDonagh have granted

O’Connor her assumptions. As they recognize evil, they impel a search for good, and she would hope for them as she did for us that their searching leads to that center of existence.

Because if the search is just a symbol, to hell with it.

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