Sign Language: Flannery O'Connor's Pictorial Text Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Reiniche, Ruth Mary Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 27/09/2021 22:20:15 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/325225 1 SIGN LANGUAGE: FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S PICTORIAL TEXT Ruth Reiniche ____________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2014 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Ruth Reiniche, titled Sign Language: Flannery O’Connor’s Pictorial Text and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/2/2014 Charles W. Scruggs PhD _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/2/2014 Edgar Dryden PhD. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/2/2014 Judy Temple PhD. Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: 5/2/2014 Dissertation Director: Charles W. Scruggs 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Ruth M. Reiniche 4 5 Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………………8 Preface……………………………………………………………………………10 Introduction………………………………………………………………………11 Documenting Development of Flannery O’Connor’s Text……………………...15 O’Connor and Hawthorne……………………………………………………......19 Chapter 1. “Oh well, I can always be a PhD.”…………………………………..23 Thurber and the Melancholy of Sex……………………………………………...28 Helen E. Hokinson, the “Society” Woman, and the Sales Clerk………………...34 George Price and Animal Observers……………………………………………..37 The PhD. Cartoon………………………………………………………………...40 The Linocut……………………………………………………………………….55 Chapter 2. Hazel Motes and Enoch Emory: Dead Men Walking………………57 The Influence of Nathanael West…………………………………………………58 The Vanitas Still Life Form in O’Connor’s Pictorial Text……………………….66 Enoch Emory: In the Belly of a Whale: Montage, Assemblage…………………78 Washstand Sequence……………………………………………………………...81 The Movie Theater Sequence…………………………………………………….87 Chapter 3. The Women of Wise Blood: A Collage of Women………………….91 Ruby: The Mechanical Bride……………………………………………………..95 Ruby in “A Stroke of Good Fortune”…………………………………………….98 Wise Blood Manuscript Ruby…………………………………………………….101 Leora Watts Assembly Line Goddess: The Image in the Glass………………….107 6 Wise Blood Manuscript Lea………………………………………………………109 Mrs. Leora Watts: The Published Version………………………………………..111 Sabbath Lily Hawks: An All-American Belladonna………………………………123 Sabbath Motes: The Manuscript Sabbath………………………………..………...124 Sabbath Lily Hawks………………………………………………………….…….128 Chapter 4. Snapshot: The Prophet with the “Camera Eye”………………….….138 The “Camera Eye”…………………………………………………………………139 The Homiletic Novel……………………………………………………………….143 Why does O’Connor use the photograph as her pictorial medium in The Violent Bear It Away?...................................................................................................................151 How does the photographic medium serve the purpose of the homiletic novel?......157 Hawthorne, O’Connor, American Romance, and the Homiletic Novel……………162 Studium………………..……………………………………………………………166 Punctum…………………………………………………………………………….168 A Series of Verbal Snapshots………………………………………………………172 O’Connor, Photographs, 2012………………………………………………………182 Chapter 5: A Turn in a Different Direction “Parker’s Back”………………….…185 Why Byzantine Mosaic?.............................................................................................186 Why Tattoo?................................................................................................................192 Tattoo Process……………………………………………………………………….196 Why Sarah Ruth?.........................................................................................................197 Why Marriage?............................................................................................................200 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..206 7 The Frame………………………………………………………………………….207 The Composition Within the Frame……………………………………………….207 The Message of the Medium……………………………………………………….209 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..212 8 List of Figures Fig. 1. Page 42. The Cartoons of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College, p. 50 as found in The Colonnade, April 3, 1942, p2. Fig. 2. Page 45. “The New Yorker” Jan. 17, 1942. Fig. 3. Page 69. “Vanitas” Bruyn the Elder, First half of the 16th Century Fig. 4. Page 97. Girl Before a Mirror Picasso, 1932 Fig. 5. Page 107. McLuhan. The Mechanical Bride. Page 93. Fig. 6. Page 117. 1950s Simplicity Pattern Fig. 7. Page 119. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Griffon-Manicure-Set-Nail-Kit-with-Red- Case-circa-1950s-/221389214591 Fig. 8. Page 123. Coca Cola Plan Robert Rauschenberg 1958 Fig. 9. Page 131. Coke Ad 1940s http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/june/200000- coke-cans Fig. 10. Page 133. Coke Ad 1948 http://www.retroarama.com/2012/03/coke-hospitality- 1948.html Fig. 11. Page 135. Leonardo da Vinci Madonna of the Rocks 1483 - 1486 Fig. 12. Page 185. Cover of Sarah Gordon’s Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Artist: Barry Mosher Fig. 13. Page 206. Future Modern Robert Rauschenberg 1959 9 Abstract Flannery O’Connor makes the invisible visible. Just as a speaker of sign language punctuates her narrative with signs that are at once pictures and words, O’Connor punctuates the narratives of her novels with moments or pauses in the forward motion of her text that are somehow framed—in a mirror, or in a window, for example—and that also are at once pictures and words. These pictorial moments not only occur in the reader’s present, but because of the way they are stylized, they are simultaneously: open windows into the historical world of the mid-twentieth century; they look backward into the classical past; and they offer a veiled look into the mystery of a Divine reality. Examination of the chronological development and refinement of Flannery O’Connor’s pictorial technique by considering the meaning conveyed by the arrangement of figures in a single panel cartoon, the contextual significance found in literary tableaux and filmic montage, the use of the pictorial “camera eye,” and the imprinting of tattoo on the human body, presents a new perspective in interpreting her work. Early manifestation of the pictorial technique is evident in O’Connor’s college cartoons. When that cartoonist becomes a novelist that tendency for exaggeration is evident in his or her pictorial renditions of characters and situations, as is the case with former cartoonists Faulkner, Updike, West, Cantor, and O’Connor herself. O’Connor does not abandon the power of the pictorial in delivering a message. Instead she embraces it and envelops it in narrative. 10 Preface The feeling that I was viewing a carefully constructed series of painted canvases quite literally haunted me as I read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood for the first time. Intrigued, I began to first isolate, and then to determine what was actually happening textually during the pictorial pauses in her writing. I started by looking at the artists who were her contemporaries. Having previously done some research on the Abstract Expressionists, I began with them. When I was unable to draw satisfying correlations between O’Connor and Pollack or Rothko, I thought about how her work seems to move in O’Connor fashion “forward and backward at the same time”—forward to Pop Art and its isolation of the object and backward to classical and religious artistic styles that conveyed moral messages. In 2009 while conducting some archival research in the O’Connor Collection at Georgia State College, I came across ten pages in the manuscript for the unpublished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, that altered the trajectory of my studies of O’Connor’s pictorial technique. In those ten pages, the main character of that novel, Walter Tilman, constructs a visual narrative using photographs. He thoughtfully,