Reading Flannery O’Connor for the First Time | Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin | CWR
She gleefully maimed and killed off her characters in a million disturbing ways—and she was a devout, daily mass Catholic who read St. Thomas Aquinas in her spare time and made a pilgrimage to Lourdes.
Reading Flannery O’Connor requires a stout heart and a strong stomach.
In her short life before she died of terminal lupus, she wrote two novels and roughly two dozen short stories that continue to shock and unsettle us. With a wicked pen, she gleefully maims and kills off her characters in a million disturbing ways: they get drowned, hanged, run over by cars (twice in a row), wrapped in barbed wire and beaten to death. Her characters are prostitutes, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers, nihilists, and (worst of all for O'Connor), salesmen. But if you read her biography, she’s practically the patron saint of Catholic fiction: a devout, daily mass Catholic who read St. Thomas Aquinas in her spare time, and made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.
As readers, we wonder, “Is there something I’m missing?” How should we read O’Connor’s writing, and where is her faith in the pages of such brutal fiction?
Readers of O’Connor will notice that most of her stories follow one basic Biblical narrative: St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Again and again, she depicts an event of searing violence in which divine grace shocks a hard-hearted, wicked, or selfish person into a moment of recognition. In this terrible moment O’Connor offers her characters a choice, a flash of self-knowledge, and an encounter with God that utterly burns away their illusions.
O’Connor does this best in one of my favorite tales, titled “Good Country People,” where she tells the story of Hulga, a nihilist with a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wooden leg.
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