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A garrulous grandmother and a roaming
bandit face off on a dirt road.
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A Bible salesman lures a one-legged
philosopher into a barn.
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A traveling handyman teaches a deaf woman
her first word on an old plantation.
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From her farm in rural Georgia,
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surrounded by a flock of pet birds,
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Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales
of outcasts,
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intruders and misfits staged in
the world she knew best:
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the American South.
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She published two novels,
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but is perhaps best known
for her short stories,
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which explored small-town life
with stinging language, offbeat humor,
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and delightfully unsavory scenarios.
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In her spare time O’Connor drew cartoons,
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and her writing is also
brimming with caricature.
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In her stories, a mother has a face
“as broad and innocent as a cabbage,”
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a man has as much drive as a “floor mop,”
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and one woman’s body
is shaped like “a funeral urn.”
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The names of her characters
are equally sly.
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Take the story “The Life You
Save May be Your Own,”
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where the one-handed drifter Tom Shiftlet
wanders into the lives
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of an old woman named Lucynell Crater
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and her deaf and mute daughter.
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Though Mrs Crater is self-assured,
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her isolated home is falling apart.
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At first, we may be suspicious
of Shiftlet’s motives
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when he offers to help around the house,
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but O’Connor soon reveals
the old woman to be
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just as scheming as her unexpected guest–
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and rattles the reader’s presumptions
about who has the upper hand.
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For O’Connor, no subject was off limits.
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Though she was a devout Catholic,
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she wasn’t afraid to explore
the possibility
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of pious thought and unpious behavior
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co-existing in the same person.
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In her novel The Violent Bear it Away,
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the main character grapples with the
choice to become a man of God –
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but also sets fires and commits murder.
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The book opens with the reluctant prophet
in a particularly compromising position:
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“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been
dead for only half a day
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when the boy got too drunk
to finish digging his grave.”
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This leaves a passerby to “drag the body
from the breakfast table
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where it was still sitting and bury it […]
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with enough dirt on top to keep
the dogs from digging it up.”
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Though her own politics are still debated,
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O’Connor’s fiction could also be attuned
to the racism of the South.
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In “Everything that Rises Must Converge,”
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she depicts a son raging
at his mother’s bigotry.
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But the story reveals that
he has his own blind spots
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and suggests that simply recognizing evil
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doesn’t exempt his character
from scrutiny.
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Even as O’Connor probes the most
unsavory aspects of humanity,
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she leaves the door to redemption
open a crack.
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In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,”
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she redeems an insufferable grandmother
for forgiving a hardened criminal,
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even as he closes in on her family.
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Though we might balk at the price the
woman pays for this redemption,
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we’re forced to confront the nuance
in moments
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we might otherwise consider
purely violent or evil.
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O’Connor’s mastery of the grotesque
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and her explorations of the insularity and
superstition of the South
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led her to be classified as
a Southern Gothic writer.
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But her work pushed beyond
the purely ridiculous
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and frightening characteristics
associated with the genre
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to reveal the variety and nuance
of human character.
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She knew some of this variety
was uncomfortable,
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and that her stories could be
an acquired taste –
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but she took pleasure
in challenging her readers.
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O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39,
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after the disease had mostly confined her
to her farm in Georgia for twelve years.
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During those years,
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she penned much of her most
imaginative work.
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Her ability to flit between
revulsion and revelation
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continues to draw readers to her endlessly
surprising fictional worlds.
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As her character Tom Shiftlet notes,
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the body is “like a house:
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it don’t go anywhere,
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but the spirit, lady,
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is like an automobile:
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always on the move.”