Flannery O'Connor
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Let's face it. If you're looking for some light summer reading about happy, bubbly characters who Look-On-The-Sunny-Side-Of-Life and have a Life-Is-Beautiful-View-Of-The-World, you might not want to dip into the works of Mary Flannery O'Connor.
Flannery's stories range from the sardonic - where a traveling Bible salesman steals the prosthetic leg of a lady who holds a Ph. D. in philosophy - to the distressing and even horrifying - where an entire vacationing family is murdered on the roadside by a mentally-deranged escaped convict.
Flannery set most of her stories in the American South. Those with a more northerly locale still feature Southerners who nevertheless remained very much part of their culture.
The nature of Flannery's stories virtually guaranteed they would be disavowed by a good chunk of the Scions of Dixie. Regional stories - as author Edna Ferber pointed out - are rarely popular with the people of the locale unless all descriptions of them and their background are sweetness and light. Although Flannery's characters were fictitious it was inevitable that her neighbors might wonder if they or their family might be serving as character prototypes1.
Footnote
Although it has been common that novels include disclaimers like "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance of the characters with anyone living or dead is purely coincidental", the truth is that authors often model their characters from people they know. Ernest Hemingway's first real novel The Sun Also Rises was in fact a roman à clef where every character was based on a close personal acquaintance of Ernest. Later his publishers specifically wrote Ernest that his novel To Have and Have Not clearly libeled the American author John Dos Passos and they would need to have a firm disclaimer before publication.
Naturally individuals who served as the literary models are often quite chaffed, and Ernest's tendency to craft his characters out of his personal circle cost him a number of friends. Ernest wasn't unique. The entire family of a young Chicagoan named William "Studs" Cunningham were extremely irritated, not only because William was clearly a model for the main protagonist in James Farrell's once famous novel Studs Lonigan, but because the whole Lonigan family was clearly fashioned after the Cunninghams as well. Jim didn't even change their first names.
Such disclaimers seem to be appearing less often in more recent works. After all when your characters are people three feet tall with furry feet or kids who get transported from World War II era England to an enchanted land inhabited with talking animals, elfs (sic), dwarfs (sic), and an evil queen who keeps the land in perpetual winter without Christmas, it's pretty clear that any resemblance with anyone living or dead is indeed purely coincidental.
Some critics have pointed out that you can't really call Flannery a realistic writer, and Flannery herself stated that her writing was certainly not realistic in picturing everyday experiences of people in the South. In fact her stories are usually described as "Southern Gothic". For those who don't want to look it up, "Gothic" as a literature genre refers to stories where people find themselves in strange and often scary situations, often of a supernatural character.
Flannery's stories don't involve the supernatural but the rest of the definition is certainly apt. She might start her stories in perfectly ordinary settings but the characters, whether willingly or not, end up in decidedly strange situations. To again cite the first story alluded to - "Good Country People" - there aren't many people who will legally change their name just to irritate their mother2 and who find themselves thinking about running off with a stranger who finds it amusing to steal things like false legs and glass eyeballs.
Footnote
The name of the protagonist was Joy Hopewell who in college legally changed her name to Hulga. However we have to admit "Hulga Hopewell" does have kind of a ring to it.
The initial thought might be that the name is a creation of Flannery, possibly a blend of "Helga" and "Ugly". However, the name was used for a character in Ever the Winds Blow by Elliott Merrick in 1936. So we suspect that there have been some real Hulgas.
And yes, although not a common name there have been some Hulgas around with the 1930's Census listing about 70. This declined to 46 in 1940. So using this two point extrapolation, we estimate that Hugla as a given name vanished around 1972.
"Hulga" is also a surname, and although not a very common one, it would be expected to last as long as the Hulga line produced at least one male heir. And the indications are that they are hanging on. In 1880 100% of the Hulga family were living in Tin Smith, Wisconsin and by 1910, they had branched out to where out of the total of four people sporting the Hulga surname, three were from New Jersey. By 1940, there were four Hulgas, all living in Erie, New York.
But don't despair! There will always be a Hulga as it is the common name for Dolichos biflorus, a tropical legume chiefly cultivated in India.
And the other story we mentioned - "A Good Man is Hard to Find" - starts off with a family going on vacation but has one of the more unnerving endings in Flannery's works (rivaled perhaps by that of "A View of the Woods"). But we have to admit that the story might be considered a little more realistic today than when it was written. In 1953, pointless mass murder as a matter of course was rare and only later did it become the near daily occurrence that it is today3.
Footnote
Ironically there is one criticism that the modern readers might levy on "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in that it relies on the stereotype of the insane inmate who escapes his confinement to wreak havoc on the population. True, the inmate - called "The Misfit" in the story - escaped from a prison, not a hospital, but he is clearly deranged.
The storyline of the "escaped crazy man" is well-known to fans of the early horror-anthology television shows and has had a surprising longevity. Although deplored by mental health professionals, these plots still crop up from time to time.
Flannery's stories are pretty much meant to be taken at face value and she sometimes was flabbergasted at the tortuous interpretations college professors and their students would sometimes give to what she thought was a straightforward plot. If she put an individual in a story, the presence was to be taken literally and was not to be interpreted as some imagined fantasy in the mind of another character. Never hesitant about speaking her mind, she was sometimes rather curt when she responded to a reader whose interpretation she felt was drifting too far out to sea.
Flannery was born in 1925 in Georgia and studied writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her early works earned her a spot at the famous writers colony, Yaddo, in Sarasota Springs, New York. However, she left after a brief time and lived in Connecticut and New York as good places for aspring writers.
However, as a teenager Flannery had been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (usually just called lupus), an autoimmune disorder where the antibodies attack healthy cells. At the time it was a dire diagnosis (her father died of the disease) and few victims lived more than a few years. However, treatment arrested Flannery's condition longer than expected although she eventually succumbed to the disease in 1964 at aged 39.
In New York it became evident that Flannery would have trouble managing on her own and she soon returned to the family farm in Georgia which her mom had continued run. She was not able to handle many heavy chores, but she did raise birds, particularly peacocks.
On the farm Flannery continued to write and quickly developed a solid reputation particularly for her short stories. But due to her short life she published only two collections of short stories and two novels.
Although not evident to the casual reader, Flannery's religous views shaped her writings as her letters make clear. The fact that few of her characters have particularly admirable qualities is a reflection on the philosophy that everyone has failings which can't be overcome by human effort.
Her own religious views were stoutly Roman Catholic. In what may have been a reference to the Catholic doctrine that once the host is elevated it becomes the literal Body of Christ, when a dinner companion remarked that the communion wafer was a symbol of the Holy Ghost and a pretty good symbol, Flannery replied, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."
Most of the overtly or outwardly religious characters in her stories are the Protestants who were far more numerous where she lived than her fellow Catholics. We must admit such characters are not often flatteringly portrayed (ironically Flannery thought Protestant theologians were better at their jobs than were the Catholics). Not that Flannery was uncritical of her own religion, particularly its outward trappings. She mentioned her irritation of enduring lengthy blessings before meals "while the dinner gets cold."
Thomas Merton and John Howard Griffin
They never met her.
Although he lived only a short distance off, Flannery never met Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk who became a well-known author and anti-war activist. Tom, though, did ask his publisher (who was also Flannery's) to give Flannery a signed copy of one his books, a gift that she appreciated. Nor did she meet John Howard Griffin and seemed to doubt the value of his experiment of darkening his skin and traveling as an African America through the severely segregated South. She did say she thought he was an interesting man, "but I wouldn't have liked him," she added4.
Footnote
We do wonder what Flannery's opinion would been had she and John actually met. John had in fact missed an opportunity to visit her when he was traveling through the South. While waiting for his photographer, he stopped at the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia. A young English professor was also there and asked him if he wanted to go and visit with Flannery the next day. John said since he only had a few hours to spare, he felt he should stay at the monastery.
Flannery had also read John's novel, The Devil Rides Outside (1952), which in general she didn't like.
References and Further Reading
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, Brad Gooch, Little, Brown and Company, 2009.
Flannery O'Connor: A Life, Jean Cash, University of Tennessee Press, 2004.
"Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)",Sarah Gordon New Georgia Encyclopedia, Jun 10, 2002 (Revised: November 1, 2019).
1880 United States Census.
1910 United States Census.
1930 United States Census.
1940 United States Census.
The Complete Stories, Flannery O'Connor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness, Otto Wahl, Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Ever the Winds Blow Hardcover, Elliott Merrick, Charles Schribner's Sons, 1936.
"Writers, Relatives Look Anew at James Farrell's 'Studs Lonigan'", John Blades, Chicago Tribune, October 3, 1996.
"I Am in a State of Shock", Shaun Usher, Letter of Note, August 16, 2012.
A Peculiar Treasure, Edna Ferber, Doubleday, 1939.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Ralph Wood, Erdman's Publishing, 2004.
"Stranger Than Paradise", Joy Williams, The New York Times Book Review, February 26, 2009.
"The Idolatry of the Marketplace: Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton", John P. Collins, Thomas Merton Center.
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, Houghton Mifflin, 1961.