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

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 By 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 v 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 1 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 2 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

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