CHAPTER - II

Themes of O’Connor’s Short Stories

What are the major common themes in the short stories of O’Connor? How are the

themes related to her characterization? This thematic study is of vital importance for any

discussion of her art and technique and an attempt is made in this chapter to discuss the

themes of her short stories. O’Connor uses many themes throughout all of her works. Her

common themes are alienation, true country life, and the demonic. Also, Flannery

O’Connor’s short fiction overflows with race-related themes. The southern racial hierarchy

clashes with integration and multiculturalism in her fiction. The wide-ranging response to

O’Connor’s race-related themes is perhaps due to the southern writer’s style. In her essay

“Flannery O’Connor and Aesthetics of Torture”, critic Patricia Yaeger notes that the southern

writer “uses the predicaments of her characters to ask, ‘What happens when the values

supporting southern bodies collapse under contradictory codes?’ Many of O’Connor’s

characters experience a sense of Freudian uncanny, a feeling of home/unhomely”

(Yaegar, 17). Throughout the short stories of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, “Everything

That Rises Must Converge”, “Good Country People”, “The Life you Save Might be your

Own”, “The Geranium”, “A Circle in the Fire”, and “The River” O’Connor speaks of her

heritage and her religious faults: “Miss O’Connor created characters and their dramatic

oppositions by separating, exaggerating, and polarizing elements in herself” (Hyman, 359).

O’Connor could be considered a writer of “apocalyptic violence, a grotesque vision,

and vulgarity” (Hyman, 358). Her themes are a reflection of her own life, and her characters

are a reflection herself. She shows the reader her life in a religious, alienated south.

Alienation of the classes is strong throughout most of O’Connor’s works. Racism is not the

only alienation O’Connor uses, but she also alienates against physical deformities.

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For instance, Hulga, who is alienated by her mother, in “Good Country People” is a

prime example of O’Connor’s reflection of her own deformity. In the story Hulga has a

wooden leg by which O’Connor reflects her own handicap, by the disease disseminated

lupus, of having to use crutches to walk. Mrs. Hopewell, Hulga’s mother, thinks of people as

“classes and kinds” showing her naïve southern nature (Paulson, 50). In “The Life you Save

Might be your Own”, Mr. Shiftlet, who has one arm, runs off and leaves Lucynell, a mentally

challenged girl isolated from society, at a gas station by herself. This story shows how

Shiftlet was alienated against and forced to become a drifter, who stumbles upon the isolated

Lucynell. Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is strongly against alienation of

blacks, but with a twist of irony he is alienated from his own mother, who is a naïve southern

woman. In the end of the story Julian’s mother feels alienated from her son when she is

confronted by her black double. In her short stories she “condemns” (Paulsonm, 72)the white

people’s relationship to the black race as “one-sided and narcissistic” (Paulson, 72).

O’Connor being a southerner writes about the true southern country life: “These families of

tenant farmers usually include a man who is stupid, incompetent, and malevolent; a wife with

an eye for defaults upon her children; and two or more mindless and voracious children”

(Hyman, 350).

In “Good Country People” Mrs. Hopewell is the stereotypical lady that Hyman talked

of, finding faults in her children, Hulga, and so quick to judge others by their outward

appearance. In “The Life you Save Might be your Own” O’Connor shows the barren

landscape of the countryside and the kind of people who dwells among it. In the story

Lucynell’s mother takes care of herself and daughter with no help from any male figures,

until Mr. Shiftlet shows up. Another example of this contradiction is “A Circle in the Fire” in

which the main character, Mrs. Caldwell, runs a prosperous farm. O’Connor’s true country

can be summed up with a quote from John Hawkes “O’Connor committing herself creatively

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to the antics of soulless characters that leer, or bicker, or stare at obscenities on walls, or

maim each other on a brilliant but barren earth” (398).These characters roaming O’Connor’s

true country are evil and demonic, and what Walter Allen called “God-intoxicated”

(Hyman, 352).

O’Connor’s short stories, with devilry as a theme, centre on a central character, which

later in the story has an encounter with some sort of a demonic character which ends in

tragedy. In “The River” the central character is a young boy named Bevel, who later returns

to where he was baptized to find Jesus. Mr. Paradise, an atheist, tries to stop him, Bevel flees,

and from what he thought was an ancient water monster, underwater drowning to death. In

“Good Country People”, Hulga plans to seduce a young naïve Bible salesman. She coaxes

him up to a hay loft; the young Bible salesman transforms into the seducer and gets Hulga to

remove her wooden leg along with her dignity. In an ironic twist, that is a trademark of

O’Connor’s short stories, Hulga’s thinking that she was the predator turned into the prey with

an opening of the salesman’s briefcase revealing a hollowed out Bible filled with whiskey,

pornographic playing cards, and other fake limbs. Hulga’s wooden leg and her dignity belong

now and forever to a demonic Bible salesman. This is a projection of O’Connor’s own self,

surviving through a test with the Devil. O’Connor’s most famous and demonic character of

all her short stories is the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Misfit in the

beginning of the story is a heathen, when in fact he is quite the intellectual with strong views

on religion and society. The Misfit and the grandmother have an intellectual war with the

grandmother on the side of God and the Misfit preaching “from a different pulpit, Satanism”

(Hyman, p. 353). The grandmother, having won the battle of wits, reaches out to the Misfit in

a Christ-like manner to forgive him. “The Misfit recoils in horror, aware that the grandmother

has opened herself to the Christian mysteries and therefore is threatening, if not totally

undoing, his life founded on the impossibility of knowing Christ” (Brinkmeyer, 161).

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The Misfit could not believe in something he has never seen before, and O’Connor uses these

demonic characters to vent her own religious doubts.

O’Connor’s short stories reflect her society in the alienated, religious, and south.

Although a devote Catholic, O’Connor had an immense intellectual background, which

refused her to be a gentile, naïve, doubtless, Southern woman like so many in her time, and it

showed in her short stories. “She could put everything about a character into a single look,

everything she had and knew into a single story. She knew people with the finality with

which she claimed to know the distance from hell to heaven” (Friedman, 60). Throughout her

life O’Connor encountered face to face the themes she dealt with in all her short stories.

Living in an alienated society O’Connor purged herself of her heritage by writing such stories

as “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save Might Be Your Own,” and “Everything That

Rises Must Converge.” O’Connor tired of the stereotypical Southern life she brought out the

truth in the stories “A Circle in the Fire,” “Good Country People,” and “The Life you Save

Might be your Own.” O’Connor when she doubted her faith wrote “The River,” “A Good

Man is Hard to Find,” and “Good Country People” to cleanse herself through her writings.

O’Connor dealt with the “decay” in society in a truthful yet painful way (Spivey, “Flannery

O’Connor’s View of God and Man”, 202).

The story, “The River”, begins as Harry's father is sending him off with his babysitter,

Mrs. Connin, for the day. His mother is in bed with an unnamed sickness, which turns out to

be a hangover. She tells him that she is going to take him to a religious healing at the river

with a preacher named Bevel, and when she asks Harry his name, he lies and says it is also

Bevel. She tells him about her husband, who is not a faithful Christian, and who suffers from

a, griping in his gut, and has had to have a third of his stomach removed. They take a taxi to

Mrs. Connin's home, where she introduces Harry, called Bevel, to her children, J.C., Spivey,

Sinclair, and Sarah Mildred. The children all go outside to the pig pen, and after debating

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throwing Harry into it, decide that their mother would punish them severely so they better

not. They do, however, talk him into lifting up a bottom board of the pen to look at the pigs,

which results in letting one of them loose.

Mrs. Connin leads her own children and Harry to the healing at the river. As they

walk, Harry reflects that he is glad he has been able to leave his own home with this

babysitter: he has discovered that “he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ”

(O'Connor, Complete Stories, 163) a name he thought was a curse because of the way it was

used in his own home. Mrs. Connin gave him a children's book about Jesus's life to look at,

and he stole it by slipping it into the lining of his coat. They arrive at the river, where Bevel

the preacher begins to speak. He tells them that if they have come just to be healed and to

“leave your pain in the river,” (O'Connor, Complete Stories, 165) then they have come for

the wrong reasons. An old woman approaches him who has been suffering from a disorder

that makes her arms flap and her head wobble for thirteen years. A man named Mr. Paradise,

who suffers from cancer and who is skeptical of Bevel's ability to heal, yells out that clearly

that woman has not been healed and that the preacher is only there for money.

Mrs. Connin tells Bevel the preacher that she has brought a boy from town who has not been

baptized. Harry goes down to the river and jokingly tells the preacher that his name is also

Bevel, but the preacher doesn't find it funny. Then Mrs. Connin calls out that they need to

pray for the boy's mother, who is sick. However, when Bevel asks Harry what his mother

suffers from, he answers, “She has a hangover” (O'Connor, Collected Works, 165). This

makes Mr. Paradise laugh, but everyone else falls silent. Mrs. Connin returns Harry to his

parents' apartment at the end of the day. When his father calls him by his name, Harry, Mrs.

Connin corrects him, saying that the child's name is Bevel. Harry's mother in turn corrects

her, and they get into a tense conversation about the preacher named Bevel and the healing

Mrs. Connin has taken Harry to see. After realizing that his parents have no faith, Mrs.

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Connin leaves without taking their payment for babysitting. Harry's mother discovers the

book he stole from Mrs. Connin's house in the lining of the coat and she and her friends make

fun of it. Before Harry falls asleep, his mother comes in to say goodnight.

The next morning, Harry wakes up before his parents and decides to return to the

river, and leaves the apartment to follow the path he and Mrs. Connin took the day before. He

passes by Mr. Paradise's house, and the man gets in his car to slowly follow Harry as he

walks down the highway. Soon Mr. Paradise parks and follows him on foot. Harry runs into

the river to drown him and discover the Kingdom of Christ the preacher had talked about. Mr.

Paradise jumps in after him, but Harry is caught in the current and after drifting far down the

river, Mr. Paradise gives up without rescuing him. The Grace of God is the most important

theme in this story. Grace is misinterpreted by Mr. Paradise and the young boy, Harry.

Mr. Paradise has unrealistic expectations of Bevil the preacher, attacking him for not being

able to perform any real miracles. Harry, having been brought up without religion, fails to

understand Bevil's preaching and drowns himself in the River. However, he achieves Grace

in death, since he chooses to strive for salvation rather than live in the atheistic household

with his parents.

Mrs. Connin is compared to a skeleton three times: while she looms in the doorway

waiting for Harry to be ready to leave in the morning, she is described as “a speckled

skeleton” (O'Connor, Collected Works,157); as she naps in the taxi on the way to her house at

the beginning of the story, “she began to whistle and blow like a musical

skeleton”(O'Connor, Collected Works,156); and when she realizes that Harry's parents have

no faith at all as she drops him back off at home, “Mrs. Connin stood a second, staring into

the room, with a skeleton's appearance of seeing everything.” (O’ Conner, The Complete

Stories, 169) This description could imply that she is naked before God, ready to be saved

and open to Grace, or it could be interpreted as a foreshadowing of Harry's death at the end of

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the story, brought on by her suggestion of Grace. As she leads her own children and Harry to

the healing, “they looked like the skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends, sailing

slowly on the edge of the highway.” (O' Connor, Collected Works,170).

In contrast, other characters are compared to animals through similes. Harry is

described as mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out. Mrs. Connin's

children's ears twitch slightly, like those of anxious animals, as they debate whether to abuse

Harry. This seems to signify their readiness to be herded toward God by believers like Mrs.

Connin. But when Mr. Paradise is compared to an animal at the end of the story, it signifies

that he is still lost to God; he doesn't understand the meaning of Harry's suicide and has not

achieved Grace. Harry hears a shout and turns his head to see, “something like a giant pig

bounding after him.” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,174) Mr. Paradise is as far away

from Grace as the pig that broke free at Mrs. Connin's house the previous day.

The symbol of the sun is used to represent Christian faith: its reflection is “set like a

diamond” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,164) in the river where Harry is baptized. The

personification of the sun enforces the idea that hope and faith overcome the darkness of sin

and lack of faith. As Mrs. Connin leads her own children and Harry to the healing at the river,

“The white Sunday sun followed at a little distance, climbing fast through a scum of gray

cloud as if it meant to overtake them.” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,162) When Bevel

the preacher tells Harry that after he is baptized he will count, Harry looks over his shoulder

“at the pieces of the white sun scattered in the river.” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,

p.168) When Harry wakes up in his parents' apartment, “The sun came in palely, stained gray

by the glass” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,171) of the window; it cannot shine brightly

in that home because his parents have no faith. In contrast, as he follows the path he and Mrs.

Connin took the day before to return to the river, “The sun was pale yellow and high and

hot.” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,172)

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As in many of Flannery O'Connor's stories, the sky is an important symbol: here, it

represents openness to faith. As Bevel preaches in the river, his eyes follow the paths of two

birds. They eventually settle “in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if

they were supporting the sky.” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,166) When Harry tells the

preacher that his name is also Bevel, jokingly, the preacher's face is “rigid and his narrow

gray eyes reflected the almost colorless sky” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories, 177) in this

moment before Harry's baptism. But when he is displeased, after Harry tells him that his

mother is in fact only suffering from a hangover, “the sky appeared to darken in his eyes.”

(O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,168) As Harry runs into the river to drown himself, “The

sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece - except for the hole the sun made - and fringed

around the bottom with treetops” (O’ Conner, The Complete Stories,173). Here, the sky

represents Harry's mentality: he is focused and determined, and the only thought in his mind

is faith, represented by the sun. O'Connor uses the pronoun she to reflect a sense of

Otherness, from Harry's point of view. As the story begins and Mrs. Connin is picking him up

at his parents' apartment, she is only referred to as she. The reader doesn't learn her name

until Harry's father calls her by it as he is saying goodbye. Over the course of the day, Harry

becomes more and more comfortable with Mrs. Connin and with the religion she represents.

When she returns him to his parents at the end of the day, it is his mother who is only referred

to as she. Harry has redefined himself as Bevel, and when his mother corrects Mrs. Connin,

she is italicized to emphasize her Otherness: “‘His name is Harry,' she said from the sofa.

'Whoever heard of anybody named Bevel?’ (O’ Connor The Compete Stories,169).

“Parker's Back” tells the story of a non-religious man, Parker, who has been obsessed

with tattooing his body since childhood when he saw a tattooed man. He tattoos nearly his

entire body, except his back because he cannot see tattoos on his back. After a cold,

awkward courtship, Parker marries a seemingly fundamentalist woman, Sarah Ruth, who

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acts very judgmental towards him despite his seeming unbelief. He frequently contemplates

leaving her. After negligently crashing and destroying a tractor at work which nearly kills

him, Parker abruptly leaves the scene and is filled with a desire to tattoo an image of God

on his back. He also believes that this will please his harshly religious wife. After getting a

tattoo of God with piercing eyes, other people are convinced Parker has had an awakening

experience with divine grace, however, Sarah Ruth is not impressed and attacks and berates

him for what she claims is idolatry.

“A View of the Woods” contains numerous references to Judeo-Christian mythology.

It explores the ideas of modernism and materialism pitted against salvation. The main

characters of the story are seventy-nine-year-old Grandfather Fortune, a successful

landowner, and his favorite granddaughter, Mary Fortune Pitts, who is said to resemble him

and he believes that she shares his business acumen. The grandfather is at the very least

ambivalent toward his own daughter and dislikes his son-in-law, Pitts, but allows them to

reside on a piece of his property. When the grandfather sells parcels of his land for

development, he knowingly irritates his son-in-law Pitts on every occasion. The grandfather

is in return frustrated every time Pitts chastises Mary Fortune and tells her not to let him beat

her. Eventually, Fortune decides to sell a parcel of land where Pitts grazes his calves for a gas

station, and, in doing so, would obstruct their view of the woods. Fortune sells the land to a

serpent-like man named Tilman, despite Mary Fortune's attempts to dissuade him from doing

so. After Mary Fortune continually irritates her grandfather, he attempts to punish her, but

she attacks him and says that she is entirely a Pitts, not a Fortune. In response, the grandfather

smashes her head against the rocks, killing her, and then presumably suffers a heart attack as

he looks out at a bulldozer developing his land.

O’Connor’s stories and novel do develop philosophical themes, especially themes

related to existentialism. In fact, one of O’Connor’s most common character types is the

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modern intellectual struggling for significance and performance in a world of alienation,

fragmentation, and transience. Hazel, Rayber, Sheppard, Hulga, Asbury, Calhoun, Walter,

and Old Dudley all suffer existential encounters with nothingness as the philosophers of her

day defined them. O’Connor satirizes modern life in her stories. She once wrote a revealing

letter to one of her friends, in it she says, “If I were to live long enough and develop as an

artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman… the angular

intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth” (Fitzgerald,

1056).

And another letter reveals that the intellectual woman she would satirize is herself.

She discusses an essay on Saint Thomas and Freud and says that it “has the answer in it to

what you call my struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me

with my ground teeth stalking joy” (Fitzgerald, 126).

The similarities between this portrait of herself and the plan to portray the intellectual woman

cannot be missed here. In spite of her claims to being a simple storyteller, O’Connor’s

intellectual gifts must be recognized in order to understand her work.

O’Connor declares that “One of the great disadvantages of being known as a Catholic

writer is that no one thinks you can lift the pen without trying to show somebody redeemed”

(Fitzgerald, 434). Most emphatically, O’Connor says, “I don’t think theology should be

scaffolding” for art. She confesses, “People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer

and I am afraid that I sometimes say no and sometimes say yes, depending on who the visitor

is” (Fitzgerald, 353).

O’Connor is more serious-minded than this fickleness suggests and she was indeed

writing from a Catholic perspective. According to O’Connor, modern fiction examples “the

mystery of personality,” which she conceives as “the general mystery of incompleteness”

(O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 167). The divided self in literature refers to characters

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with an uncertain sense of identity-a sense of in completeness. Freud’s theories of the

divided self were widely discussed by academics and writers. Psychoanalytic approaches are

essential to any basic understanding of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Madness’ is the central

issue in her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, but neurosis, as Freudian psychology defines it

an issue throughout the canon. Many critics have identified the importance of existence of

existentialism to O’Connor’s art. The existentialist and the Catholic share certain important

concerns and values: the acceptance of despair and an awareness of human morality as a

means of heightening one’s moral sense, the emphasis on the developing individual, the ideal

of responsibility for one’s actions, the importance of freedom and choice, and the assertion

that individuals must establish a proper relation to their community, thereby overcoming

alienation and psychic fragmentation.

Despair and a hyper awareness of death may result in the desire to establish one’s

sense of identity as entirely independent from others, thus denying that one exists as a link in

a long chain of human life. O’Connor’s characters that suffer a fear of death and are

alienated from self and society are divided against themselves. O’Connor felt that ideally the

individual functions as a part of the larger religious community as well as a part of the social

community the stories that most suggest these kinds of concerns focus on a single character-

death-hunted questers alienated from self, family, and any form of community. The character

sometimes dreads following the fate of another character earlier in time. For example, Ruby

Hill in “A Stroke of Good Fortune” is subconsciously aware that she is pregnant but fears

following the fate of her mother, who died in child birth. She denies her pregnancy, prefers

to think she has cancer, and tries to escape becoming “something all dried and puckered up”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 99) like her mother, who is a sharp contrast to “somebody

as alive as her (self)” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 99). She associates pregnancy with

morality. A fear of death results in an inability to love, incapacity to give oneself to family or

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community. Ruby suffers a profound sense of alienation-from the whole human community,

from her husband, and from her own body-because she does not want to participate in the

generative process, a process prefiguring her own death and requiring self-sacrifice for others

rather than independence from others and affirmation of her personal significance. She is

ironically presented as “a whole thing climbing the stairs” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,

99). She is divided rather than whole because she is obsessed with her own morality. Her

body is “Shaped nearly like a funeral urn”, (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 95) signifying

the threat of generation-of sexuality, which requires that the parent give up the self for the

sake of the child and participate in a chain of events leading to the parent’s death. A collard

green stuck to her cheek seems to her “a poisonous seed” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 95).

A blind, old Negro Gabriel in “Wildcat” is another O’Connor character obsessed with

morality. Gabriel thinks of himself as fair game for the present wildcat that has been

terrorizing the neighbourhood. He associates himself with the previous victim of another

wildcat rampage that occurred when he was a boy. Gabriel wonders “was he Hezah”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories,30) but reassures himself that “He was Gabrul” (O'Connor,

The Complete Stories,30). Suffering blindness and the infirmity of body due to old age,

Gabriel wishes to establish control over his mortality by being in control of the hunt. He

fantasizes himself in the role of master hunter, a role that also confirms his masculinity and

differentiates him from femininity, which he associates with powerlessness and death.

Nowhere in O’Connor’s works are the theme of alienation and the fear of death more

evident than in “The Geranium.” The struggle to overcome morality by establishing one’s

significance apart from others is clear; Dudley refuses to relate constructively to his daughter

and his neighbours. This sedentary and alienated old man spends his last days staring out the

window at his neighbour’s geranium, which is perched on a window ledge high above the

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abyss of a multi-storied apartment complex in New York. The precarious position of the

geranium refers to Dudley’s own situation-and to the image of dangling man as the

existentialists have defined it or to the image of man as a rope over an abyss, as Nietzsche has

envisioned the human predicament. Dudley actually does commit suicide by leaping off the

ledge of his window. At the start of the story, Dudley’s alienation and the problem of time’s

progress are emphasized. A flashback to his earlier life shows that he did maintain a sense of

community at his boarding house; O’Connor juxtaposes his memories of his neighbours’

geranium with the geranium of the present.

O’Connor even portrays a child, Ruller McFarney in “The Capture”, as feeling vague

sense of being pursued by “Something awful… tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its

fingers ready to clutch” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 53). The story begins and ends

with this image. At the start the boy is himself that ominous figure “edging nearer to a turkey

he intends to bag with his arms rigid and his fingers ready to clutch” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 43). In his neither community, nor God affirms his sense of significance;

O’Connor again focuses on a single alienated character wishing for self-definition and uneasy

about life. The motif of sibling rivalry developed in “The Capture” also relates it to the next

group of stories. “The Capture” is narrated in the third person and told through the limited

perspective of the boy hunter, who at the start imagines himself as a powerful figure, a sheriff

capturing a rustler. When the “sheriff” is startled by an actual, rather than imaginary, Prey, a

wild turkey, he takes up the pursuit.

In the story “A View of the Woods”, grand father Mark Fortune murders his grand

daughter, Mary Fortune Pitts, because he rebels against him. In the stories that present a

parent’s efforts to remake a child, the child invariably suffers a terrible sense of being a

divided self-split between conforming to what parents demand and asserting his or her own

self-image felt to be more real and less mortal. In spite of the child’s efforts to be unlike the

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parent, the child is destroyed. In each case, a parent figure fails to nurture his child and

instead generates so much narcissistic energy that the child is destroyed. In the prototype for

these stories, “The Violent Bear It Away”, the child, Francis Tarwater, adopts the behaviour

of his crazy uncle who believes himself a prophet of God whenever a child adopts the

behaviour of a domineering parent the point is that he has lost himself. In “A View of the

Woods” Mary Fortune Pitts reflects the narcissistic will of her grandfather-his primitive

aggressive drives-but we cannot identify with his viciousness or hers. Nor do we lament her

loss of self as she ends up explicitly revealing in an actual physical attack the meanness

Fortune hides in underhanded ways. She begins as “a small replica” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 336) of the old man and ends up miming his aggressive wilfulness. One

senses little struggle on her part to seek an independent self, although one identifies with her

part to seek an independent self, although we identify with her part to preserve the woods,

what O’Connor says is a “Christ symbol” (Fitzgerald, 190). Mary Pitts and Mark Fortune

lose sympathy because the reader does not understand their struggle as an existential plight.

Mark Fortune might be seen to suffer the powerlessness of old age, like Dudley in “The

Geranium,” but what Old Dudley suffers more passively Mark Fortune suffers aggressively.

Human vulnerability does not seem to be represented as much as human viciousness.

Fortunes merely note in passing that “Anyone over sixty years of age is in an uneasy

position” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 337). Grandfather Fortune denies his existential

plight so completely by asserting his power over others that the reader even wishes for his

downfall. Completely embedded in this world, Fortune lacks any spiritual impulse-being so

involved in petty material pursuits that lead him to destructiveness and destruction. His

tractor is the primary symbol for the human destructiveness that results when human will

becomes cold and mechanical. The tractor appears in a “red pit” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 337) as “disembodied gullet [which] gorge[s] itself on the clay” (O'Connor, The

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Complete Stories,335), suggesting flesh. Mark Fortune essentially “gorges” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 335) himself on Mary Pitts’s self by expecting her to conform to his will

because he considered her “thoroughly of his clay” ( O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 338).

He denies her independence. When Mary Pitts positions herself half on her grandfather’s

Cadillac and half on her grandfather “as if he were no more than a part of the automobile”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 339), the point is that Fortune’s materialism and cold-

heartedness reduce him to being like a mechanism. He and his granddaughter watch his

construction projects that destroy both nature and his son-in-law’s inheritance. The

construction occurs because the old man is selling off the land his son-in-law wants to

preserve for himself. The tractor and the catholic represent power in the material world-

power Mark Fortune loves to wield. He also values his automobile over human life; it

provides him with a sense of his own identity. Mark Fortune does not suffer an identity crisis

as more sympathetic characters do. He is secure in the fact that he is “PURE Fortune”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 351), but his security depends on his granddaughter

carrying out his will. And she rebels against him by allowing her father to bear her. When

this happens, Mark Fortune sees her “completely foreign” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,

340) and becomes “infuriated” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 340). He feels her

surrender to her father as a personal failure. Mr. Pitts beats his youngest daughter as revenge

against the grandfather-in-law, treating her as the one possession he can still control even if

he cannot control his father-in-law’s sale of the land. “She’s mine to whip” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 341), he declares, thereby treating the human as property. In this way, he

reflects the materialism of the man he would overcome. This rivalry between the grandfather

and the son-in-law suggests oedipal conflicts and the regressive behaviour of death-hunted

parents. The old man no longer can compete with his own father for the love of his mother

and therefore turns to his daughter’s love and competes with the son-in-law. Rejection by the

Sekhar 43

daughter amounts to rejection by the mother and is intolerable. The daughter’s love for the

father is encouraged by the father in order to retain her as a child under his control, to satisfy

his own need for maternal love, and to prevent her from growing up and marrying the man

who will replace him. Unable to overcome infantile possessiveness, Mark Fortune disinherits

his daughter when she does marry because he feels that she prefers “Pitts to home”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 336), as the jealous father puts it. Mark Fortune maintains

his power over his daughter and her family by treating them as tenants, not family, and

selling off tracts of land whenever they displease him. Like Old Dudly, he also denies his

daughter, who considers herself dutifully caring for him. He feels threatened by her care and

by her pretence of duty, which, in his view, conceals a desire to “put him in a whole eight feet

deep” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 337). Mark Fortune then turns to his granddaughter

to satisfy his narcissistic need to possess a single love object like himself and to seek revenge

against his daughter because of her rejection.

This family system of rivalry, crippling interdependence, jealousy, and revenge

finally fails when Mary Fortune rebels more empathetically against her grandfather because

he threatens to obscure the family’s view of the woods by selling off the front lawn for the

construction of a gas station. The patriarch rationalizes this attack on his son-in-law by

idealizing progress. He wants to destroy the natural scenery and replace it with automobiles

and corrugated steel, there expanding his self and imposing his view on Pitt’s pasture. Mark

Fortune expects his look-like granddaughter, Mary, to value things, people and nature exactly

as he does.

But Marry has learned from her grandfather how to exert her own will. When her

grandfather chastises her for not supporting him, he speaks as if were “a suitor trying to

reinstate himself” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 347). Nonetheless, his strategy to win

her back fails eventually, he sees her not as a satisfying mirror image of himself but as an

Sekhar 44

ominous other. Ironically, Mary’s wilfulness actually does reflect his own self-his own

wilfulness, only this time not directed by him. He perceives her to be veering away from his

image, but actually she is imitating his egotistic, destructive, and wilful being bottles at him

and Tilman as they sign an agreement that ensures the construction of a gas station on Pitt’s

front lawn. Mark Fortune then murders his own offspring to preserve himself-to rid him of

what he now perceives as a reflection of the son-in-law’s will. Mary Pitt’s shift from support

of her grandfather to support her father significance a growing awareness of the grandfather’s

waning power as well as a desire to preserve her view of the woods. The old man suffers

heart attack after his struggle with his other self, and his last view is ironically of the wood or

“the gaunt trees and the monster… gorging itself on clay” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,

356).

The next group of stories retains the theme of parent/child conflicts but develops it in

a context the focuses on a less obvious but important motif in the O’Connor canon having to

do with gender and male/female conflicts. Several O’Connor stories are in fact distinguished

by male protagonists who are antagonistic toward family, express an aversion for femininity,

and try to repress all reminder of their own physicality sometimes represented by a particular

woman character. Joseph Campbell’s insights about male perceptions of femininity are

relevant in these cases:

When it suddenly dawns on us… that everything we think or do is necessarily

tainted with the odour of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a

moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular

as the great symbol of life, becomes intolerable to the pure, pure soul. (The

Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Vol. 6, 125.)

The theme of separation from the mother is very ancient, but it is only in recent times

that philosophers and psychologies have recognized its significance as it expresses a

Sekhar 45

profound revulsion for femininity. In O’Connor’s stories dealing with this issue, male

characters exhibit aggressive behaviour, sometimes explicitly based on male prerogative. In

“Greenleaf,” Mrs. May complains that Mr. Greenleaf takes advantage of her because she is a

woman. Mrs. May’s sons indulge in angry triads against their mother and at one point attack

each other. In “The Enduring Chill,” Asbury verbally attacks his sister and mother. In “The

Comforts of Home,” Thomas feels revulsion for Sarah Ham and ends up accidentally killing

his mother. These three stories in the cannon share a special focus on symbolic contexts

related to sex. Male potency, procreative and creative power, is represented by images of

twins, horns, bull, walking stick, gun, and/or even artist. Female purity is represented by

Thomas’s mother, depicted as a sibyl, but otherwise femininity is related to the reproductive

process symbolically represented by images of cows (the herd), milk, and the female

container, cow’s bag, purse, Various negative images of women are projected by aggressive

males: Thomas sees the delinquent girl as a slut in “The Comforts of Home”; Asbury sees his

sister as a sleeping dog in “The Enduring Chill”; and Mrs. May is presented as a kind of

Medusa with her “Green rubber curlers [that] sprouted neatly over her forehead and her

face…smooth as concrete” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 311). The male characters in

these stories feel revulsion for women representing physicality, and they assert their need for

control sometimes in brutal ways. Claire Kahane has accused O’Connor “of repugnance

toward femaleness,” (19) but the “repugnance” (19) in the stories does not express the

author’s view but is felt by the male character, male like Thomas toward females like Sarah

Ham. In one case, in “A Stroke of Good Fortune”, a female, Ruby Hill, feels repugnance for

a treating male, her husband, Bill B.Hill. The male characters feel an aversion for female

characters thus suggesting the need to counter the masculinisation of culture, not least to

encourage tenderness in human life and to accept the body self and the facts of human

mortality. These themes are connected with O’Connor’s Catholic concerns. Fredrick Asals

Sekhar 46

notes the relevance to O’Connor’s work of the biblical idea that “there is neither male nor

female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (NIV, Galatians 3:38). Only when sex-related

differences are harmoniously integrated can spiritual development take place. Revulsion for

femininity and the body self provides a measure of alienation from the community and

signifies a lack of evolutionary progress toward unity within the family and within God’s

community.

In “The Comforts of Home,” Thomas tries to control his mother, who infuriates him

by offering her home to Sarah Ham, a delinquent young woman she wishes to help. Unlike

his mother, Thomas does not consider the suffering of others, but seeks his own creature

comforts an interesting choice of words given the Rheims-Douai Catholic Bible, which refers

to the Holy Ghost as comforter and explains God’s many rooms a sharp contrast to Thomas’s

unwillingness to have his rooms invaded by what his mother calls a pathetic “nimpermaniac”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 385).

In “The Enduring Chill,” Asbury Fox also directs his aggressions toward his mother. He

tortures her with the idea that he is about to die and formulates his pronouncement so that

“each word [seems] like a hammer blow on top of her head” ( O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 372). Like Thomas, he seeks passivity, which inhibits his development. He instructs

his mother to “Close the blinds and let me sleep” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 365)

wishing to be blinded to his own responsibilities. He fails to develop a constructive

relationship with his mother and to lay a productive life. A would-be writer who left home to

fain his independence in New York, Asbury returns to his mother and is convinced he is

dying because he has been suffering for several months from vague symptoms of physical

distress. Both Thomas and Asbury suffer from an inability to reconcile the female and male

sides of the self. Thomas feels revulsion for Sarah Ham; Asbury gives his sister Mary

George a revolted look when he first sees her after a long absence in New York. Both of

Sekhar 47

these misogynists blame their nurturing mothers for their failures. A conventional woman,

Asbury’s mother advocates plain work and sunshine as a cure for his ills. Suspicious of

higher education, she extols her husband as successful even though limited to an eighth-grade

education. And like the child who identifies with the more powerful parent, she sees him as

able to do anything. She is also conventional in that she wants her son to do real work, not

writing. Mrs. Fox and her intellectual son are thus opposites. He represents aggressive

masculinity, isolation and cold rationality; she represents the feminine caretaker,

conventional attitudes of the community, and tenderness. When his mother worries over her

herd, especially over a particular cow’s bag, a comic repetition of her concern for Asbury’s

more general ailment, Asbury responds to her in an agonized voice. Asbury’s immaturity is

evident when he returns to his hometown with the idea of assisting his mother in the process

of growing up. He is pleased to see his mother’s grief over his obvious ill health.

As the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” begins, the Grandmother is complaining

about going on a road trip to Florida; she'd rather visit friends in east Tennessee. She worries

aloud to the rest of the family, Bailey (her son), his wife, June Star and John Wesley, their

children, and the baby, about The Misfit, whom she has been reading about in the newspaper.

The Misfit is a serial killer who has escaped from the Federal Penitentiary and is on the loose.

The next morning, the family sets out on the road trip. They stop at the Tower for barbecued

sandwiches, where the owner, Red Sammy Butts, and his wife wait on them. The

Grandmother and Red Sammy commiserate about the current state of the world, complaining

that you cannot trust anyone these days. He tells a story about how he gave two men gas on

credit; clearly he has been taken advantage of and regrets his decision. As they set off again,

The Grandmother remembers an old plantation that she thinks used to be in this area. Bailey

does not want to take a detour to go find it, so The Grandmother makes up a lie about how

there are secret doors in the house with hidden treasure; this makes June Star and John

Sekhar 48

Wesley scream and complain until their father agrees turn around and drive down the dirt

driveway. However, after they have been driving for a while, The Grandmother realizes that

the old plantation is actually nowhere around there at all. Her reaction causes the cat to

escape from its box and jump on Bailey's shoulder, and he veers off the road.

The car has flipped over and is in a ditch. Another car approaches, and from out of it

climbs The Misfit, Bobby Lee, and Hiram. The Grandmother recognizes The Misfit, and he

answers, “it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of recognized me.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories,127) She begins to talk about how The Misfit is clearly not

of common blood, and how he must come from nice people, flattering him. But he calmly

orders Bobby Lee and Hiram to take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods, and soon

gunshots ring out as they are murdered. As The Grandmother advises The Misfit to pray to

Jesus, Hiram and Bobby Lee return from the woods dragging Bailey's yellow shirt with bright

blue parrots on it, and The Misfit puts it on. Then Bobby Lee and Hiram politely help up The

Mother and June Star to take them back into the woods, as well. The Grandmother begins to

panic and resumes trying to convince The Misfit to find Jesus. She repeats, “I know you

come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 132). Then she bargains with him, offering all her money to save her life.

When The Grandmother hears the pistol shots that announce the deaths of the rest of

her family deep in the woods, she cries out, “Bailey Boy!” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories,132) for her son. The Misfit reminds her that no one has raised the dead except for

Jesus, and opines that Jesus shouldn't have done that: the only pleasure he finds in life is

meanness. He reveals his lack of faith in God by saying that he can't believe Jesus even raised

the dead, since he wasn't there to see it, and blames this lack of knowledge for how he has

turned out. Noticing he looks like he is about to cry, The Grandmother cries out, “Why you're

one of my babies. You're one of my own children!” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 132)

Sekhar 49

and touches him on the shoulder. The Misfit responds by firing three shots into her chest and

killing her. Hiram and Bobby Lee come back from killing The Mother, June Star, and the

baby, and The Misfit comments that in fact, there is no real pleasure in life at all.

The title of the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” echoes Red Sammy Butts in his

conversation with The Grandmother. The mistrust of others in general is a continuing theme

throughout O'Connor's short stories, and in her conversation with Red Sammy Butts, The

Grandmother confirms her belief in this idea: “It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that

you can trust.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 122)This belief contradicts her Christian

faith, of course, but in the end her Christian faith results in the achievement of Grace. Grace,

an important theme to O'Connor, is given to both The Grandmother and The Misfit, neither of

whom particularly deserves. As she realizes what is happening, The Grandmother begins to

beg The Misfit to pray so that Jesus will help him. Right before The Misfit kills her, The

Grandmother calls him one of her own children, recognizing him as a fellow human capable

of being saved by God's Grace. Even though he murders her, the Misfit is implied to have

achieved some level of Grace as well when he ends the story by saying, “It's no real pleasure

in life.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,133) Earlier in the story, he claimed the only

pleasure in life was meanness.

The glorification of the past is prevalent in this story through the character of The

Grandmother, who expresses nostalgia for the way things used to be in the South. Her

mistake about the “old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she

was a young lady” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,123) leads to the demise of the whole

family when they get in a car accident while driving down the dirt driveway. Before she

realizes that the plantation is actually not in Georgia but in Tennessee, she remembers “the

times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey,” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 124) imagining the beautiful scene she believes they will soon find. Eyes

Sekhar 50

are an important symbol in many of O'Connor's short stories, and here they indicate a

character's mindset. The Grandmother's eyes are bright as she listens to “The Tennessee

Waltz” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,121) on the jukebox at The Tower. As Bailey

makes a single effort to argue with The Misfit before he is led into the woods to be killed, his

eyes are described as “blue and intense.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 128) After they

hear the gunshots that signal the deaths of Bailey and John Wesley, The Mother and June

Stars' eyes are glassy. After he kills The Grandmother and removes his glasses, “The Misfit's

eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories,132)

Racism is a minor theme in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” The Grandmother reveals

her racism when she comments on the child the family observes out the window: “Little

niggers in the country don't have things like we do,” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 119)

calling him a “cute little pickaninny.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 119) Though she

feigns compassion for the plight of blacks, her feelings toward them are clearly racist. As in

many of O'Connor's story, the sky is mentioned as an indicator of the characters' moods.

Right after The Grandmother identifies The Misfit, he comments, “Don't see no sun but don't

see no cloud neither,” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 127) implying that their fates have

not yet been decided. But after Bailey and John Wesley have been murdered, as The Mother

and June Star are being led into the woods as well, The Grandmother notices that “there was

not a cloud in the sky nor any sun,” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 131) and now it

indicates that she has nothing from which to get her bearings: “there was nothing around her

but woods. There is no hope.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 131)

O'Connor uses the first part of her story to describe the characters and to establish the

basic irony of their situations. Both old George Poker Sash (based presumably on General

Bush) and his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, are individuals who live for the gratification

Sekhar 51

of their own desires. Sally Poker Sash, who is sixty-two years old, has prayed that her

grandfather, who is a hundred and four years old, will live until she is able to graduate from

college with a B.S. degree in education. She has attended summer school each year for the

past twenty years, and she fears that she “might be cheated out of her triumph because she so

often was.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,134) Her goal is to have her grandfather on

stage when she receives her degree in order to show “what all was behind her and not behind

them.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,135) Similarly, old George Poker Sash is willing

“to sit on stage in his uniform so that they could see him.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories,134) At heart, however, he is bored by all processions including graduation

procession; he would much rather be the center of attention at a parade.

O'Connor's repeated use of images function to tie the elements of the story together

and to foreshadow the ending. O'Connor's reference in the first paragraph of the story “to the

River Styx”, (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 134) in Greek mythology, this is the river

across which dead souls were ferried to the Underworld by the boatman Charon. O'Connor's

frequent use of the phrase “black procession” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 136) in this

story suggests the approach of death and all those things associated with it, and Sally Poker

Sash's dream of having her grandfather silently revered and honored in the hearts of the

graduation audience foreshadows a major disappointment in her life. For both Sally Poker

Sash and old George Poker Sash, the most memorable event in both their lives was a

premiere which they attended twelve years earlier in Atlanta. It was then that “General

Tennessee Flint rock Sash of the Confederacy” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,139) had

been created by the Hollywood publicity agents. We are told that, in reality, Sally's

grandfather was probably no more than a foot soldier during the Civil War even though Sally

claims that he was a Major.

Sekhar 52

The memory of this false, artificial reality has become a focal point in the lives of

both old General George Poker Sash and Sally. For the General, it was a moment of triumph,

and he constantly relives that experience — at the risk of being made aware of the real nature

of his life. For Sally Poker, the moment of triumph in Atlanta turned to tragedy, however, for

she went on stage without changing from her brown Girl Scout oxfords into the silver

slippers which she had purchased to compliment her long, glamorous black crepe gown. That

careless mistake, she believes, will finally be redeemed by the presence of her famous

grandfather on stage for her graduation. On the day of Sally's graduation, everything goes

well — until she discovers that her nephew, John Wesley, did not take her grandfather onto

the stage as she directed him to do. Instead, he allowed the old man to sit in the hot sun while

he himself stopped to drink a Coca-Cola. At this point, the old General felt “as if there were a

little hole beginning to widen in the top of his head.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,141)

This “hole,” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 142) of course, is a precursor of his death.

Remember that earlier, we were told that he could not possibly conceive of death — “living

had got to be such a habit with him.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,134)

Finally, as the old General sits on the stage, he attempts to ignore the speakers;

however, he is unable to do so because of the ever-widening “hole” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 142) that he feels in his head. The comments of one of the speakers, you should note,

are of importance because they echo one of O'Connor's major themes in this story: “if we

forget our past . . . we won't remember our future and it will be as well for we won't have

one.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 142)

From O'Connor's point of view, the events of a person's lifetime are properly

understood only when one sees them against the background of the Divine scheme — a

scheme which extends from the time of Creation to the Last Judgment. By remembering his

Fall from Eden and God's promise of a future opportunity for redemption, man can be led to

Sekhar 53

remember the promise of salvation which is made available through the sacrifice of Christ

(NIV. Hebrews 1:2, 1036). The old General, having forgotten his real past, which includes

his family, as well as his wartime experiences, attempts to recall his finest moment of glory:

“He tried to see himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of beautiful girls,

being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 142)

He is unable to conjure up this vision, however, because he is too distracted by the speaker's

words.

The General's moment of epiphany and his death occur as the graduates move forward

to receive their diplomas. In his final moments, during his moment of epiphany, his

recognition of his true past comes flooding in on him, “as if the past were the only future now

and he had to endure it”. (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 143) The black procession, now

an image of his impending death, appears to be almost upon him, and he recognizes it

because “it had been dogging all his days.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 143) He dies

while trying desperately to “see over” the black procession in order to “find out what comes

after the past.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,143) The General's epiphany appears to

serve two purposes in the story. First, it reinforces the commencement speaker's view that the

ability to remember the future is conditioned by one's ability to remember the past. The

General has chosen to remember a false, culturally created past, and he dies before the

memory of his true past can lead him to the knowledge of the future. From O'Connor's point

of view, those who accept a false past as true and then attempt to make its preservation the

focus of their lives have little chance of finding a spiritually satisfying afterlife. The second

purpose of the General's tangential moment stresses the mortality of all things. As it must

come to all men, death comes to the General, who has forgotten its inevitability. In the

orthodox religious view, life must be a preparation for death; to live while attempting only to

preserve the great moments of the past is to abandon all hope for the future. Thus, one ends

Sekhar 54

one's life by trying vainly, as did the General, “to find out what comes after the past.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 143) Although Sally Poker Sash does not experience an

epiphany in the story, O'Connor arranges the details in such a way that it appears impossible

for her to avoid one. When she realizes that her moment of triumph (receiving her scroll at

graduation) occurs after her grandfather dies (symbolically, a dead past which she refuses to

relinquish), her nightmare comes true. The consequent destruction of her pride may, then, be

viewed as a necessary step which will turn her attention from her old concerns; indeed, it may

well be the beginning of a new realization of the purpose for her existence. The story ends

with a twist. After the graduation ceremony, the Boy Scout nephew who was in charge of

General Sash “bumped him out the back way and rolled him at high speed down a flagstone

path and was waiting now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 144)

This final tableau leaves one with an image of a dead past juxtaposed with a representative of

the new generation — a generation which is caught up in the rush to satisfy its

physical/material needs from one of O'Connor's archetypal, despised images of modern

culture, a Coca-Cola machine. Given her tendency to deal with anagogical meanings, one

might see this vision as O'Connor's way of rejecting both the old and the new (neither of

which provides an answer to the General's final question) as bastions behind which man

might hide himself.

The story A Temple of the Holy Ghost is told in third-person but from the point of

view of the child, who is a homely twelve-year-old girl. Her second cousins, Joanne and

Susan, are visiting from their convent school, Mount St. Scholastica, for the weekend. The

child's mother asks her daughter for some suggestions about how to entertain the two

fourteen-year-old cousins during their visit, and the child petulantly suggests a visit from Mr.

Cheatam, the boyfriend of their boarder, Miss Kirby. This is a ridiculous idea, since Cheat

Sekhar 55

would not be pleasing to the girls at all, and the child has purposefully suggested it to make

fun of Miss Kirby. Susan and Joanne joke about how Sister Perpetua has instructed them to

defend themselves against would-be wooers by saying, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy

Ghost!.” ( O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 238) But the child's mother doesn't get the joke;

she confirms that they are in fact, temples of the Holy Ghost. The child likes that idea, and

considers that she, too, could be one. The child makes the legitimate suggestion that the

neighborhood boys Wendell and Cory Wilkins could come and visit to entertain Susan and

Joanne, and the mother agrees that that is a good plan. The next day, Wendell and Cory

comes to visit and the girls immediately begin to giggle. The child watches the action by

standing on a barrel hidden in the bushes as Wendell begins to sing to the girls. He sings

simple songs about Christ, including The Old Rugged Cross, and when he is finished, the

girls make fun of him by responding with their own songs in Latin. Wendell and Cory are not

Catholic, they are members of the Church of God and so they don't recognize the Latin words

and conclude that it “must be Jew singing.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 241) As the

girls giggle, the child betrays her hiding place by shouting, “You big dumb ox!” (O'Connor,

The Complete Stories, 241) and falling off the barrel.

The child does not eat dinner with Susan, Joanne, Cory, and Wendell, instead hiding

in the kitchen to eat with the cook. After dinner, the four older children leave for the fair, but

the child is too proud to ask to accompany them. She stays in her bedroom and daydreams

about one day becoming a saint. However, she worries that she might be too afraid to

withstand martyrdom by some horrible method. Finally she gets into bed and says her

prayers, thanking God that she is not in the Church of God like Wendell and Cory.

The child is awakened by the return of Susan and Joanne, and she asks them about

what they saw at the fair. They tell her that some things they can't explain to her because she

is too young, but she eventually convinces them to reveal that they have seen a

Sekhar 56

hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite showed them its genitals, saying, “God made me this

away... and I ain't disputing His way.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 245) The child

doesn't understand what a hermaphrodite is, but she falls asleep imagining the hermaphrodite

repeating, “I am a temple of the Holy Ghost, Amen” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 246).

The next morning, the child and her mother accompany the girls back to the convent as

Alonzo Meyers drives them in his taxi. When they arrive, a nun embraces the child's mother,

but the child refuses to be embraced. She is in a bad mood, and thinks cynically, “You put

your foot in their door and they got you praying.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 247)

They follow the nun into the chapel and the child kneels down, still thinking ugly thoughts,

until all at once she realizes that she is in God's presence. She begins to pray for God to help

her not to be so mean, and to not sass back to her mother.

As the priest raises the host, which represents the body of Christ, during the

ceremony, the child remembers the hermaphrodite saying, “I don't dispute it. This is the way

he wanted me to be.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 239) As the child and her mother

leave the convent, the child allows herself to be kissed by the nun, and doesn't mind that the

nun's crucifix is mashed into the side of her face. On the drive home, Alonzo reports that the

fair has been shut down because some preachers from town protested it to the police. The

hermaphrodite represents an acceptance of God's will, and has clearly achieved Grace by not

questioning its situation. Susan and Joanne witness the show by the hermaphrodite at the fair,

and later tell the child about it when they are all in bed. O'Connor herself had suffered from

lupus, a crippling disease that resulting in the loss of the use of her legs and eventually her

death. This story demonstrates a sympathy for freaks, as this hermaphrodite is called at the

fair, and a respect for accepting the lot you are dealt in life. O'Connor wrote of the story in a

letter, “As near as I get to saying what purity is in this story is saying that it is an acceptance

of what God wills for us and acceptance of our individual circumstances” (Sally Fitzgrald,

Sekhar 57

Habit of Being, 390). In fact, the hermaphrodite's body is certainly a temple of the Holy

Ghost in the mind of the child: as she watches the priest raise the host, which in the Catholic

faith is believed to literally become the body of Christ, she remembers the hermaphrodite's

words. The child, who is on the surface ornery, suffers from a prideful disposition. She does

not ask to go to the fair with the older children, and decides that even if they asked her she

would not accompany them because she is too proud. But O'Connor gives the reader insight

into the workings of the child's mind, and it is revealed that she strives for Grace, even

considering a saintly death to be her calling. There is a tension in the child's mind between

her ugly thoughts and the knowledge that she is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and in the end,

the sun represents the triumph of Grace in the child's being.

The fact that the child remains nameless is significant, since it implies that the child

could represent children everywhere, at least in her ability to observe and absorb influences

and details. The child can also be interpreted as a representation of O'Connor herself, since

the author often described herself in letters as socially awkward and lacking grace. Like a

comic author might, the child makes cynical judgments about the intelligence of those who

surround her, concluding that she is much more intelligent and faithful. But it is only at the

end of the story, when she lets go of her pride and allows herself to be wrapped up in the

experience of the Catholic mass, that she achieves Grace. The sun is a symbol of Catholic

faith in this story, and its intensity mirrors the characters' embodiment of that faith. After

Wendell sings to the girls, they use the Latin songs they have practiced at school to make him

and Cory feel confused and embarrassed; accordingly, “The sun was going down and the sky

was turning a bruised violet color.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 240) After the child

has achieved Grace in the chapel of the convent school, during the drive home, “The sun was

a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a

line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.” (O'Connor, The Complete

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Stories, 243) The Host, which Catholics like O'Connor believe is literally transformed into

the body of Christ, is also linked to the hermaphrodite's body when the child thinks of the

freak during the mass ceremony.

Wendell and Cory, who are not Catholic, are baffled by Susan and Joanne's beautiful Latin

singing. The child calls out, “You big dumb ox!” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,241) and

the animal similes used by O'Connor corroborate this view of the boys. “They sat like

monkeys” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 240) on the porch while the girls sat together in

the swing, and while Wendell sang his simple Church of God songs to the girls. “He looked

at Susan with a dog-like loving look.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 240) Perhaps this

characterization is meant to point out the deficiencies of the Church of God as compared to

the Catholic Church in the child's mind; in fact, she later fervently thanks God for having her

not be a member of the Church of God.

“The Enduring Chill” is yet another interesting story of O’Connor. Asbury arrives

home from school by train; his mother and sister, Mary George, are there in the car to pick

him up at the station. He looks horribly ill, and his mother is taken aback, but he refuses to

talk about it. He is very rude to his mother and to his sister, and considers how he has been

dying for about four months. When his mother suggests that he see Doctor Block, he refuses,

expressing disdain for this country doctor. Instead, he thinks about his friend Goetz, who

doesn’t believe in life after death, and who took him to a lecture on Vedanta. At the end of

the lecture, Goetz challenged a priest by expressing his disbelief in salvation. Mrs. Fox

interprets her son’s refusal to see Doctor Block as indication that he is about to have a

nervous breakdown. She disapproves of his devotion to education and thinks he would be

much better off working outside in the sunshine; but when she tells him so, he dismisses her

suggestion and again refuses to see Doctor Block. Mary George, who has been sleeping in the

backseat of the car, wakes up and derides her brother’s obvious disdain for their home. She

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makes fun of him for being so pretentious, and in the past she has claimed that he cannot be

an artist since he has never published anything. When they reach the house, Asbury walks

upstairs and promptly falls into bed. He remembers the letter he had written to his mother

when he was still at school in New York, blaming her for his lack of creativity and for

pinioning him. The letter takes up several notebooks, which he has sealed in a manila

envelope and hidden in his drawer. His mother and sister arrive with his luggage, and he tells

them to leave him alone and let him sleep. When they are gone, he stares at the stain on his

ceiling that resembles a bird with its wings spread and an icicle held in its beak. It has always

irritated him and sometimes frightened him. Asbury awakens in the afternoon to find Doctor

Block examining him. He is extremely rude to the doctor, who takes his blood for tests. Over

the next few days, Asbury’s health declines even though his mother is able to convince him

to sit out on the porch. He remembers his interactions with Randall and Morgan, the two

black farmhands. Last year when he was writing a play about black characters, he had spent

time with them on the job, and they had bonded over breaking one of his mother’s rules by

smoking in the barn. However, when he tried to convince them to go even further by drinking

some of the milk from the farm, they had refused. After deciding that his mother is

insufficient company, Asbury surprises her by requesting a visit from a priest. He believes

that he will be able to have an intellectual conversation with a Jesuit priest, even though he is

not that religion. His mother finally obliges and makes a phone call to arrange for one to visit

the next day. That evening, Asbury overhears his mother and sister talking about him; Mary

George insists that he is making himself sick because he is failing as an artist. He knows she

is right in a sense, but does truly believe himself to be ill, and that night he dreams about his

own death.

The next day, Father Finn arrives. He is blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, so

Asbury must shout to have a conversation with him. Asbury is disappointed because the

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priest is clearly not as intellectual as he had hoped; instead, Father Finn encourages him to

speak to Jesus. He aggressively instructs Asbury to pray and discover the Holy Ghost, and

though Asbury thinks he is an old fool, nevertheless he is paralyzed by the priest’s words.

Finally, Mrs. Fox bursts in and tells Father Finn to leave because he is upsetting Asbury. The

next morning, Asbury is surer than ever that he is on the brink of death, and he asks to see the

two black farmhands, Morgan and Randall, with the hope of recreating their special moment

when they smoked a cigarette together the year before. He gives them cigarettes, but their

visit doesn’t satisfy him because they just keep assuring him that he looks fine, which is

obviously a lie. They end up bickering, and Asbury’s mother asks them to leave. Asbury is

extremely disappointed, having realized that “there would be no significant experience before

he died.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 380) That evening, Doctor Block arrives and

Asbury’s mother cheerfully reports that he is not, in fact, dying: he has undulant fever. This

illness will keep coming back, and will likely ruin his life, but it won’t relieve him with

death. Asbury realizes that his life will drag on in illness, and that he won’t be able to achieve

a tragic artist’s death.

The sky and sun play an important role in reflecting the mood of the characters. When

Asbury arrives at the train station “The sky was a chill gray and a startling white-gold sun,

like some strange potentate from the east, was rising beyond the black woods that surrounded

Timberboro.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,355) His mood is like the sky, since he

believes he is about to die. When he has discovered that he will not die, but will instead suffer

his entire life from undulant fever,

A blinding red-gold sun moved serenely from under a purple cloud. Below it

the tree line was black against the crimson sky. It formed a brittle wall,

standing as if it were the frail defense he had set up in his mind to protect him

from what was coming. (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 382)

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The tree line represents Asbury’s determination to culminate his life as a suffering artist in an

early death; however, the sky, which represents his chance at life, overwhelms that

opportunity.

The stain on Asbury’s bedroom ceiling can be interpreted as representing the Holy

Ghost. It appears to him as a fierce bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its

beak. Since he has closed himself off to faith, he finds it irritating and sometimes frightening.

After Father Finn leaves, having instructed him about the Holy Ghost, Asbury “looked at the

fierce bird with the icicle in its beak and felt that it was there for some purpose that he could

not divine.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 378) When he realizes that he is doomed to a

long life suffering from undulant fever, “the fierce bird which through the years of his

childhood and the days of his illness had been poised over his head, waiting mysteriously,

appeared all at once to be in motion.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 382) It descends

toward him, since he is doomed to suffer for his refusal to open his mind to Grace.

Rather than accepting Grace, Asbury has been worshiping Art as a god instead. He

realizes this when he overhears Mary George say that he has decided to be an invalid because

he cannot be an artist, thinking, “He had failed his god, Art, but he had been a faithful servant

and Art was sending him Death” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 373) When Father Finn

instructs him to pray, he responds, “The artist prays by creating.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 376). Eyes are a common symbol in O’Connor’s stories, and here they are often

violent. When Mary George tells Asbury if she looked as bad as he does she would go to the

hospital, her mother cut her eyes sharply at her and she left. Doctor Block examines Asbury

for the first time, his drill-like gaze swung over his mouth and bore down. When Father Finn

chastises him for being ignorant of the Holy Ghost, Asbury “moved his arms and legs

helplessly as if he were pinned to the bed by the terrible eye.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 377) through which the priest sees. Similarly, when Doctor Block has reported that

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he is suffering from undulant fever and will not die, “Block’s gaze seemed to reach down like

a steel pin and hold whatever it was until the life was out of it.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 381)

When Asbury asks for a Jesuit priest to visit and insists to his mother that he is going

to die, “he tried to make each word like a hammer blow on top of her head.” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 372) When his mother eventually contradicts this statement with proof

from Doctor Block that he in fact only has undulant fever and is not going to die, “Her voice

broke in on him with the force of a gunshot.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 381) Racism

is apparent in Asbury’s interactions with Randall and Morgan, although he doesn’t believe

himself to be racist. The very idea that he would be writing a play about “The Negro” is, of

course, racist. Last year when he was writing the play, he had spent time with them on the

job, and they had bonded over breaking one of his mother’s rules by smoking in the barn. He

saw this moment as “one of those moments of communion when the difference between

black and white is absorbed into nothing.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 368)

However, he is dissatisfied with their visit because they simply insist that he looks well,

which is obviously a lie, and end up bickering with each other.

“Everything That Rises must converge”, by Flannery O’ Connor is comical as well so

serious tale of a grown but not-so-mature man, Julian, and his typically Southern mother, as

they travel downtown to their local YMCA. The title of this story comes from Pierre Teilhard

De Chardin (Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’ Connor, 110). After reviewing De Chardin’s

works, O’ Connor considered him a kindred spirit. The context of this title comes from the

explanation of one of his works called “The Omega point”. From the first page, the readers

get an idea of how double-minded and shallow Julian’s mother is, and later, of how weak a

person and disrespectful of his mother he often is, all the while his mother regarding him as

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her hero. Regarding his weakness, O’ Connor likens Julian to Saint Sebastian “while waiting

for the arrows to begin piercing him” (Charters, The True Country, 1037).

Referring to the hat she just paid seven dollars for, Julian’s mother frequently states,

maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have, even though the hat is very

important to her, as it is a symbol of her dignity; it represents her southern pride. The story’s

main focus is on her pretentiousness, her bigotry, her prejudice against the Negro, and

ironically, her struggle to maintain her dignity through it all. Of the blacks, in the bus, she

states, “most of them in it are not our kind of people, but I can be gracious to anybody. I

know who I am.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 409) There is irony in this statement,

since she is in constant need of reassurance from Julian of the loveliness of her heart. This,

and the repetition of the quote above, I know who I am, serves to indicate that she is either

unconsciously insecure, or, she is consciously attempting to mask her awareness of her

bigotry and prejudice and appease her conscience. She knows she is prejudiced, and to

counteract her feeling of dissonance, she finds gratification for her statement by saying, “but I

can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 409) She

is hoping for her son, whom she considers her hero, to reinforce her statement, and ease her

conscience.

Julian does not affirm his mother’s statements or ideas. He loathed her ideas and her

prejudice, and is “determined to make himself completely numb during the time he would be

sacrificed to her pleasures” (Charters, The True Country, 1037) This making he numb is one

sign of his weakness. Rather than confront his mother openly and truly address the issues -

draw-the-line, if you will, about anything, especially in regard to her constant disparage of

the Negro, he simply numbs himself, although he uses his character flaws to work at showing

her up; for example, when he sits next to the Negros on the bus. He uses this no-conflict

method as an attempt to punish his mother for her attitudes, to show her that she doesn’t

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‘know’ herself as she claims. His mother is like a thorn in his side. As the story tells us,

Julian walks with his mother, in a sort of depressed stoop, head hanging down and sort of

dragging his feet. Subject to one’s own interpretation is whether Julian’s weaknesses of

character brought on his obvious depression, or, if he already suffered depression, which was

enhanced by his menial and irritable existence. Contradictory to his mother, Julian has not

grown up to be prejudiced, but liberal, as the result of the Civil Rights Movement. His

mother’s attitude becomes clearer when she exclaims, “I see we have the bus to ourselves.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 410) Segregation has probably just ended, and she finds it

difficult to accept and adapt to the change desegregation has brought about. Julian always

makes a point of sitting next to a colored person. He does this to spite his mother, because he

is strongly motivated to defend the Negro, for righteousness’ sake. Julian represents the

younger generation, and what the society should be one which does not have preference for

one race or sex over another. His mother, on the other hand, represents the old generation.

Julian’s mother is a Southern lady and her grandfather was a former governor of their

state. Her father was a prosperous land owner, and her mother was a god-high. She was well

bred! It was not surprising that before she can take a trip downtown, she must be fully

dressed. Southern ladies take pride in their dress. As all Southern ladies, she takes particular

care as to how she dresses. It is vital to her overall self-image! The hats are symbolic in the

story, of both Julian’s mother and the large Negro woman who enters the bus with a little

boy. Julian’s mother wore her hat as a sign of her integrity; it topped off the rest of her outfit.

Since she could have benefited by using her money to pay bills rather than to purchase the

hat, she is obviously desperate (and foolish) to prove she has class. When the large, gaily

dressed, sullen-looking woman entered the bus, she had on a hat identical to that on Julian’s

mother’s head!. Upon noticing the hat on Julian’s mother, the black woman “muttered

something unintelligible to herself,” which “Julian’s mother’s mouth began to twitch slightly

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at one corner” (Carter, The True Country, 1045). Julian noticed the convergence of the hat,

but he knew “his mother would not realize the symbolic significance of this” (Carter, The

True Country, 1044).

“After being hit by the black woman for giving her boy a penny, Julian gloats that his

mother has finally received her comeuppance until he realizes she has fainted and perhaps

even dead. Then his guilt and remorse begin and the story ends”. (Balee, Literary Profit of

the South, 98). As action turns and tensions rise, again and again there appears before those

self-denying characters a creature both strange and yet in some way familiar, like a distorting

mirror whose images they at once repudiate but cannot quite turn away from - in short, a

double figure. “An expression in character and action of O’ Connor’s characteristic duality,

the pattern recurs so often that it can only be called obsessive. This typical duality recurs

again and again”. (Asals, The Imagination of Extremity, 96).

In her work, the configuration (of duality) always takes one of two classic forms. Either one

character discovers that another is a replica of himself, an almost identical reflection - here

the paradigm would be twins - or, much more often, one character is presented as the alter-

ego of another, the embodiment of qualities suppressed or ignored by the first, a mirror image

or inverse reflection”. (Asals, The Imagination of Extrimity, 411). This configuration of

duality is what we see in the bus scene with the white and black women’s hats. Whitt

observes

Julian’s mother is angry because the black women’s hat is just like

hers, which removes her symbol of superiority to the Negro. The

Negro woman hates seeing herself wearing the same hat as the white

woman, since the white woman represents the oppression that the

white race has imposed upon her and her race, and represents

everything she stands against. To the Negro, the hat becomes a symbol

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of all white oppression she has known. The Negress quickly yanked

the little boy off the seat as if she were snatching him from contagion.

(Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’ Connor, 120)

The questioning nature of Julian’s mother symbolized her racist ideology. It was really her

way of putting the woman and the boy in their place- of patronizing them. This served as a

reminder of the white races oppression of blacks. When Julian’s mother gave the little boy

one shiny penny, the Negress was furious! “Her fist swung out with the read pocketbook.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 418) She shouted, “He doesn’t take nobody’s pennies!”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 418) At the end of the story, O’ Connor presents an

interesting idea. “She says to us that Julian and his mother are relics of the South, who

crumble in the face of the future, which the black woman here represents”, (Hending, The

world of Flannery O’Connor, 108). In the last scene, as Julian’s mother collapsed on the

sidewalk! “a tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him” (Carter, The True

Country, 1048). As she begins to fade, she demands to have her dead grandfather and Negro

maid come and get her. She crumbles, and her weakness prevails. What this story centres

around, is a need for humans to love each other, regardless of colour, or status. Julian would

not have been swept “into the world of guilt and sorrow” (Carter, The True Country, 1048), if

he had cared more about his mother. O’ Connor suggests that unconditional love is what the

world needs.

O’Connor’s story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” begins with an account

of Julian’s mother’s health: she has been directed by her doctor to lose weight, so she has

started attending a “reducing class” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 405) at the Y. Because

she is wary of black people and since the bus system has just been integrated, she insists that

Julian accompany her on the bus each Wednesday night. This evening, Julian waits for her to

get ready as she puts on her new hat, which is hideous and green. As they walk to the bus

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stop, Julian stews about how much he resents his mother. She makes things worse by

insisting on discussing the integration of black people, a topic about which she and Julian

have differing viewpoints. He is not racist and cannot stand talking about the subject with

her. She begins to reminisce about the old mansion where she used to visit her grandfather as

a little girl, and about the slaves he kept. Julian pretends to hate the place, but he has dreams

about it and wishes that he had been able to experience the house for which his mother is so

nostalgic. They board the bus, and noticing that there are no black people there his mother

says aloud, “I see we have the bus to ourselves.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 410) She

makes small talk about Julian and how he has finished college with the woman who is sitting

across the aisle. Julian thinks about how she has struggled to bring him up properly and give

him all that he needed; instead of feeling love and thankfulness, he resents her for trying to

live up to their blue-blood family standards. He is proud of himself for having not been too

influenced by her ignorance and racism.

A black man boards the bus, and Julian’s mother like the other white women on the

bus becomes visibly uncomfortable. In order to make his mother even more upset, Julian asks

the black man if he has a light before realizing that he doesn’t even have any cigarettes to

smoke. He daydreams about the old mansion where his grandfather used to live, then starts

thinking up ways to make his mother uncomfortable, including bringing home a black woman

as his girlfriend. Soon, a tough-looking black woman and her son get on the bus. Her son,

whose name turns out to be Carver, sits on the seat next to Julian’s mother. Julian is

disappointed because his mother’s racism does not extend to children. The black mother sits

down next to Julian, and he realizes that she is wearing the exact same hideous hat as his

mother. He hopes it will teach his mother a lesson, but instead she seems to find it amusing,

and compliments the woman’s son using “the smile she used when she was being particularly

gracious to an inferior.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 417) Both pairs of mothers and

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sons get off the bus at the next stop, and Julian predicts that his mother is going to give

Carver a nickel. He is horrified at the idea, because it would be so insulting; but he was right,

and she tells him her intention. He hisses at her not to do it, but she ignores him and calls

after Carver to come back, his mother has been dragging him away down the street. When

Julian’s mother holds out the coin for him, Carver’s mother knocks her onto the sidewalk and

runs away with her son. Julian’s first reaction is annoyance, and he tells his mother, “You got

exactly what you deserved. Now get up.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 418)

When she does get up off the sidewalk, she sets off in the direction of home instead of

going to the Y. As she walks along, paying no attention to him, he continues to scold her. She

is walking quickly and won’t stop when he demands that they take the bus home. When

Julian grabs his arm, her face is unrecognizable and she says, “Tell Grandpa to come get me.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 420)She has had a stroke, and Julian is horrified when he

realizes it. He immediately changes his attitude toward her, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 420) and running down the street to get help. But it is too

late, and his “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,

420) is impending. Julian’s mother is clearly a racist. She is afraid of the black people who

board the bus and of black people in general. The fact that the black woman on the bus is

wearing the same hideous green hat as Julian’s mother links the two women. Julian hopes it

will teach his mother a lesson that she and the black woman are not so different, but instead

she finds it amusing, as if the woman is a monkey that had stolen her hat. What Julian finds

most infuriating about her is that she is not hatefully and openly racist, but rather racist in a

pitying way, which is more insulting to the black woman who hits her. She thinks that black

people were better off as slaves, and that, “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the

fence” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 408). Disgust with the world in general is a

common theme in O’Connor’s stories, and here Julian’s mother complains about the state of

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the world. Out of nowhere, while they are discussing her hat, she says, “With the world in the

mess it’s in, it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 409). This is a reference to racial integration, which she

sees as disempowering to white families like theirs. Aboard the bus, before any black people

are on it, she says to another white woman about integration, “The world is in a mess

everywhere. I don’t know how we’ve let it get in this fix” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,

415). Julian’s mother’s disgust with the world is closely linked to her nostalgia for the past.

As they walk to the bus stop, she reminisces about the huge mansion where her grandfather

lived, and the old darky who was her nurse. The mansion rotted and fell apart, and it has

since been sold. But Julian remembers visiting it once as a child, and he still dreams about it;

although he pretends to hate it, he resents his mother for having been able to experience it.

Julian fancies himself as a saint, and this pride leads to his intense guilt after his mother has a

stroke. Similes throughout the story indicate that he views himself as saint-like: as he waits

for his mother to get ready before they leave the house, “he, his hands behind him, appeared

pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 404). As they walk to the bus stop, he is saturated in

depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.

“The Enduring Chill” is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. The story involves

Asbury, a writer from New York who returns home to his mother's farm in the South after

being diagnosed with a serious illness. He is out of money, unsuccessful and believes he is

dying. His mother finds a local doctor who draws some of Asbury's blood to examine. In bed

Asbury thinks about various experiences, including one the prior year when he interacted

with the African-American farm hands and, in a show of rebellion against his mother,

smoked with them in the dairy barn. However, the hands refused to drink some of the milk as

Asbury did. Asbury requests that his mother bring a priest to him against her wishes. She

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eventually complies but the priest is elderly, hard of hearing, and not the intellectual that

Asbury hoped for. Asbury then requests to see the African-American farm hands and gives

them cigarettes. The farm hands lie to him and tell him he looks well. Asbury finds this

interaction disappointing. Later, Asbury is informed that he has undulant fever, probably

from drinking raw milk. The illness will not kill him but will continually recur and cause him

pain. Asbury is disappointed that he will not die a tragic death.

The main character in “The Comforts of Home” is Thomas, a history writer who lives

with his mother. His mother takes pity on Sarah Ham, who calls herself Star Drake, a young

woman who has been arrested and jailed for passing bad checks. Thomas' mother hires an

attorney to parole the girl and finds a boarding house for Sarah to live. After Sarah gets

kicked out of the boarding house for drunkenness, Thomas’ mother invites the girl to live

with them over her son's objections. After various conflicts where Sarah is seemingly

flirtatious toward Thomas, Thomas gets the sheriff to agree to remove Sarah once he notices

that his handgun is missing from his room. Before the sheriff arrives, Thomas notices that the

gun has been returned. He decides to plant the gun in Sarah's purse in order to get her

removed anyway, but while doing so, he shoots at Sarah and as this is happening Thomas'

mother jumps in front of Sarah and is killed. The police arrive and arrest Thomas.

The main character in “The Lame Shall Enter First” Sheppard is a liberal, atheistic

rationalist who is unsympathetic with the grief of his young son, Norton, despite the death of

Norton's mother only a year before the story takes places. Sheppard believes helping other

people improve their lives is the greatest virtue in life, and he is frustrated with his inability to

help Norton's grief and resulting foibles. Sheppard tells Norton that his Mother is dead, and

no longer exists. Eventually, Sheppard invites Rufus Johnson, a fourteen-year-old juvenile

delinquent, to live with them against Norton's wishes. Sheppard met Johnson while

volunteering at a juvenile incarceration facility, and desperately wants to help Johnson turn

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his life around. Johnson holds Sheppard in contempt and strongly believes in good and evil,

but believes that he himself is evil and resists all of the naive attempts by Sheppard to help

him. Against Sheppard's wishes, Johnson tells Norton that his mother is in heaven above the

earth, and he will only see her again if he dies as a child before he is corrupted. The story

ends with Johnson being taken away by the police for a burglary and with Sheppard then

finding Norton hanged dead from an attic rafter above the telescope that Sheppard purchased

to help Johnson expand his horizons.

When the story “The Lame Shall Enter First” begins, Sheppard and his son, Norton,

are having breakfast. Sheppard tells Norton that he saw Rufus Johnson the day before, trying

to eat out of a garbage can. He hopes to stir some kind of compassion in his son, whom he

finds lacking in this area, but does not succeed. Sheppard is the City Recreational Director,

and he has tried to help Rufus at the reformatory where he works as a counselor once a week.

He has given Rufus the key to their house with an open invitation. Over breakfast, he tries to

impress on Norton how lucky he is, but only upsets his son when it comes up that Norton's

mother has been dead for over a year. Norton vomits up his breakfast and Sheppard tells him

to go lie down, extremely disappointed with him. Sheppard remembers how when he first met

Rufus, he knew there was something special about the boy. Rufus is incredibly smart and has

a club which he keeps in a battered old shoe. He met him every week until he was released

from the reformatory. Rufus's father had died before he was born and his mother was in jail;

when he was released from the reformatory, his grandfather got custody of him. But

Sheppard hopes he will run away from home and come to stay at his house, so that he can

take credit for helping the boy. That afternoon, while Norton is at home alone, Rufus uses the

key Sheppard gave him to enter the house. He orders Norton to make him a sandwich. Then

he storms around the house, touching Norton's mother's things. This is offensive to Norton,

but Rufus won't stop disturbing all her things. When Sheppard arrives home a half hour later,

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he is absolutely delighted to find Rufus in the parlor reading an encyclopedia. Rufus tells him

that his grandfather has died. While Sheppard considers how to ask Rufus to stay at their

house for good, he finds his son, Norton, hiding in one of his mother’s coats in the hall closet.

Sheppard tells Rufus that Norton needs the company of another boy in the house, and asks

him to stay because he needs his help. Despite Norton’s protestations, Rufus agrees. After

Sheppard leaves, he asks Norton how he can stand his father, since “He thinks he’s Jesus

Christ!” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 49) A few days later, Sheppard and Rufus look

through the telescope that Sheppard has bought for him and set up in the attic. Sheppard has

taken him to the brace shop to be fitted for a special shoe for his club foot. Meanwhile,

Norton sulks in a corner and shows no interest in the telescope. Rufus says he is bored with

the telescope because all you can see is the moon, and he’ll never even go there: instead, he’s

going to hell when he dies. Norton becomes afraid that his mother is burning there, though

Sheppard tries to comfort him with the idea that she just doesn’t exist anywhere anymore. It

doesn’t work, and Norton instead listens to Rufus, who tells him that if he dies right now

he’ll go to heaven where his mother is, but if he lives long enough, he’ll end up in hell. The

next day, Sheppard sees Rufus talking secretly to Norton behind the bleachers at the ballpark.

That night, Norton is focused intently on the telescope in the attic, but he doesn’t know where

Rufus is. Soon, their question is answered when Rufus is brought home by a police officer,

who accuses him of breaking into a house and destroying property. Though Rufus denies

having committed the crime, Sheppard is extremely disappointed and lets the police officer

take Rufus to the station. However, the next morning, the police sergeant calls to tell

Sheppard that Rufus has been cleared, and Sheppard goes to the station to pick him up.

Sheppard feels horrible, and Rufus seems to have no problem making sure he suffers in his

guilt. It is time to pick up the special shoe for Rufus’s club foot, but when they get to the

brace store they discover that the shoe is too small and a new, bigger one must be made; this

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is extremely disappointing for Sheppard, though it pleases Rufus. That night, Sheppard drops

Norton and Rufus off at the movies while he goes to a meeting. When they get home, the

police are there again, accusing Rufus of breaking into another house. But Sheppard sticks up

for him, saying that he was at a movie, and that he will defend Rufus. When the boys are in

bed, Sheppard goes into Rufus’s room and asks him if he left the movie theatre at any time;

Rufus responds with outrage that Sheppard doesn’t trust him, and accuses him of planning to

go across the hall to ask Norton what happened. So when Norton beckons to his father from

bed, Sheppard ignores him. The next day, Sheppard and Rufus return to the brace store; the

shoe is ready and it fits perfectly, but Rufus declares that he will never wear it. That night, the

police come to their home again, this time with proof that Rufus has broken into another

home: his club foot has left distinct tracks. However, Sheppard declares that Rufus has been

at home with him all night, and they leave. Sheppard can tell that Rufus is trying to get him to

kick him out of the house, but he refuses to; he wants to save him. But he does wish that the

boy would leave on his own accord. The next morning, Norton and Rufus bring the Bible to

the breakfast table and read it together. Rufus says they have stolen it from a store, and

Norton begs him to repent so that he won’t go to hell; Sheppard thinks that repenting is

nonsense. He tells Rufus that he is too intelligent to believe in the Bible, but Rufus eats a

page of it and tells him that he will never eat earthly food again, and then disappears. After

dinner, Sheppard goes up to the attic to ask Norton where Rufus has gone. Instead of

answering, Norton declares that he has found his mother through the telescope. Sheppard

dismisses this news and tells Norton to be in bed in fifteen minutes.

Policemen arrive at the house again, with Rufus in their custody, and Rufus claims

that he wanted to be caught. There is a reporter there, and Rufus tells the reporter that he’d

rather go to jail than live in Sheppard’s house, since Sheppard thinks he is God but “the Devil

has him in his power.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 480) Sheppard watches the police

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car drive away with Rufus inside it and tries to console himself that “I did more for him than

I did for my own child.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 480) But then he realizes that he

has neglected Norton, and runs upstairs to hold his son, deciding to love him and treat him

better. However, when he reaches Norton’s room, he finds that Norton has hung himself.

Sheppard believes himself to be Christ-like, but because he has no actual faith his is

misguided. He compares himself in his office at the reformatory to a priest in a confessional,

but thinks that “his credentials were less dubious than a priests; he had been trained for what

he was doing.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,449) Rufus also believes that Sheppard sees

himself this way, declaring to Norton, “He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 459) When he is finally caught breaking into a house, Rufus tells the

reporter that Sheppard “thinks he’s God… The Devil has him in his power. ” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 480) In contrast, Rufus declares himself to be controlled by Satan on the

very first day he meets Sheppard. However, unlike Sheppard, he actually believes in God and

begins to teach Norton about heaven and hell. But instead of identifying himself in terms of

faith, he identifies himself by his handicap: his club foot: “Johnson was as touchy about the

foot as if it were a sacred object.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 459) Although Sheppard

pays for him to have a special shoe that fixes his gait, he refuses to wear it. He needs to have

his physical handicap to maintain his identity and perhaps to believe that he will get into

heaven since, as he quotes the Bible, “the lame shall enter first.” (O'Connor, The Complete

Stories, 480) Though he is a juvenile delinquent, Rufus achieves Grace because he believes in

Jesus and tries to share the truths of the Bible with Norton. He resents Sheppard for trying to

act like Jesus Christ while lacking all faith, and tells him, “Satan has you in his power, not

only me, you too”. (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 477) Sheppard tells him he is too

intelligent to believe in the Bible, but Rufus eats a page of it and tells him that he will never

eat earthly food again.

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Eyes are important in many of O'Connor's stories, and here they are often described as

violent. As Sheppard talks to his son, he tries “to pierce the child's conscience with his gaze.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 446) Likewise, when Rufus encountered Norton for the

first time, “his look went through the child like a pin and paralyzed him.” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 453) When he tells Norton about heaven, there is “a narrow gleam in his

eyes now like a beam holding steady on its target.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 462)

However, eyes can also reveal the characters’ moods: when Rufus first tells Sheppard that

Satan has him in his power, a “black sheen appeared in the boy's eyes,” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 450) and as Sheppard believes himself to be making progress with the boy,

“he watched his eyes and every week he saw something in them crumble.” (O'Connor, The

Complete Stories, 451) When Norton says he is going to be a space man when he grows up,

clearly having decided to commit suicide, “there was a glitter of wild pleasure in the child’s

eyes;” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,476) and when he tells Sheppard that he has found

his mother through the telescope, “there was an unnatural brightness about his eyes.”

(O'Connor, The Complete Stories, 478) Both Rufus and Norton are often compared to

animals, especially in their actions. When Rufus notices Sheppard watching him as he picks

through trash, he vanished with the swiftness of a rat, and when he first appears to Norton, he

“stood there like an irate drenched crow.” (O'Connor, The Complete Stories,453) Norton, on

the other hand, squatted motionless like a large pale frog in his room before Rufus comes to

the house, and when he sees the other boy for the first time, he speaks in a kind of mouse-like

shriek.

O’Connor’s fiction, like the parable, centers on everyday experience. And like

parables her stories are not allegories but dramatic narratives involving conflicts between

human beings that symbolize rather than describe man’s relationship to ultimate reality. Her

fiction focuses on the word of revelation spoken to the protagonist that either achieves

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conversion or announces simple condemnation. Through her contemporary parables of the

ordinary, the reader encounters a religious, or at least extra-ordinary, experience-”not

orthodox Christian theology in its fullness but a single-minded revelation of human limitation

and possibility in the face of mystery” (May, The Pruning World, xxv).

The Social scene within which she wrote was that of growing civil-rights movements-

a movement that not only highlighted the differing viewpoints of black and white Southerners

but juxtaposed with these the perceptions of the Yankee activists who came south to aid the

cause. O’Connor’s characters although drawn in comic relief, still sharply illustrate

contemporary class structure and racial differences. O’Connor incorporated her social

comment into her stories rather than making public statements; she was a writer, not a

propagandist.