FREE ESSAY ON FLANNERY O'CONNOR: THEMES

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: THEMES

Flannery O'Connor's Themes: Alienation, True Country, and the Demonic
O'Connor uses many themes throughout all of her works. Her most criticized themes are
alienation, true country life, and the demonic. Throughout the short stories of "A Good
Man is Hard to Find", "Everything That Rises Must Converge", "Good Country People", "The
Life you Save Might be your Own", "The Geranium", "A Circle in the Fire", and "The River"
O'Connor speaks of her heritage and her religious faults. "Miss O'Connor created
characters and their dramatic oppositions by separating, exaggerating, and polarizing
elements in herself" (Hyman 359). O'Connor could be considered a writer of "apocalyptic
violence, a grotesque vision, and vulgarity" (Hyman 358). Her themes are a reflection of
her own life, and her charactes are a reflection herself. She shows the reader her life
in a religious, alienated south. O'Connor uses many themes throughout her works; the most
powerful of her themes are alienation, true country, and the demonic.
Alienation of the classes is strong throughout most of O'Connor's works. Racism is not
the only alienation O'Connor uses, but she also alienates against physical deformities.
Hulga, who is alienated by her mother, in "Good Country People" is a prime example of
O'Connor's reflection of her own deformity. In the story Hulga has a wooden leg by which
O'Connor reflects her own handicap, by the disease disseminated lupus, of having to use
crutches to walk. Mrs. Hopewell, Hulga's mother, thinks of people as "classes and kinds"
showing her naive southern nature (Paulson 50). In "The Life you Save Might be your Own"
Mr. Shiftlet, who has one arm, runs off and leaves Lucynell, a mentally challenged girl
isolated from society, at a gas station by herself. This story shows how Shiftlet was
alienated against and forced to become a drifter, who stumbles upon the isolated
Lucynell. Julian in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is strongly against alienation
of blacks, but with a twist of irony he is alienated from his own mother, who is a naive
southern woman. In the end of the story Julian's mother feels alienated from her son when
she is confronted by her black double. In O'Connor's short stories she "condemns" the
white peoples relationship to the black race as "one-sided and narcissistic" (Paulson
72).
O'Connor could be considered a local color writer, in that she writes about the true
southern country life. "These families of tenant farmers usually include a man who is
stupid, incompetent, and malevolent; a wife with an eye for defaults upon her children;
and two or more mindless and voracious children" (Hyman 350). In "Good Country People"
Mrs. Hopewell is the stereotypical lady that Hyman talked of, finding faults in her
children, Hulga, and so quick to judge others by their outward appearance. In "The Life
you Save Might be your Own" O'Connor shows the barren landscape of the countryside and
the kind of people who dwells among it. In the story Lucynell's mother takes care of
herself and daughter with no help from any male figures, until Mr. Shiftlet shows up.
This shows O'Connor's true country life, which is quite contradictory to the common man
of the house stereotype of southern life. Another example of this contradiction is "A
Circle in the Fire" in which the main character, Mrs. Caldwell, runs a prosperous farm.
O'Connor's true country can be summed up with a quote from Hawkes "O'Connor committing
herself creatively to the antics of soulless characters who leer, or bicker, or stare at
obscenities on walls, or maim each other on a brilliant but barren earth" (398).
These characters roaming O'Connor's true country are evil and demonic, and what Walter
Allen called "God-intoxicated"(Hyman 352). O'Connor's short stories, with devilry as a
theme, base around a central character, who later in the story has an encounter with some
sort of a demonic character which ends in tragedy. In "The River" the central character
is a young boy named Bevel, who later returns to where he was baptized to find Jesus. Mr.
Paradise, an atheist, tries to stop him, Bevel flees, from what he thought was an ancient
water monster, underwater drowning to death. In "Good Country People" Hulga plans to
seduce a young naive Bible salesman. She coaxes him up to a hayloft, the young Bible
salesman transforms into the seducer and gets Hulga to remove her wooden leg along with
her dignity. In an ironic twist, that is a trademark of O'Connor's short stories, Hulga's
thinking she was the predator turned into the prey with an opening of the salesman's
briefcase revealing a hollowed out Bible filled with whiskey, pornographic playing cards,
and other fake limbs. Hulga's wooden leg and her dignity belong now and forever to a
demonic Bible salesman. This is a projection of O'Connor's own self, surviving through a
test with the Devil. O'Connor's most famous and demonic character of all her short
stories is the Misfit in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The Misfit in the beginning of the
story is a heathen, when in fact he is quite the intellectual with strong views on
religion and society. The Misfit and the grandmother have an intellectual war with the
grandmother on the side of God and the Misfit preaching "from a different pulpit,
Satanism" (Hyman 353). The grandmother, having won the battle of wits, reaches out to the
Misfit in a Christ-like manner to forgive him. "The Misfit recoils in horror, aware that
the grandmother has opened herself to the Christian mysteries and therefore is
threatening, if not totally undoing, his life founded on the impossibility of knowing
Christ" (Brinkmeyer 161). The Misfit could not believe in something he has never seen
before, and O'Connor uses these demonic characters to vent her own religious doubts.
O'Connor uses many themes throughout her works, the most powerful being alienation, true
country, and the demonic. Her short stories reflect her society in the alienated,
religious, South. Although a devote Catholic, O'Connor had an immense intellectual
background, which refused her to be a gentile, naive, doubtless, Southern woman like so
many in her time, and it showed in her short stories. "She could put everything about a
character into a single look, everything she had and knew into a single story. She knew
people with the finality with which she claimed to know the distance from hell to heaven"
(Friedman 60). Throughout her life O'Connor encountered face to face the themes she dealt
with in all her short stories. Living in an alienated society O'Connor purged herself of
her heritage by writing such stories as "Good Country People," "The Life You Save Might
be Your Own," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge." O'Connor tired of the
stereotypical Southern life she brought out the truth in the stories "A Circle in the
Fire," "Good Country People," and "The Life you Save Might be your Own." O'Connor when
she doubted her faith, wrote "The River," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "Good Country
People" to cleanse herself through her writings. O'Connor in her time did what other
writers tried. She dealt with the "decay" in society in a truthful yet painful way
(Spivey 202). 
Bibliography
Works Cited
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana 
State UP, 1989.
Friedman, Melvin J., and Beverly Lyon Clark. Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor.
Boston:
G.K. Hall and Co., 1985. 60-61.
Hawkes, John. "Flannery O'Connor's Devil." Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 395-407.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "Flannery O'Connor." American Writers.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New York: 
Noonday Press, 1971. 117-134.
---. "A Circle in the Fire" 175-194.
---. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" 405-421.
---. "The Geranium" 3-15.
---. "Good Country People" 271-292.
---. "The Life You Save Might be Your Own" 145-157.
---. "The River" 157-175.
Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. Flannery O'Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Spivey, Ted R. "Flannery O'Connor's View of God and Man." Studies in Short Fiction 1
(1964): 200-06.