Flannery O \'Connor Flannery O\'Connnor:

Flannery O 'Connor

Flannery O'Connnor: Of Darkness and Salvation

Flannery O'Connor's works are peppered with allusions to religion, salvation, and damnation; these are interests which arose from her own impending illness and death and the deeply-held religious convictions which prepared her to meet that event. In her work, O'Connor works with stories of horrific violence and suffering in which otherwise unsympathetic, even caricature-like, individuals face death and in so doing are freed to discover for themselves the meaning of life. One intuits that by working through violence and death in her characters and stories, the author was able to deal with her own emotions regarding the nature and meaning of suffering in the world. The problem of pain, (as C.S. Lewis once dubbed the quandry) is one of the most significant theological issues facing any theistic religion - how can a good God allow his creations to suffer and die? Flannery O'Connor's work can be seen as an extended answer to that problem. Unlike many soft-hearted modern religious apologists, O'Connor takes the hard line approach and answers this question with the rather existential suggestion that in suffering and death one is able to see clearly one's own sins and shortcomings and reach something resembling enlightenment; suffering becomes a door to grace which (for some of her characters) leads to repentance. In the works "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "Everything that Rises Must Converge," O'Connor portrays the way that death and suffering can break through congealed layers of prejudice and religious apathy to bring about startling emotional revelations and a certain grasping of salvation; in so doing, she applies religious imagery and a sophisticated secret dialog concerning the nature of salvation and the mystery of grace and life.

In both works, the primary characters are constricted and one might evcn say blinded by their prejudices. Both of the older women (the Grandmother in "A Good Man..." And the Mother in "Everything that Rises...") are preoccuppied above all with retaining their status as white women of good breeding. The Mother obsesses about the house that once belonged to their family, and recalls consistently how they are the proud descendants of slave holders. Her pride in what she understands as being the past is so great that she applies its principles to the future, and assumes that the wold has passed to some degree unchanged. It is for this reason that she offends the large woman who will eventually crack her upside the head.

The Grandmother has a similar sort of pride which displays itself in her insistence that she must be and dress like a lady. In both cases the women's rigid ideas of class are shown as literally preparing them for death. The Mother speaks of only living once, implying that death justifies dressing her part. The Grandmother actually is caught thinking to herself that she wishes that "anyone seeing her dead on the highway [to] know at once that she was a lady." [1] This pride may seem to be merely cultural, but the remainder of the scenario will show it to be the face of the sin of these characters. Both face damnation because of precisely these weaknesses. The Mother is attached and killed by a woman who looks a great deal like her in terms of costuming; the Grandmother is killed in her fancy clothes after abandonning her lady-like positioning and begging for her life. O'Connor, like Christ, portrays pride as the ultimate sin. The women are the only prideful one in the stories. Their children are also prideful, particularly the Mother's Son. Their pride brings about their downfall as well.

If pride is the sin, then the salvation is in the moment in which all pride dissolves for a moment. " an examination of her stories will soon reveal many recurrent themes: disfigurement, shallowness, pettiness, na vete, hypocrisy, and overall ugliness, badness, and meanness of character all woven into a sort of dark comedy. Almost always, some shocking act of violence acts as the catalyst by which the protagonists are forced to face their own inner poverty." [2] This moment comes for the Mother as she begins regressing tho childhood, as she becomes helpless. Perhaps more importantly in that story, it comes for the son who looses his mother, and in that moment of suffering and loss of control over her realizes that he actually loves her, moving from a position of power (mocking her and so forth) into a position of weakness where he feels lost: "A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. 'Mother!' he cried. 'Darling, sweetheart, wait!'" [3] This moment comes for the Grandmother when she has a sudden epiphany that that the Misfit and herself have a great deal in common - they are indeed the same class, which is a class that transcends race or socio-economic status, as she says: "You're one of my own children!"[4] to the Misfit. The imagery of salvation and damnation is made clear thought-out these works as taking place in the moment of greatest strain, when pain or death reduced the ego (which fears its own death) to silence while that part of the mind that is clearest and most dispassionate is able in that silence to make itself heard. Flannery o'Connor herself wrote:

The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death."[5]

The idea that this moment of death (or of great suffering and loss) one can access the truth about one's self and about God is really key to the work. Salvation is not just a matter of heaven, but a matter of having one's soul clean and ready to pass Beyond. This cleansing can come in a moment of radical grace, as in these two poems when the dying characters realize the truth and in that moment (being one with truth) are nearest to being true.

O'Connor admits the importance of the death bed herself, in an essay in which she discusses "A Good Man is Hard to Find": "The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death." [4] at the moment at which one faces death, on has the opportunity of sainthood. In "Everything that Rises must Converge," the role of martyrdom is hinted at as the boy prepares to walk with his mother and describes himself mentally as a mad man inn pursuir of "Saint Sebastian... waiting for the arrows to being piercing him." [6] Sebastian survives being shot by arrows, and so the narrator will survive being shot at by arrows and will gain experience and even possibly sainthood. Sacrificing and expecting death any moment are, after all, how the author managed to write. Kirjasto quotes O'Connor as admiring the face of her own death because of the opportunity it presents her for thought: "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself." [7]