CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S
MORTIFICATION OF THE PROUD
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors in
English
by
Paige Lorene Wilson
August, 1983
The Thesis of Paige Lorene Wilson is approved:
Elaine Plasberg, First Re::%er
Arthur. E. Lane, Second Reader
Arthur E. Lane, Honors Committee Chairman
California State University, Northridge
ii
For Trish and Herb
and Pam
iii
ABSTRACT
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S
MORTIFICATION OF THE PROUD
by
Paige Lorene Wilson
Bachelor of Arts with honors
The short stories of Flannery O'Connor repeatedly
center around the sin of pride as it leads to the devastation of her protagonists and sometimes to their redemption.
Seven stories in particular involve characters who, depending on their unique combination of the elements of pride,
suffer humiliation alone, humiliation coupled with responsibility for the death of a loved one, or humiliation and
violent death.
The stories included in this analysis are
"Good Country People," "The Artificial Nigger," "Revelation," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "The Lame
Shall Enter First," "Greenleaf," and "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find."
In nearly all these stories, mortification prepares
iv
the main character to accept what O'Connor called his
"moment of grace" as it occurs either overtly or implicitly
in the climactic scenes.
v
Flannery O'Connor's short stories are some of the
richest and most critically analyzed in American literature.
When The Complete Stories was first published, one
reviewer wrote that "Every one is good enough so that if it
were the only example of her work to survive, it would be
evident that the writer possessed high talent and a remarkably unclouded, unabstract, demanding intelligence."!
O'Connor's clarity of vision makes the world she describes
real, even when the incidents and the characters, out of
context, seem very unreal indeed.
O'Connor was aware of
the problem, and she explained that it could be traced to
the fact that, as she put it, "Much of my fiction takes its
character from the reasonable use of the unreasonable,
though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be
apparent."2
This may be one of the reasons why readers often have
difficulty enjoying the stories, for in retrospect they
seem outrageous, as evidenced by the strange experience of
trying to offer a verbal synopsis of "Good Country People"
and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" without the listener's
maintaining a look of doubt as to the point of reading such
a story.
O'Connor's driving tone and painstaking descrip-
tion make the probability of any action she sees fit to
develop almost unquestionable.
Marion Montgomery, in his
book Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home, articulates the
idea that O'Connor's work did not suffer as a result of her
1
2
seeming isolation on her mother's farm in Georgia; on the
contrary:
What we would understand is that her vision is
the ultimate control of a fiction which sees the
larger world and more.
By that vision, the
unsophisticated local particular is revealed as a
shadow cast by recent intellectual history, a
shadow intensified and concentrated by art until
its very concreteness and immediacy tempt unwary
critics to see her as only a local color writer.
To the more perceptive reader, the actions of her
fictional agents, as homely or vulgar or wild as
they may seem to be, become dramatic projections
of errors practiced-by our intellectual community, errors powerful and general in their control
of social, political, or religious conceptions
and actions in that community ••• because these
errors have been pervasive, she is denied access
to a willing and receptive audience.3
Although O'Connor's writings seldom received praise from
what she referred to as the "casual reader," especially if
he was a fellow southerner, an enormous amount of criticism
in all areas of study, including religious, regional,
psychological, and stylistic, has been devoted to her work,
which illustrates its complex nature and multi-faceted
appeal.
O'Connor herself insisted that there are perhaps many
ways in which a story like "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" may
be read, "but none other by which it could have been written."4
This is an important statement.
She had a theme,
and she wrestled with it time and time again: she was
interested in the confrontation involving the "sinner" and
that action which would cleanse him or destroy him, or
3
both.
The action was almost always one of violence.
In
fact, O'Connor relied on the act of violence as her keenest
instrument of development, but it is an element which also
works against a full appreciation of the stories, as she
explains:
I suppose the reasons for the use of so much
violence in modern fiction will differ with each
writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have
found that violence is strangely capable of
returning my characters to reality and preparing
them to accept their moment of grace.
Their
heads are so hard that almost nothing else will
do the work.
This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by
the casual reader, but it is implicit in the
Christian view of the world.s
The "reality" that O'Connor insists upon is that her characters take responsibility for their part in the evil they
encounter, the way the grandmother in "A Good Man" does
when she finally (though metaphorically) claims the Misfit
as one of her own children, instead of trying to explain
the evil away, as she had before when suggesting to the
killer, "You could be honest too if you'd only try."6
But
for the reader in a world inundated with violence to step
back and view it as anything but senseless is difficult.
Those who do not view the world from O'Connor's religious
standpoint might find such quotations as the one set off
above alarming, but as Montgomery recognizes, "If only such
statements accompanied an inferior fiction, a fiction which
blared tract or sermon, then both her firm personal posi-
.
-~--~
------
-----~..,..,.-
4
tion and the fiction itself could be laid to rest."
Signi-
ficantly, he continues, the work remains "sparklingly
fascinating in its aesthetic dimension, but also darkly
attractive with some deeper pull it has upon us."7
O'Connor's letters (The Habit of Being) and occasional
writings (Mystery and Manners) offered her unique avenues
in which to voice her frustrations and give
how the stories should be read.
~dvice
about
Speaking again of "A Good
Man," she suggested that "in this story you should be on
the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the
Grandmother's soul and not for the dead bodies."B
She
warns against the inadequate response of body counting,
rightly so.
Some critics, however, like Clara Park in her
essay "Crippled Laughter: Toward Understanding Flannery
O'Connor," feel that if we are to allow O'Connor's explanations "to carry full conviction," we will see not more and
more in the stories, but "less and less."9
It may be true
that the nature of O'Connor's fiction demands a careful
objectivity, but because of her Christian focus and singleminded vision, any tools she provides the serious reader
for a better understanding of the stories' core, which
should be understood before he can go on to find his own
area of enjoyment, prove to be extremely helpful.
One aspect of O'Connor's self-criticism that makes it
unusual and hard to dismiss is the way she seemed able to
divorce herself from her stories and to love them on their
5
own terms as if she had taken no part in their creation.
In a letter to Robie Macauley, she wrote, "I am certainly
glad you like my stories because now I feel it's not so bad
that I like them so much.
The truth is I like them better
than anybody and I read them over and over and laugh and
laugh."lO
Her enjoyment of the humorous side of her sto-
ries was coupled with a deep respect for their darker side,
a world where others fear to go; as Clara Park writes,
" ••• we who cannot laugh at its dark mayhem enter it armored
and withdraw as soon as we can."ll
O'Connor learned that
what made her stories "work" was that they contained "an
action ••• totally unexpected, yet totally believable ••• which
indicates that grace has been offered •••• This is not a
piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories;
it is a discovery that I get out of them."l2
In other
words, O'Connor; the critic, should be acknowledged as one
of the clearest voices approaching work that, because of
its complexity and almost invisible skeletal structure of
grace in the making, may be viewed from any angle but one-indifference.
And though it may be true,- as Park suggests,
that "Our task as readers would be easier if her explanations had remained inaccessible,"l3 certainly the task has
been made more interesting.
For the reader who enters the world of O'Connor's
fiction without protection in order to be enlightened as to
the mysterious workings of divine intervention and/or
----------- ------
- - - - - - - - - ; ; - ; -------.......-------.----
r--..~
--;-:_~
6
personal recognition, the stories offer tremendous satisfaction, and O'Connor herself is the best guide through
what she called a "territory held largely by the Devil."l4
Some critics avoid her theological stance and address the
stories in laymen's terms; in truth, her work may be read
from both points of view, as Preston Browning writes, "Not
only is it not necessary to exclude one view in order to
espouse the other; it is positively detrimental to a just
appreciation of her work to do so."l5
A careful reader, regardless of his point of view,
will recognize that O'Connor considered pride to be the
most contemptible of sins, and the stories bear witness to
her preoccupying need to mortify the proud.
O'Connor's
protagonists commonly maintain a false sense of their own
moral or intellectual superiority, and it is this vanity
that leads to the climactic moment when they are faced with
an entity or situation which they have not anticipated and
against which they have no defenses.
As a result, the
protagonists are left in one of three conditions: humiliated, humiliated and responsible for another's death, or
humiliated and dead.
The stories to be included in this
discussion fall into these three categories.
Of those in
which the main character is allowed to live (and perhaps
change), "Good Country People," "The Artificial Nigger,"
and "Revelation" are representative.
The second category
includes "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and "The
7
Lame Shall Enter First."
And the third set of stories
consists of "Greenleaf" and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find,"
those in which the character is in the "most significant
position life offers a Christian ••• facing death.nl6
But something important happens between mortification
and any further development; this is where "grace," if it
is to be accepted by the character, might free- him and
allow him to enter eternity redeemed or to continue life as
a true believer.
O'Connor referred to these as moments
that made contact with "mystery," mystery beyond human
comprehension and control.
Marion Montgomery writes about
the elusiveness of grace in O'Connor's stories:
Grace touches her fiction, then, with a mystery
difficult to explicate, but it touches at points
in a story that we would call technically a
climax.
It does so with an implication of the
possibility of good, which she leaves suspended
as only a possibility.l7
The "possibility of good" in a particular story depends
upon the subtlety of implication in its final moments, and
the reader is left in varying degrees of certainty as to
the final outcome based on these variables.
"Good Country People" is perhaps O'Connor's most
open-ended story, and it is one in which the reader senses
the author's satisfaction as she overinflates Joy-Hulga
Hopewell with pride and then introduces Manley Pointer to
puncture her swollen self-image.
And pierce it he does.
But, as O'Connor stressed in a letter to "A," that is where
------.----- - - - · - - - - - -·-------
---.,..........---~---
8
the action of the story stops: "Nothing 'comes to flower'
here except ••• [Hulga's] realization in the end that she
ain't so smart."l8
Hulga is not the only excessively proud character in
the story; Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman are equally
guilty of that sin, though with important variations.
Mrs.
Hopewell, who lives smugly with the knowledge that she "has
no bad qualities of her own" but is "able to use other
people's in such a way that she never felt the lack" (p.
272), later becomes Ruby Turpin in the story "Revelation."
Mrs. Freeman's pride stems from immovability; she "could
never be brought to admit herself wrong on any point"
(p.
271), which gives her a disposition similar to that of a
Mack truck: "Besides the neutral expression she wore when
she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and
reverse, that she used for all her human dealings"
271).
(p.
Mrs. May, with the same unbending temperament,
receives her comeuppance in "Greenleaf."
In "Good Country People," however, i~ is Hulga, whose
"purity has been overridden by pride of intellect,"l9 that
O'Connor aims to mortify.
Clara Park captures the person-
ality of Hulga, a "girl" of thirty-two with a wooden leg
and a Ph.D. in philosophy, when she writes that she "embraced ugliness ••• compounding pride and despair, deadliest
sins of all, as she stumps around in a grotesque sweatshirt
and insists that her mother take her 'LIKE I AM.'"20
Con-
9
vinced of her intellectual superiority, Hulga looks at
others, especially "nice young men," "as if she could smell
their stupidity" (p. 276).
Neither Mrs. Hopewell nor Mrs. Freeman can crack
Hulga's facade of self-imposed ugliness, the building of
which she considers her "highest creative act," though they
try.
Mrs. Hopewell unknowingly terrorizes her daughter
with benign expressions like "nothing is perfect," "that is
life," and "well, other people have their opinions too" (p.
2 73):
She would make these statements ••• in a tone of
gentle insistence as if no one held them but her,
and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage
had obliterated every expression from her face,
would stare ••• with the look of someone who has
achieved blindness by an act of will and means to
keep it (p. 273).
Mrs. Freeman works on Hulga by very subtly mocking her
carefully chosen and protected identity:
And without warning one day, she began calling
her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front of Mrs.
Hopewell who would have been incensed but when
she and the girl happened to be out of the house
together, she would say something and add the
name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her
privacy had been intruded upon (p. 275).
It takes a custom-made stranger, Manley Pointer, to shatter
Hulga's atheistic motto, "Some of us have taken off our
blindfolds and see that there is nothing to see" (p. 288),
10
and to prove that she "ain't so smart."
He is able to
succeed because he portrays a mixture of Mrs. Hopewell's
"down home" goodness, which (although she finds it nauseating) Hulga does trust, and Mrs. Freeman's penetrating
vision that can see
secret fact"
11
far beyond Hulga's face to reach some
(p. 275).
At the end of the story, Pointer leaves Hulga legless
and humiliated, her face churning with confusion as she
watches him walk away over the fields that, because she has
lost her glasses in the struggle, appear to be "two green
swelling lakes 11 (p. 287).
11
Park makes the observation that
It is not by accident that to Joy-Hulga's nearsighted
vision the departing Bible salesman appears to be walking
on water."21
Significant to the irony of the story,
Pointer is revealed to be an Anti-Christ figure.
Drake writes in his essay
111
As Robert
The Bleeding Stinking Mad
Shadow of Jesus' in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, ..
Pointer "wins something of our admiration: he may be a
devil but he is not a fool, as Hulga is."22
11
Good Country People" is one of the stories one can
envision O'Connor reading again and again, as she told
Robie Macauley, and laughing and laughing.
11
The Artificial Nigger" and "Good Country People" both
involve a proud character on the road to self-discovery, in
Mr. Head's case literally on the road.
markedly different in dimension.
But the stories are
In a revealing letter to
ll
"A," O'Connor wrote about the amount of energy it took her
to write these stories:
••• what comes easiest is what is most natural and
what is most natural is what is least affected by
the will.
For instance, I wrote GCP ["Good
Country People"] in about four days, the shortest
I have ever written anything in, just sat down
and wrote it; but I was two or three months
writing "The Artificial Nigger"--which is a story
in which there is an apparent action of grace.
As stories both of these are equally successful
(I insist) but the amount of creative energy put
out was entirely different; and this is not to
say that more energy expended on GCP would have
made it a better story.23
What becomes evident in this passage is that writing an
ironic, non-mysterious story like "Good Country People" was
what came naturally for O'Connor, and that writing so that
her characters made contact with "mystery," as they do in
"Artificial Nigger," required a great deal more from her
and left her with results that even she did not always
fully comprehend.
In her introduction to The Habit of
Being, Sally Fitzgerald writes that "there was an area of
sensibility in ••• [O'Connor] that seems to have remained
imperfectly developed ••• although I believe that she touched
it in what she often described as the best thing she would
ever write,
'The Artificial Nigger'--a story that she said
contained more than she herself understood."24
The story begins ordinarily enough with Mr. Head and
his grandson, Nelson, preparing for a trip to the city one
day.
Mr. Head wants to teach Nelson that being born in the
12
city is no reason to be proud, and "It was going to be a
lesson that the boy would never forget"
(p. 251).
Nelson's
grandfather plans to show him "everything there is to see
in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for
the rest of his life" (p. 251).
O'Connor describes the
characters as almost identical in temperament and appearance, despite their age difference:
••• they looked enough alike to be brothers and
brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head
had a youthful expression by daylight, while the
boy's look was ancient, as if he knew everything
already and would be pleased to forget it. (p.
251).
But Mr. Head is considerably more proud than Nelson, whose
only source of pride is his cosmopolitan birthplace; significantly, though, they ordered Nelson's hat "a size too
large because they expected his head to grow" (p. 251).
It is Mr. Head, however, who learns his lesson (as
O'Connor intended) when the pair gets lost in the section
of the city populated by blacks.
Nelson, who has never
seen a "Negro" and even fails to recognize one his grandfather points out on the train because to Nelson he seems
"tan," clings to his older relation and trusts him to guide
them through the terrifying streets.
The city proves too much for Nelson after all, and he
falls asleep.
But Mr. Head, still motivated by the·pride
of an unthinking elder, decides to teach his grandson a
truly unforgettable lesson by hiding so that Nelson will
13
wake up alone.
The cruelty of Mr. Head's search for satis-
faction at the expense of their relationship becomes even
more devastating when Nelson knocks a woman down accidentally after waking up to find his grandfather gone and
running off to find him.
When Mr. Head catches up to the
scene, he denies knowing Nelson, "I never seen him before"
(p. 265), out of fear of the woman's threats to call the
police.
The crowd turns its attention from Nelson to Mr.
Head at this point: "The women dropped back, staring at him
with horror, as if they were so repulsed by a man who would
deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to
lay hands on him" (p. 265).
What began as a harmless trip to the city becomes a
nightmarish, almost surrealistic, voyage into a corrupting
world.
As the two characters walk on to try and find the
railroad station, Nelson silently punishes his grandfather
who realizes the severity of repudiating Nelson in his
crucial moment of need and no longer cares if they ever get
home:
Mr. Head's shoulders were sagging and his neck
hung forward at such an angle that it was not
visible from behind.
He was afraid to turn his
head.
Finally he cut a short hopeful glance over
his shoulder. Twenty feet behind him, he saw two
small eyes piercing into his back like pitchfork
prongs (p. 266).
The character's roles are reversed ~s Nelson, "with a
dignity he had never shown before" (p. 266), turns his back
14
on his grandfather, who envisions "a long old.age without
respect and an end that would be welcome because it would
be the end" (p. 267).
Humiliation complete, the story proceeds into the
realm of "mystery" when Mr. Head catches sight of a plaster
lawn decoration in the form of a negro boy "about Nelson's
size" (p. 268).
The "artificial nigger" is described the
same way the grandfather and grandson were described in the
beginning of the
story~
"It was not possible to tell if the
artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked
too miserable to be either" (p. 269).
The sight of the
statue brings Nelson and Mr. Head together in wonderment:
The two of them stood there with their necks
forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and
their hands trembling identically in their pockets.
Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and
Nelson like a miniature old man.
They stood
gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were
faced with some great mystery, some monument to
another's victory which brought them together in
their common defeat.
They could both feel it
dissolving their differences like an action of
mercy (p. 269).
The relationship is strengthened, as a broken piece of wood
is made stronger once it is glued back together, when Mr.
Head makes the profound observation (or so it seems to
Nelson after all they've been through) that "They ain't got
enough real ones here.
They got to have an artificial one"
(p. 269).
Perhaps more than in any other story, O'Connor overtly
15
describes Mr. Head's acceptance of grace in the last three
paragraphs when he judges himself "with the thoroughness of
God while the action of mercy covered his pride like a
flame and consum.ed it"
(p. 269):
He had never thought himself a great sinner
before but he saw now that his true depravity had
been hidden from him lest it cause him despair.
He realized that he was forgiven for sins from
the beginning of time, when he had conceived in
his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present,
when he had denied poor Nelson (p. 270).
Here is the "apparent action of grace" that O'Connor felt
separated this story from others like "Good Country People"
and that Montgomery might admit more than implies the
possibility of good.
Importantly, it is arrived at through
the humiliation of Mr. Head who, at the outset of the
story, believes his age is "a choice blessing and that only
with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of
life that makes him a suitable guide for the young" (p.
249).
He comes to the end of the story with the full
realization (undeniably rare in O'Connor's fiction) that
"no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and
since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready
at that instant to enter paradise"
(p. 270).
"Revelation" is the third story in which a puffed-up
character is pulled down from self-imagined heights.
In
this story it is Ruby Turpin who is left mortified after a
routine visit with her husband, Claud, to the doctor's
16
office.
Mrs. Turpin comes to two revelations in the story.
In
the waiting room, Mary Grace, a Wellesley College student,
sets off the first when she throws a book entitled Human
Development at Ruby's head, then attacks her and tries to
choke her, and finally tells her to "Go back to hell where
you came from, you old wart hog" (p. 500).
Mrs. Turpin's
self-image of a pleasant looking, albeit plump, woman of
forty is shattered as she realizes that the girl is not all
wrong:
"I am not," she said tearfully, "a wart hog.
From hell." But the denial had no force.
The
girl's eyes and her words, even the tone of her
voice, low but clear, directed only to her,
brooked no repudiation (p. 502).
The more important revelation occurs, however, when Mrs.
Turpin becomes angry and decides, once back on the farm, to
discover
message.
w~y
she was chosen for this seemingly misplaced
There were, she decided, others in that waiting
room more deserving of the Lord's wrath; she could tell
just by looking at their shoes if they were "trash" or not.
She lumbers out to the pig parlor, with the "look of a
woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle" (p.
505), in order to confront the true source of Mary Grace's
remark.
Across the fields she dares God to try to humili-
ate her again, in the meantime squirting any hog that
should try to get in her way:
------------
·~~..,........-
--~~
_,.~1l"-~~---.-........---
--------- ---- - ------
17
"Go on," she yelled, "call me a hog!
Call me a
hog again.
From hell.
Call me a wart hog from
hell ••• !" A final fury shook her and she roared,
"Who do you think you are?" ( p. 5 07).
As O'Connor herself put it, "You got to be a very big woman
to shout at the Lord from across a hogpen.n25
The Lord answers her with no less than a vision of a
purgatorial procession in the sky with the likes of Ruby
and Claud bringing up the rear.
They are there because
they have committed the worst of all sins: they are proud
in that they take it upon themselves to judge others, as
Ruby constantly does, while they profess to be charitable;
"To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of
life"
(p. 497).
Above them in the procession are "whole
companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their
lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and
battalions of freaks and lunatics" (p. 508).
That the processional order is right is demonstrated
earlier when Mary Grace, who, it is decided, "is going to
be a lunatic" (p. 501), and the "white-trash woman" are
significantly not amused by the Turpins' prejudiced and
smug remarks made in the waiting room.
When the discussion
turns to the problem of blacks as displaced persons, Ruby
observes that they have no intention of returning to
Africa:
"Noo," she said, "they're going to stay here
where they can go to New York and marry white
folks and improve their color. That's what they
all want to do, every one of them, improve their
18
color. 11
11
You know what comes of that, don't you? 11
Claud asked.
11
No, Claud, what? 11 Mrs. Turpin asked.
11
Claud's eyes twinkled.
White-faced niggers,n
he said with never a smile.
Everybody in the office laughed except the
white-trash and the ugly girl [Mary Grace].
The
girl gripped the book in her lap with white
fingers.
The trashy woman looked around her from
face to face as if she thought they were all
idiots (p. 496).
O'Connor, by specifically naming the three groups wronged
in this important moment in the story--white-trash, niggers, and lunatics--intends the reader to recognize that
they deserve to be the first in line for salvation because
they alone are not guilty of hypocrisy.
Ruby's first revelation, as brought about by Mary
Grace's attack, is not enough to squelch her stubborn
pride.
the
11
But the one that ends the story, when she sees by
Shocked and altered faces 11 of the group to which she
belongs that
11
even their virtues were being burned away 11
(p. 508), strongly implies that she might change in the
direction of good.
Her vision will surely have lasting
impact, for as she slowly walks back to the house,
11
In the
woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck
up, but what she heard were the voices of souls climbing
upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah"
5 09) •
(p.
19
The second group of stories introduces a complicating
element, namely the main character's responsibility for
another person's death,
into the discussion of O'Connor's
near obsession with creating immoderately proud characters
whom she can vicariously mortify.
One senses that she
enjoyed concocting these individuals as much as she relished degrading them.
In "Everything That Rises Must Converge," Julian is,
"in effect, two presences in the story: the Julian who
assumes himself aloof and detached from the human condition
by virtue of his superior intellect and the Julian who
destroys his mother before our eyes."26
O'Connor portrays
Julian as a monumentally prideful young man who holds the
rest of the world and his own mother in contempt because
they do not appreciate him; as Montgomery continues:
Julian's distortions are those that a selfelected superior intellect is likely to make
through self-deception; his is an intellect
capable of surface distinctions but not those
fundamental ones such as that between childish
and child-like readings of the world.
In short,
Julian takes himself to be liberated, older than
his mother since he is more modern.
He feels
burdened by his retarded mother and so is free to
enjoy the pleasure of his chosen martyrdom to her
small desires.
Still, there is no one ••• capable
of appreciating him, and so no one to know, other
than himself, the constancy of his sacrifice.27
Part of his sacrifice involves escorting his mother to a
weight reducing class on Wednesday nights, with "the determination to make himself completely numb"
(p. 406) while
20
performing this service.
Once on the bus, Julian withdraws
from his mother completely, retreating "into the inner
compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time"
(p.
411):
This was a kind of mental bubble in which he
established himself when he could not bear to be
a part of what was going on around him.
From it
he could see out and judge but in it he was safe
from any kind of penetration from without.
It
was the only place where he felt free of the
general idiocy of his fellows.
His mother had
never entered it but from it he could see her
with absolute clarity (p. 411).
From this cowardly vantage point, Julian sees his mother as
diminutive and under his control; "At that moment he could
with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped a
particularly obnoxious child" (p. 414).
He fantasizes
about the various ways in which he could teach his mother a
"lesson."
So involved in this cruel daydreaming is he that
he almost fails to recognize the tailor-made, ironic offering of a huge black woman wearing the same atrocious hat
that his mother felt guilty about buying but decided to
wear because, "you only live once and paying a little more
for it I at least won't meet myself coming and going" (p.
406).
The hat, however, turns out to be not "a permanent
lesson" for his mother, as Julian hopes, but one that
"rolled off her like rain on a roof"
(p. 417).
A more devastating lesson is slowly and subtly being
planned, but it is one that Julian himself must learn.
21
Julian notices that because the black woman sits next to
him and her child climbs up next to Julian's mother, the
women had, "in a sense, swapped sons"
(p. 415).
Mont-
gome ry, in his insightful chapter "Julian as Raging He athen," elucidates the seemingly unlikely pairing of mothers
and sons:
••• the Negro woman is very much unlike... [Jul ian's] mother ••• [which] underlines the strange
woman's kinship to Julian.
She, like Julian, is
unaware of the possibilities of love.
The Negro
child, Carver, acts [lovingly] toward Julian's
mother to the discomfort of the child's mother,
but with an innocence that Julian can't claim ••••
When the mother has snatched her child away from
Julian's mother, he presently escapes back to
"his love," Julian's mother.
Afterward the Negro
woman slaps the "obnoxious child" as Julian only
imagines doing to his mother.
When the game of
Peek-a-boo starts between Julian's mother and
Carver, Carver's mother threatens to "knock the
living Jesus" out of the child.
And later, we
see her carry the child down the bus steps by its
arm, as if it were a thing and not a child.2E
Importantly, when Julian's mother offers Carver a shiny new
penny, Julian and Carver's mother react from the same basis
of unloving pride, trusting the mind and not the heart to
guide them; as Montgomery writes:
Julian's and the Negro woman's world is one in
which a penny is hardly an acceptable substitute
for a nickel, a world in which any gift at all is
unsuitable since it represents an intrusion that
can only seem a condescension of the Haves to the
Have-nots •••• [Julian's] mother cannot make distinctions of minor significance •••• But being
child-like, she can make major distinctions, even
as Carver can.
The mother's gesture of love with
the penny has removed from it any concern for the
worldly value of her gift.
It is a bright coin,
given with an affection misunderstood by both
22
Julian and Carver's mother.29
These two heartless characters are responsible when Julian's mother has a stroke following the black woman's physical and Julian's verbal (but equally violent) attacks on
her.
The moments transpiring between the assault upon his
mother and her death chart Julian's much needed regression
from self-affirmed social critic: "From now on you've got
to live in a new world and face a few realities for a
change" (p. 419), to helpless child: "He dashed forward and
fell at her side, crying 'Mamma, Mamma!'" (p. 420).
That
Julian is about to enter "the world of guilt and sorrow"
(p. 420) implies a movement from relying on the intellect
as initiator of action to submitting to the heart as human
motivator, an important, though often elusive, progression
for O'Connor's characters to make.
"The Lame Shall Enter First" is a story containing a
set of characters Stanley Edgar Hyman aptly describes as
the "trio of parent, child, and wolf cub."30
The parent is
Sheppard, an almost pathological do-gooder who ignores and
even despises his son, Norton, who is still suffering from
the death of his mother a year before.
Sheppard, a social
worker, discards his responsibility to his son in order to
help someone he feels is more worthy of his attention,
Rufus Johnson, a Bible-thumping juvenile delinquent with a
club-foot.
23
The opening of this story is one of the most "grotesque" scenes in O'Connor's fiction.
compelling and revealing.
It is funny and
Sheppard, described as having
prematurely white hair that "stood up like a narrow brush
halo over his pink sensitive face"
(p. 445), sits on a
stool eating cereal out of a little cardboard box and
judging his ten-year-old son to be worthless: "He would be
a banker.
ny"
No, worse.
( p. 4 4 5) •
He would operate a small loan cornpa-
In the meantime, Norton, without a mother
(or father) to guide him, is eating cake with ketchup and
peanut butter on it for breakfast.
Sheppard decides to
teach his selfish son a lesson by allowing Rufus Johnson to
use their house as temporary horne until he can find shelter
elsewhere.
Norton responds to the news as anyone would
whose property is
threatened~
"'Maybe he won't come,' the
child said and his eyes brightened slightly" (p. 447).
Sheppard continues with disgust, "Think of everything you
have that he doesn't ••• !
You have a healthy body ••• your
daddy gives you everything you need and want •••• And your
mother is not in a state penitentiary" (p. 447).
To the
last callous statement, Norton reacts emotionally:
A knot of flesh appeared below the boy's suddenly
distorted mouth.
His face became a mass of lumps
with slits for eyes.
"If she was in a penitentiary," he began in a kind of racking bellow, "I
could go to seeeeee her." Tears rolled down his
face and the ketchup dribbled on his chin •••• He
abandoned himself and howled (p. 447).
24
The boy becomes so upset that he eventually throws up his
entire breakfast in "a limp sweet batter."
Sheppard is so
unaware of his son's inner turmoil, which he believes to be
part of Norton's selfishness, that he thinks his son had
simply eaten too much.
Sheppard's pride is the most enormous of all; as Rufus
Johnson puts it, "He thinks he's Jesus Christ" (p. 459).
Rather than give his son the comfort of believing that his
mother may be in heaven, Sheppard tells Norton, "Your
mother isn't anywhere •••• She just isn't."
He sacrifices
Norton's peace of mind because Sheppard, "could not allow
himself to bring him up on a lie"
(p. 461).
Since Sheppard
cannot educate the eager. Norton about the mechanics of
salvation, Rufus Johnson takes over the job.
Rufus tells
Norton, as they look through the telescope that Sheppard
bought for Rufus, that if Norton's mother wasn't a "whore"
and if she believed in Jesus, then "She's saved" (p. 462).
Norton 1 s next question is inevitable; he asks, "When I'm
dead will I go to hell or where she is?"
Rufus replies,
"Right now you'd go where she is ••• but if you live long
enough you'll go to hell" (p. 462).
Sheppard views Johnson's religious instruction of
Norton as a way of trying to annoy him:
But he could not be annoyed.
Norton was not
bright enough to be damaged much •••. [Sheppard]
gazed at the child's dull absorbed little face.
Why try to make him superior? Heaven and hell
were made for the mediocre, and he was that if he
was anything (p. 463).
25
Norton withdraws into a fantasy world centered around the
telescope as a link to heaven and his mother:
The child's back was to him.
He was sitting
hunched, intent, his large ears directly above
his shoulders.
Suddenly he waved his hand and
crouched closer to the telescope as if he could
not get close enough to what he saw.
"Norton!" Sheppard said in a loud voice ••••
Norton stared.
He turned around.
There was
an unnatural brightness about his eyes.
After a
moment, he seemed to see it was Sheppard.
"I've
found her!" he said breathlessly.
"Found who?" Sheppard said.
"Mamma!"
Sheppard steadied himself in the doorway.
The
jungle of shadows around the child thickened •.••
"She's there!" he cried, not turning around
from the telescope.
"She waved at me!" (p. 479).
Sheppard completely ignores Norton's unbalanced mental
state and is obsessed with proving to Johnson that he can
help him even after Rufus admits his involvement in a
series of crimes of vandalism that occur in the neighborhood:
••• "I did those other two jobs too--the first
one as well as the one when I was supposed to be
in the picture show."
"I'm not going to tell you to leave," Sheppard
said •••• "I'm going to save you."
Johnson thrust his head forward.
"Save yourself," he hissed.
"Nobody can save me but Jesus"
(p. 474).
26
Johnson vows, "I'll show you" (p. 474), and the following
night some policemen and members of the press bring Johnson
to Sheppard's house where Rufus accuses him of blasphemy
and child molestation before they take Johnson away.
Sheppard's revelation begins as he wallows in selfjustification~
"I have nothing to reproach myself with ••.• I
did more for him than I did for my own child.
He heard his
voice as if it were the voice of his accuser.
He repeated
the sentence silently" (p. 481).
He is mortified as he
begins to realize the extent of his sins:
Slowly his face drained of color •••• The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a
dull blow.
His mouth twisted and he closed his
eyes against the revelation.
Norton's face rose
before him, empty, forlorn •.•• His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and
intense that he gasped for breath. He had
stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a
glutton.
He had ignored his own child to feed
his vision of himself.
He saw the clear-eyed
Devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from
the eyes of Johnson.
His image of himself shrivelled until everything was black before him.
He
sat there paralyzed, aghast.
He saw Norton at the telescope, all back and
ears, saw his arm shoot up and wave frantically.
A rush of agonizing love for the child rushed
over him like a transfusion of life.
The little
boy's face appeared to him transformed; the image
of his salvation; all light.
He groaned with
joy. He would make everything up to him.
He
would never let him suffer again.
He would be
mother and father.
He jumped up and ran to his
room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him,
that he would never fail him again (p. 482).
But Norton, hanging from the beam above the telescope, has
been transported to his mother's side,. and Sheppard is
27
left, one assumes, to enter the same world of guilt and
sorrow that Julian faces for committing the same sin of
spurning love to embrace pride.
The final two stories end in the death of the protagonist, "and since the characters are ••• on the verge of
eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with
them."3l
In "Greenleaf," Mrs. May's death is foreshadowed
from the first sentence in the story when a bull, "silvered
in moonlight," chews on the shrubbery outside her window,
"like some patient god come down to woo her"
(p.3ll).
He
is there to save her from a life of sacrilege and materialism fostered by pride:
She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept
inside the church building like other words
inside the bedroom.
She was a good Christian
woman with a large respect for religion, though
she did not, of course, believe any of it was
true ( p. 316) •
Montgomery explains that to Mrs. May, "Being a good Christian woman is a convenience to the establishment of her own
kingdom, since the forms of religion and its language,
however decayed, are still convenient in the social world
that surrounds her."32
And her materialism stems from
"that excessive love of the self whose designation is
Pride"; Montgomery writes:
For Mrs. May, who is both lord and lady of her
domain, reveals that failing explicitly •••• The
world becomes translated to property. There is
no reason to suppose that Mrs. May does not see
her property as she tries to see her sons--as an
28
extension of and imprint of herself upon the
world. What she wants is the world's adoration
for her strength and sacrifice, the acknowledgement she looks for insistently in her sons.33
Typical of all the independent farm woman stories of O'Connor, such as "The Displaced Person" and "Circle in the
Fire," "Greenleaf" portrays a woman's inability to work
successfully with the tenant family hired as farm help.
In
this case it is Mr. Greenleaf and his wife and children who
are the source of Mrs. May's frustrations.
Her condescen-
sion toward the Greenleaf family, especially Mr. Greenleaf,
reveals her pride and leads to a general lack of compassion
for others.
For fifteen years she has had to face the
successes of the Greenleaf clan: Mr. Greenleaf and his wife
never seem to age; Mrs. Greenleaf has mysterious healing
powers; and their sons, O.T. and E.T., have prospered while
Mrs. May's sons are failures.
But instead of learning from
these people, being humbled by them, she only becomes more
and more proud.
Montgomery observes that
11
the truth we are
meant to see is that Mrs. May has underestimated the Greenleafs as she underestimates her own potential."34
The scrub-bull is sent as her savior.
At the bushes
beneath her window a wreath of thorns falls around his head
"where it looked like a menacing prickly crown"
(p. 312).
When Mrs. May discovers that the intruder belongs to O.T.
and E.T. Greenleaf, she plans to teach them a lesson by
ordering their father to shoot the trespasser.
29
Out in the pasture, "a green arena, encircled almost
entirely by woods"
(p. 331), she meets the bull again while
Mr. Greenleaf is off in the trees trying to find it.
Like
a sacrificial senorita in a bullring, Mrs. May catches
sight of the bull "crossing the pasture toward her at a
slow gallop, a gay almost rocking gait as if he were overjoyed to find her again" (p. 333).
He swoops her up onto
his horns and "burie[s] his head in her lap, like a wild
tormented lover, before her expression change[s]" (p. 333).
His horn pierces her uncharitable heart, and her face is
transformed with "the look of a person whose sight has been
suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable"
333).
(p.
Mr. Greenleaf shoots the bull, but not before Mrs.
May is able to whisper "some last discovery into the animal's ear" (p. 334), a discovery about which the reader may
only speculate.
Montgomery imagines that, if she had
lived, "Mrs. May might look on her fields and the cattle
under the sun, upon her sons and scrub mavericks and say in
her heart, with joy and no envy,
'The heavens declare the
glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.' n35
Of all the stories, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is
O'Connor's most controversial.
She recognized that the
problem lay in the fact that almost everyone read it as
simply "an account of a family murdered on the way to
Florida."36
It was, she felt, almost never enjoyed on the
"spiritual" level on which it was written.
When she read
30
the story aloud to groups, she began with a discussion of
her own way of enjoying it and, interestingly, even told
them the ending beforehand so that
11
like the Greeks you
should know what is going to happen in the story so that
any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its
surface to its interior.u37
What she considered most
important in the story was that moment when the old woman
is about to die:
The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the
Misfit.
Her head clears for an instant and she
realizes, even in her limited way, 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.
And at this point, she does the
right thing, she makes the right gesture.
I find that students are often puzzled by what
she says and does here, but I think myself that
if I took out this gesture and what she says with
it, I would have no story. What was left would
not be worth your attention. Our age not only
does not have a very sharp eye for the almost
imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer
has much feeling for the nature of the violences
which precede and follow them.38
What precedes the grandmother's death, and the annihilation
of her family, is a recounting of the numerous petty acts
of violence that a family with no love at its center can
get away with.
June Star is even disappointed when no one
is killed when the family's car overturns.
And as they are
being taken into the woods to be shot, the individual
members seem truly not to care about the welfare of the
others.
31
Only the grandmother, once left alone with the Misfit,
progresses from believing herself above him, "I know you
wouldn't shoot a lady"
(p. 132), to recognizing and taking
responsibility for her part in the evil he represents; "Why
you're one of my babies" (p. 132).
The Misfit recoils, as
if repulsed by the old woman's acceptance of him, and
shoots her three times in the chest.
Like Mrs. May, how-
ever, the grandmother appears to have undergone a transfermation in the final seconds of her life; as she lies "in a
puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a
child's," her face changes expression, and she is left
"smiling up at the cloudless sky" (p. 132).
Grace touches
"Greenleaf" and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in the moments
before death and is implied through O'Connor's descriptions
of the women's changed faces as they appear to have accepted their moments of salvation.
After finishing this and the more devastating stories,
one senses that O'Connor was writing for an audience she
felt needed stirring.
Indeed, she wrote that it was often
necessary to make her "vision apparent by shock--to the
hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you
draw large and startling figures."39
Marion Montgomery
writes of the fiction writer's control over his work:
By the artist's deliberate actions, the world he
creates and the agents within that world are what
they are. Through his elections and orderings,
his deliberate selectivity, he sets the piece.
That it is a determined creature-n8'eds only our
recalling the act of revision of that piece--the
32
striking out or adding to--whether the artist is
determined upon a single effect ••• or a multiplicity of effects •••• The artist determines to make
the artifact determined; that is, he intends to
bring the work's potential to perfection, a
perfection whose limits are progressively set by
his conception, selection, execution.40
Flannery O'Connor was determined upon a single effect.
She
clearly conceived of pride as the wickedest of sins, selected characters who embodied and even flaunted that sin, and
executed the sentences she felt each had deserved in stories strangely unique but undeniably unified by the author's recurring fascination with the mortification of the
proud and the action of grace that often followed it.
33
Notes
1 Martha Duffy, "At Gunpoint," Time, 29 Nov. 1971,
p. 88.
2
Flannery O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," in Mystery
and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York:
Noonday, 1970), p. 109.
3
.
-
Marlon Montgomery, Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed
Home (La Salle, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1981), p. 19.
4
O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," p. 109.
5
O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," p. 112.
6
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), p. 129.
Further quota-
tions from the stories are taken from this edition.
Page
numbers appear in text.
7
Montgomery, p. 25.
8 O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," p. 113.
9
Clara Claiborn Park, "Crippled Laughter: Toward
Understanding Flannery O'Connor," The American Scholar, 51
(Spring 1982), 251.
10 Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally
Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 80.
11 Park, p. 252.
12 O'Connor, "On Her Own tvork," p. 118.
13
Park , p . 2 52 .
14 O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," p. 118.
15 Preston M. Browning, Jr., "Flannery O'Connor and
34
the Demonic," Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Spring 1973), 32.
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
O'Connor, "On Her Own Work, " p. 110.
Montgomery, p. 248.
O'Connor, Habit of Being, p. 160.
O'Connor, Habit of Being, p. 160.
Park, p. 255.
Park, p. 251.
Robert Drake, Jr., "'The Bleeding Stinking Mad
Shadow of Jesus' in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor,"
Comparative Literature Studies, 3 (1965), 189.
23 O'Connor, Habit of Being, p. 170.
24 Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. xvi.
25
26
27
28
29
30
O'Connor, Habit of Being, p. 577.
Montgomery, p. 291.
Montgomery, p. 293.
Montgomery, p. 296.
Montgomery, pp. 296-97.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, Flannery O'Connor (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 32.
31 O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," p. 114.
32
Montg-omery, p. 198.
33 Montgomery, p. 196.
34
Montgomery, p. 193.
35
Montgomery, p. 201
36
37
"On Her Own Work,
11
p. 114.
O'Connor, "On Her Own Work,
11
pp. 108-09.
O'Connor,
35
38
39
O'Connor,
"On Her Own Work," pp. lll-12.
Flannery O'Connor,
"The Fiction Writer and his
Country," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald (New York: Noonday, 1970), p. 34.
40
Montgomery, p. 228.
36
List of Works Consulted
Baumbagh, Jonathan. "The Acid of God's Grace: The Fiction
of Flannery O'Connor." Georgia Review 17 (Fall 1973),
334-46.
Browning, Preston, M., Jr. "Flannery O'Connor and the
Demonic." Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Spring 1973)
29-41.
Cheney, Brainard. "Flannery O'Connor's Campaign for Her
Country." Sewanee Review 72 (Autumn 1964), 555-58.
----------. "Miss O'Connor Creates Unusual Out of Ordinary
Sin." Sewanee Review
71 (Autumn 1963), 644-52.
Drake, Robert, Jr. "'The Bleeding Stinking Mad Shadow of
Jesus' in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor." Comparative Literature Studies 3 (1965), 183-86.
--:--------. "Harrowing Evangel of Flannery O'Connor."
Christian Century (September 30, 1964), 1200-1202.
Duffy, Martha. "At Gunpoint." Time, 29 Nov. 1971, pp.
87-88.
"Dust for Art's Sake." Time, 30 May 1969, p. 70.
Farnham, J.F. "The Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor."
America, 13 May 1961, p. 277.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar.
Flannery O'Connor. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1966.
Katz, Claire. "Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision." American Literature, 46 (March 1974), 54-67.
Montgomery, Marion. Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Horne. La
37
Salle, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1981.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor." Southern Humanities Review 7 (Summer 1973),
235-46.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1981.
The Habit of Being, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Noonday, 1970.
----------. Three by Flannery O'Connor. New York: New
American Library, 1962.
Park, Clara Claiborn. "Crippled Laughter: Toward Understanding Flannery O'Connor." The American Scholar 51
(Spring 1982), 249-57.
Sweeney, Francis. "One Gets the Blood of the Narrator on
One's Hands." New York Times Bood Review, 13 Feb.
1972, p. 30.
Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O'Connor. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1973.