Dresden Technical University

Mary Flannery O’Connor
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find“

 by

Silke-Katrin Kunze

TABLE of CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION 4

MARY FLANNERY O’CONNOR

BODY 7

“A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND“

GENERAL FACTS

CONTENT 8

CONCLUSION 15

REMARKS

POINT-OF-VIEW SHIFT 17

ENDING 18

BIBLIOGRAPHY 19

Introduction

Mary Flannery O’Connor

Cursae vitae¹: Mary Flannery O’Connor, American short story writer, novelist and essayist, born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, was by birth and faith a Roman Catholic. As the only child of orthodox Roman Catholics from prominent Georgia families she attented local schools in Savannah before entering the public Peabody high school in Milledgeville, where the family moved in 1938 after her father developed lupus, an incurable skin tuberculosis that makes clinical treatment necessary. With 16 she entered the nearby Georgia State College for Women, majored in social sciences and graduated in 1945. In the spare time Miss O’Connor not only wrote for school publications, but also presented linoleum block and woodcut cartoons. After having enrolled in the graduate writing program at Iowa State University, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree, which was earned in creative writing in 1947 with six stories. Her stories were easily published, occasionally by popular magazines, but more often by prestigious literary journals. A Flannery O’Connor story is always the slowly paced uncovering of a series of unusual people and circumstances. Her independent writer’s life ended abruptly at the age of 25 when she suffered the first attack of lupus. From that time on she lived with her mother. There she maintained a steady if slow writing pace. Her production has been severely limited in quantity. Miss O’Connor defined fiction as “the concrete expression of mystery - mystery that is lived.“ Flannery was a mystery fan, and what she wrote about might be comprehended by the word mystery. “There are two qualities that make fiction,“ she was fond of saying: “One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of experience that surrounds you.“ For her, mystery was centered upon the three basic theological doctrines of the Church: Fall, Redemption, Judgment. She realized that a character makes itself known in extreme situations and used Georgia as the surface to express her mystery. She confronted life’s mystery with the extraordinary capacity for laughter.²

In all her writing Flannery O’Connor has certain preoccupations that seem almost obsessional. Her themes, as opposed to her language, derive less from her region than religion. A few simple images recur so strikingly that every reader notices them: color- ful shirts, suns, treelines. Whereas the sun reflects impending light or enlightenment, the treeline suggests a delineation between the known and unknown. The sudden consciousness of the tree-line on the part of the character foreshadows an impending crisis. Altogether do half a dozen important themes run through all Miss O’Connor’s work. Fall and redemption; nature and grace; innocence versus evil, innocence victimized by evil - every one of her stories, revolves around these traditional Christian themes.³ The South was her great metaphor. It provided her with a language and social fabric. The basis of Miss O’Connor’s vision, the rational world, a world man can perceive through human reason - has replaced the spiritual world, the Body of Christ which can only be perceived through Grace and Mercy of God. She shows the world as it is as a way of emphasizing the need to see beyond the world.⁴

Flannery skillfully infused her fiction with local color, regional dialect, and rich comic detail of her southern milieu. The settings of her stories and novels are either Geogia or Tennessee. Only two of her stories are set outside the South. Where it is compared to the industrialized and intellectual North, it in general turns out as the more human habitat. “The image of the South is so strong in us that it is a force which has to be encountered and engaged, and it is when this is a true engagement that its meaning will lead outward to universal human interest.“ Present and past do not merge in her work but confront each other. Common within the southern landscape are everyday confrontations, such as a family trip being filled with horror. Essentially, O’Connor’s subject is acceptance, the point at which her sinners become aware of their awful unavoidability of Grace. Reading O’Connor’s tales, one feels that grace simply makes salvation possible.⁵

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1 see: Sharon R. Gunton, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 1982, pp. 254-279.
2 see: Carolyn Riley, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 1973, pp. 253-259.
3 see: Dedria Bryfonski, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 1979, pp. 364-371.
4 see: Carolyn Riley, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 1976, pp. 375-382.
5 see: Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald, eds., Short Story Criticism, 1988, pp. 333-371.