HER RELIGION IN STORIES

Flannery O’Connor

FAMOUS WORKS

Wise Blood (1952)- first novel

The Violent Bear it Away (1960)- her second, and

final novel.

A Good Man is Hard to Find, and other stories

(1955)- book of short stories

Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1971)-

book of short stories released after her death.

HER RELIGION

Flannery was a devout Catholic, and her religion greatly influenced her outlook on life and her work.

BELIEFS

With the exception of a number of the early

stories, O'Connor consistently produced fiction

having an implicit, if not a totally explicit,

religious world view as an integral element of

each work.

WRITINGS

In numerous articles and letters to her friends,

O'Connor stressed the need for the Catholic writer to

make fiction "according to its nature . . . by grounding

it in concrete observable reality" because when the

Catholic writer "closes his own eyes and tries to see

with the eyes of the Church, the result is another

addition to that large body of pious trash for which

we have so long been famous." As she noted in one

article, "When people have told me that because I am

a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply,

ruefully, that because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford

to be less than an artist

COMMENTS

"They didn't want to hear what I said and

when they heard it they didn't want to believe it

and so they changed it. I also told them that the

average Catholic reader was a Militant Moron

but they didn't quote that naturally."

CHRISTIAN CONCERNS

O'Connor was, throughout her writing career,

convinced that the majority of her audience did

not share her basic viewpoint and was, if not

openly hostile to it, at best indifferent. In order

to reach such an audience, O'Connor felt that

she had to make the basic distortions of a world

separated from the original, divine plan "appear

as distortions to an audience which is used to

seeing them as natural." This she accomplished

by resorting to the grotesque in her fiction.

DOCTRINEWithout becoming totally bogged down in the

Catholic doctrine of grace (a good Catholic

dictionary will list at least ten to fifteen entries

dealing with the subject), one should be aware

of what O'Connor means when she uses the

term in connection with her stories. Loosely

defined, Illuminating Grace (the type of grace

most frequently used by O'Connor in her

stories) may be described as a gift, freely given

by God, which is designed to enlighten the

minds of people and help them toward eternal

life.

COMIC NOVEL

Even though O'Connor's vision was essentially

religious, she chose to present it from a

primarily comic or grotesque perspective. In a

note to the second edition of Wise Blood, her

first novel, O'Connor wrote, "It is a comic novel

about a Christian malgré lui [in spite of himself],

and as such, very serious, for all comic novels

that are any good must be about matters of life

and death." Several friends have verified

O'Connor's problem with public readings of her

stories.

SIN

For individuals incapable of seeing humanity as a group of

struggling manikins operating against a backdrop of eternal

purpose, many of O'Connor's stories appear to be filled with

meaningless violence. Even those characters who are granted a

moment of grace or experience an epiphanal vision do so only

at the cost of having their self-images, if not themselves,

destroyed. In a very real sense, all of O'Connor's characters

have inherited the Original Sin of Adam, and all are equally

guilty.