FLANNERY O'CONNOR_ INTRO_ AND "A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND"

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

SAVANNAH -GEORGIA-1925 / 1964

BIOPIC

BIOPIC

Flannery O’Connor, in full Mary Flannery O’Connor, (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.—died August 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia), American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, concern the relationship between the individual and God.

O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised.

After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952; film 1979), explores, in O’Connor’s own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.

a grotesque cast of itinerant loners, false prophets, and displaced persons on the make.

Disabled for more than a decade by the lupus erythematosus she inherited from her father, which eventually proved fatal, O’Connor lived modestly, writing and raising peafowl on her mother’s farm at Milledgeville

DEVOUT CATHOLICISM VS

"STARTLING ACTS OF VIOLENCE, UNSYMPATHETIC, OFTEN DEPRAVED CHARACTERS DEPICTED IN HER STORIES

With the publication of further short stories, first collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection’s eponymous story became possibly her best-known work. In it O’Connor created an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit...

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

Southern Gothic

A Historical Perspective of the Genre Southern Gothic: SOUTHERN literature became widely popular American literary genre during the 20th century. It was the historical backdrop of the post-Civil War South that made it a perfect landscape for the writers to explore dark and brooding Gothic themes. The Civil War was a grotesque experience for the people of the South. That’s why Gothic literature of the South is replete with elements of that grotesqueness.

The writers of this genre highlighted the South’s history of slavery, racism, violence, and the fear of the outside world. Their main purpose was to expose the prevailing social issues and explore the question of moral integrity.

LITERARY STYLE SOUTHERN GOTHIC

Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo / voodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

ANALYSING THE TITLE

The search for goodness. Paraphrasing the critic Kessler, it is difficult to find a good man because that man cannot be defined.

AS IF

The reiterative use in the story of "as if" indicates that the narrator rejects the part of omniscient narrator,as well as the impossibility of being able to reflect the physical and psychological reality of the world surrounding her, and therein, the impossibility of defining it. The reader shares this uncertainty from the title.

The title also contributes to a dichotomy that will pervade the story

The secular and the divine: the search for moral ethos, on the one hand / reminiscent of a popular song, on the other.

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

June Start: the foregone stardust of Hollywood's glittering world turned into vulgarity and triteness

THE CHARACTERS NAMES ARE PART OF THAT DICHOTOMY OF THE OLD AND THE NEW

John Wesley (an English cleric from the 18th century, known as the leader of a revival movement in the Church of England known as methodism

The grandmother's vision of goodness is flawed by her materialistic approach. She seems to stand as a moral bastion of the values of the Old South, but she turns out to be a really flawed egotistical character

The good man is measured in terms of his possessions.

"Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched" (Red Sam said)

CHARACTERISTICS OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S PROSE

THE GROTESQUE

SATIRE

CARICATURIZATION

FORESHADOWING

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” ― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Origins of the word "grotesque"

The word "grotesque" goes back to the discoveries made in a Roman villa in the 15th century that referred to an overlapping of natural and animal motifs. The discovery was made in a "grotto," therein, the word "grotesque." (See Wolfgang Kayser: "The Grotesque in Art and Literature"

"We smile at the deformations but are appalled by the horrible and monstrous elements as such. The basic feeling.. .is one of surprise and horror, an agonizing fear in the presence of a world which breaks apart and remains inaccessible. (Kayser, 30"The Grotesque in Art and Literature")

Nameless characters

THE GRANDMOTHER THE CHILDREN'S MOTHER

CARICATURIZATION

"A young woman in slacks,whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears"

FORESHADOWING

Anticipation of future events through disseminated clues in the narrative

"She has her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus." (The grandmother)

"In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady"

Foreshadowing

"They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it"

"It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile"

TRAGICOMIC ETHOS

The materialization of certain moral attitudes of human nature

The Grandmother triggers the tragedy through her egotistical interests

The search for the hiddden panel (literal: the plantation house the grandmother wants to find and which provokes their deviation from the main road) / also metaphoric: the moral values that the characters seem to advocate, specifically those of the grandmother, lack soundness

THE MISFIT VS THE GRANDMOTHER

MESSIANIC FIGURE?

SURROGATE SON

HE WEARS BAILEY'S PARROT SHIRT AT THE END OF THE STORY

EPIPHANIC MOMENT

THE MISFIT

"They had the papers on me."

"Turn to the right, it was a wall."

"...Jesus thrown everything off balance."

"It is no real pleasure in life" (says the Misfit)