Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 67 | Autumn 2016 Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction Ruth Fialho Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1786 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2016 Number of pages: 173-186 ISBN: 0294-0442 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Ruth Fialho, « Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 67 | Autumn 2016, Online since 01 December 2018, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1786 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Sh... 1 Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction Ruth Fialho 1 As a post-war Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor needs to be read with the history of the South in mind: a traumatic history of denial, destruction and loss. The ante-bellum South, as represented in plantation fiction, seemed to be an agrarian idyll of easy living, with no toil nor labor, despite “the historical reality of a patriarchal culture which relied on the extensive use of slave labor” (Castillo 487). Southerners saw their region as a Garden of Eden of which they were the guardians. From this fantasy derived the popular images that are associated with the Old South, with its Southern Belles, hospitable landowners, Southern gentility, leisureliness, religion and immutable social classes. While in the North, an urban world was emerging where industriousness led to social, financial and cultural improvement, in the South, the stress lay on agrarianism, stability, religious fervor and family values. The Civil War ended the Pastoral dream, and engendered an identity crisis that would bolster the Southern Renaissance literature. After the Second World War, the South went through a period of industrial and economic growth that would lead to the expansion of such urban areas as Atlanta, several times mentioned in O’Connor’s fiction as a city of perdition. It is in this ambivalent environment that Flannery O’Connor was born and raised. The rise of industrialization was viewed as a threat to the Southern sense of order, something that would eventually ruin its agrarian culture and chase them from their Garden of Eden. 2 The clashes between old and new world order gave birth to a new set of myths that in turn clashed with reality. This tension has been best represented in short fiction, with its ability to “dramatize a moment of revelation which brings a character to full consciousness for the first time in his life” (Shaw 8). Only in a short story can the characters’ fight gain that particular urgency as they manage (or more typically do not manage) to defend their position from an all-invading modernity and a painful reality check. Journal of the Short Story in English, 67 | Autumn 2016 Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Sh... 2 3 O’Connor made ample use of stereotyped characters who saw the South as a Land of Abundance and Fertility needing to be protected from devouring outsiders. The short stories I have chosen to focus on, namely “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf” and “A View of the Woods,” share a worried vision of the pastoral world threatened by the modern world. This was a recurring theme in plantation fiction, ante- and post-bellum (Grammer 62). Yet, O’Connor uses this usual pattern of fear and resistance as a canvas to weave a different tale. They were all written within a two-year-span (1954-1956) which might explain why one story seems to take up an underlying allegory where the preceding one left it. 4 In “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Cope is visited by three boys from the new developments in Atlanta. After she has told them not to do anything that might endanger their lives, but more importantly her property (her greatest fear is to see her woods catch fire under the summer sun), they eventually decide to set fire to her woods themselves. The last sentence of the short story introduces us to a hermeneutic reading of the text, as we are made to hear, in the distance, the boys’ “high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them” (193). These clashing images of salvation and destruction recur throughout all three short stories. 5 In “Greenleaf,” Mrs. May is annoyed by a bull that keeps coming to her cow pastures. She asks her tenant, Mr. Greenleaf, to get rid of it. But it turns out the bull belongs to the latter’s sons, who own a state-of-the-art, half-automated dairy farm a few miles from her own. When it appears that they will not do anything to solve the problem, she runs out of patience with the Greenleafs (not that she ever had much of it, as the narrator obligingly informs the reader). Her decision to take things into her own hands will lead to her being killed by the bull. Again, the scene of destruction (of a human life this time) is given a symbolic dimension through a description combining contradictory feelings: “she had the look of a person whose sight has been restored but who finds the light unbearable” (333). 6 In “A View of the Woods,” the roles of landowner (here Mr. Fortune) and invader (his son-in-law Mr. Pitts) are somewhat reversed. Mr. Fortune, 79 years of age, has decided he would sell his land plot after plot to make way for Progress, this time in the shape of a gas-station. He later dies of a stroke after Mary Fortune Pitts, his nine-year-old granddaughter and the only Pitts for whom he has any consideration, violently assaults him for selling the woods in front of her parents’ house. She also dies during the fight, and their bodies lay in the clay, alongside the machine that is tearing at the earth, as a last, darkly ironic comment from the narrator. 7 From these summaries some sense of continuity already emerges as well as a few (apparent) contradictions. This should come as no surprise, as short fiction favors contrast as an operating principle (Shaw 154). Land as a preserved Garden of Eden threatened by evil city strangers, is central to “A Circle in the Fire,” although the boys seem to have some religion. “Greenleaf” seems to stress how the social improvement of the lower classes will bring disorder and death, but they’re ultimately caused by a symbol of uncontrollable animality and fertility comically crowned with a wreath of thorns. Religious and pagan symbols are sometimes combined in a grotesque fashion in O’Connor’s fiction. In “A View of the Woods,” order and stability are ideals that had to be relinquished to allow for the coming of a new Age, albeit destruction being here brought about by the due owner of the place. This will bring him to his own end in a Journal of the Short Story in English, 67 | Autumn 2016 Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Sh... 3 fatal confrontation with his grand-daughter that started, of all things, with biblical quotations. If nature, social changes and industrialization also appear, the importance they are given in each text shows a drift from one to the other, ending in destruction for all, while the contradictions we have mentioned seem to question the respective roles of the protagonists and destabilize traditional views of their environment and values. The End of the Pastoral 8 In “A Circle in the Fire,” we have descriptions of Mrs. Cope’s land that explicitly identify it as a preserved place where the characters “have everything,” “rich pastures and hills heavy with timber” (177), for which “‘every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving’,” Mrs. Cope reminds Mrs. Pritchard, her tenant. The boys will add to that mythical quality of Mrs. Cope’s land when the narrator describes Powell, a boy who used to live on her farm, “examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods” (179). The metaphorical description of Mrs. Cope’s land, her repeatedly declared gratefulness to God, the long paratactic sentence, both a mimetic transcription of Powell’s panoramic vision and a figuration of Mrs. Cope’s accumulation of wealth, all combine to offer the reader an Edenic view of the place. 9 Around this Land of Plenty, as the end of the quote shows, the trees are walls that turn the Garden into a fortress: “Sometimes the last line of trees was a solid grey-blue wall” (175), and behind it, “the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against a fortress wall, trying to break through” (178). Almost closing the story, much as the woods enclose the landscape, the metaphor is again used when Mrs. Cope’s daughter takes a walk in the woods: “The fortress line of trees was a hard granite blue” (190). The reader is presented with a strong sense of a limited space which gives the narrative its efficiency and unity (Grojnowski 84).