Flannery O’Connor: Vulnerability and Hope
Catholics are proud of Flannery O’Connor, but we don’t always know what to do with her. She’s just too much: too violent, too strange, too bleak. Often, we treat her as a mascot: she proves that Catholics can write great literature, even in the modern era. But when we read her fiction we are left wondering: “Where is redemption in O’Connor? Where is hope?”
If that is you, don’t lose heart. Hope is perhaps O’Connor’s great contribution to American literature. But she believes that hope is not to be found where we expect it. Hope is a theological virtue, which means that it comes to us through the grace of God. It cannot be seized or willed; it must first be given, and it usually comes through suffering. To see where O’Connor found hope, as well as what she contributes to the American imagination, it is worth first understanding how American literature and culture have imagined its major themes – individualism, society, and freedom.
The dominant strain of the American imagination is Protestant and individualist. Its protagonists reject tradition, history, and society, seeing them as sources of ignorance and oppression. Instead, they find freedom and goodness welling up from their individual consciences. Mark Twain articulates this vision in one of the great novels of American self-reliant individualism, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The protagonist, Huck Finn, is a frontier boy who runs away from his abusive father and the dullness of small-town life and sails down the Mississippi River with his friend Jim, an escaped slave. Huck and Jim enjoy the freedom that they find on the river, living by hunting, fishing, and enjoying untouched nature. When they visit towns on the shore, however, they find a society full of hucksters and con artists. Community and the past are sources of ignorance, superstition, and fraud, from which Huck must free himself; like many great American novels, Huckleberry Finn accepts Emerson’s statement that “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
Huck finds superstition and oppression in society; he finds truth by reaching deep within himself. He has been taught that slavery is right and that he is committing theft by helping Jim to escape, but his heart tells him that his friend deserves his loyalty. In the end, he trusts his conscience over his upbringing and helps set Jim free. Morality, then, depends on Huck’s inner goodness: Huck rejects what he has been taught by his elders and discovers the moral truth that he knows in his heart. After freeing Jim, Huck sets out for the frontier so that he can live by his own values rather than those of society. The book ends with his resolution to “light out of for the Territory ahead of the rest” so that he can stay one step the friendly relatives who want to “sivilize” him. On the frontier, away from society, he is free to live the life that he chooses.
In the 19th century, Americans saw the frontier as a place where we could escape the strictures of society and define our own lives. Later, new spaces of freedom replaced the frontier: cities, the suburbs, and the virtual world of the internet. To this day, stories of freedom and self-determination retain immense power in American culture. They show up in our popular culture, our politics, and our everyday conversations. When someone speaks of finding “my truth,” he is channeling Emerson, Twain, Whitman, and other great 19th Century American writers. When we speak of America as a place where you can become anything you want, we are tapping into the same strain of self-determination. Liberals and conservatives both draw on Twain’s vision of an innate desire for self-determination. George W. Bush expressed one version of this vision when he declared that “the desire for freedom resides in every human heart.” Transgender ideology depends on the conviction that I, only I, can decide my identity. And our popular culture teaches us to find truth by searching within ourselves: if you want to blow up the Death Star, you first need to “trust your feelings.”
O’Connor’s protagonists, too, seek, to define their own lives. In most of her stories they fail horribly. But through those failures she charts the limits of American self-definition—and the hope, love, and Grace that lie on the far side. Her stories make human failure, embodiment, and interdependence—the very things that the mainstream American imagination flees—into the ground for hope.
O’Connor’s story, “Good Country People,” features just such an Emersonian protagonist. The story introduces Hulga Hopewell, a young woman with a Ph.D. in philosophy and a conviction that life is meaningless. Because she has a bad heart and an artificial leg (the legacy of a childhood accident), Hulga lives on a farm with her conventional, middle-class mother. Hulga’s mother worries that her daughter cannot enjoy an ordinary life: “It tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times.” But Hulga has no desire for an ordinary life: she thinks that she achieves her highest freedom and dignity by recognizing life’s meaninglessness and refusing to accept conventional illusions. She has even tried literally to define herself: her mother named her “Joy,” but she changed her name to Hulga, the ugliest name she could imagine. Hulga’s name symbolizes her entire character: because beauty is conventional and false, she will embrace ugliness to be true to herself.
One day, a young man named Manley Pointer comes to the door to sell Bibles. He oozes evangelical sincerity and good-neighborliness; everyone except Hulga describes him as “good country people.” He charms Hulga’s mother so thoroughly that Hulga sees him as a challenge: she decides to prove the emptiness of his faith by seducing him. In a satirical sequence that only O’Connor could have written, Hulga musters all the charms available to a reclusive academic and finally brings Pointer up to the family hayloft. Pointer wants her to say that she loves him; she tries to resist, telling him that she has too much self-respect to indulge in illusions like love. But eventually, she gives in. He tells her to prove her love. “How?” she asks, and he says something that shocks her to her core: “Show me where your wooden leg joins on.”
Hulga’s wooden leg, he says, is “what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.” Here, her game falters. She is no longer playing with him; she realizes that “with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom” he has “touched the truth about her.” He has understood that her leg has made her different from everyone else. Her mother was right that she has been excluded from normal society and that she would always be dependent on others. Her conviction that the world is meaningless, and that she sees through it, made her special and made her restrictions less restricting. As Pointer sees this, she begins to fall in love with him.
O’Connor throws us one more big twist, but I’ll let you read the story to find out what it is. Nevertheless, I have said enough to describe the story’s core thematic movement. This story is a metaphysical seduction. There is no sex, but Manley Pointer steals Hulga’s innocence in a much deeper way: he steals her illusions about herself. He shows her that her freedom, self-definition, and insight, are all forms of self-defense. The story cruelly sweeps aside Hulga’s illusions—but are we sorry that she has lost her innocence? Her desire to define her own life had isolated her from her mother, from the people around her, and having a place in the world. Bereft, she is now open to the possibility of love.
Like Hulga Hopewell, many O’Connor protagonists see their dreams of autonomy turn out to be illusions. But what makes O’Connor different from tragic American writers like Melville or Fitzgerald is that the destruction of those illusions paves the way for a hint of Grace. Grace in O’Connor is violent and grotesque because God tries to save characters from a damnation that looks—to them—like independence and self-definition. In O’Connor stories, Grace can appear as a burning farm or a run-in with a circus freak. In her most famous story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an old woman is shot to death by a madman. But before she dies, she is able to make a single act of love—the first truly free act that she makes in her life—which prompts her killer to give her an immortal eulogy: “She would of been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Death frees the old woman from the trap that she had made of her own life and makes it possible for her to go to her Father.
Likewise, O’Connor frees American fiction from the trap it imposed on itself by Americans’ desire for self-determination. In her stories, the freedoms that American culture most cherishes—intellectual independence, commercial accomplishment, rugged self-reliance—turn out to be illusions. Her protagonists are more vulnerable, fragile, and dependent than they thought. But in reckoning with their vulnerability they are thrown open to the grace of God.
O’Connor knew what she wrote about. She was born in Georgia in 1925; in her early twenties she left her home to study fiction, then moved to New York City to write. She had obvious talent, caught the attention of prominent intellectuals, and was launched on a promising career. Then, when she was twenty-seven, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disorder that had killed her father and was still little understood. The disease would kill her at age 39; while she lived, she was often in excruciating pain. She could walk only with crutches, and she was forced to move back home to her family farm in rural Georgia so that her mother could care for her. The autobiographical overtones of “Good Country People” are obvious: O’Connor, like Hulga, was an intellectual who glimpsed the world of learning and culture when she was young and then had it taken from her. Her body confined her, and her pain reminded her every day that she would die. But her return to Georgia produced an imaginative revolution and stories that have no parallel in American literature.
O’Connor’s faith, and her experience with lupus, taught her that human freedom, community, and dependence are interconnected. Our bodies make us dependent. We begin as children, dependent on our parents; if we live long enough to grow old, each of us comes to depend on our children and communities. Between childhood and old age, we can sometimes pretend to be independent, but it is always an illusion. Illness, violence, accident, or want, can remind us that we need the love and mercy of other people. O’Connor’s illness spared her the illusion of self-determination. But—and here is the key Catholic insight—it is good that we should be prevented from pure independence. Independence isolates us, and it is not good that man should be alone. O’Connor’s faith made it possible for her to see the American desire to live life on one’s own terms as form of isolation, and to see suffering and family ties as sources of genuine freedom. It is a strange working of grace, and it took a genius and a woman of faith to see it.