Flannery O'Connor's literature has been described as grotesque, Catholic, Southern, and even gothic. Her work has also been recognized for its harsh humor and criticism of the south. Much of her literature reflects the hostilities she experienced against racist southern attitudes, social structures, and southern ways of life. She was awarded three O. Henry awards for short fiction during her life as well as numerous grants and fellowships. After her death, she received a National Book Award and a National Book Critic Circle award. (Georgia Writers Hall of Fame)
O'Connor employed a descriptive style, which was always effective in evoking the feel of the spoken southern language. Her subject matter typically deals with a "conflict or a breakdown in communication between a member representing traditional southern ideas (that is strong and proud family attachments, identification with Southern history, nostalgia for the old plantation regime) and a member typifying the 'New South'" (Univ. North Carolina). O'Connor successfully tackles the "Old South" regime on it's own term, "using Southern dialect, social structures, and settings as a weapon against itself...Her critical nature, however, serves to create both a humorous and serious debate on the nature of the reforms needed to update the "Old South" (Univ. North Carolina).
According to Paul Lauter, O'Connor "wanted to push the reader to experience a sense of something beyond that ordinary, a sense of the mystery of life... She wanted to shock the reader into recognizing the distortions of modern life that we have come to consider normal: 'for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures,' she has noted in an essay" (Lauter 1935).
She wanted the reader to experience stark, unsentimental, some thing that could be called a "sense of the scared" (Lauter 1935). However, a reader need not be Southern or Catholic to appreciate O'Connor's writing style or experience the mysteries of life she often captured in her stories. The Catholicism in O'Connor's probably represented a fallen world. She also probably absorbed a sense of having "fallen from past grandeur by growing up white in the post-Civil-War South" (Lauter 1935) Her characters were not so much fallen aristocrats as poor or middle-class whites who usually did not realize what they were missing. The result is characters that are powerful, funny, devastating -- but most of all true.
O'Connor blended the supernatural and the grotesque as she wrote of those she encountered in her life. With almost every story, she was able to recreate a reality of southern life but often made the characters freaks. The freaks are the everyday people O'Connor saw but can be driven by a demonic force. According to Gilbert Muller, that O'Connor's typical freak is a "flat" character "to the extent that he is obsessed, that he is automation-like, that his compulsive gestures are mechanical" (Muller 23). In addition, O'Connor often used the Christian dogma to illustrate grotesque characters that would effect her readers.
James A, Grimshaw, Jr. notes that O'Connor's short story "A View of the Woods" defines the grotesque by Christian terms. The grand father in the story is a man drive by his pride and vanity, which condemn him. The main conflict in the story is between the symbolic spiritual view of the world and the need for material progress. The grandfather can only see the world in terms of progress attributed to him. The family represents nature as they stand in the way of progress to protect the view. The final character, Mary, is his salvation or damnation. Grimshaw explains that O' Connor exemplifies this then Mary tells the grandfather that she is Mary-fortune-Pitts. Mary is the contrast in the story as she is the image of her…
