4 - Flannery O’Connor

Summary

Flannery O’Connor’s passionate religious convictions were the central fact of her intellectual and aesthetic life, vastly outweighing in her view any of the ways her sensibility was shaped by her gender, her region, or her race. Although like the Agrarians of the preceding generation O’Connor saw the South as if not resisting the rush to an alienating, secular, and capitalist modernity, at least as not yet totally given over to it, she never sentimentalized the vocation of the subsistence farmer and did not have romantic ideas about traditionalism generally. She was as bitterly critical of the urban habit of life and of secular culture as the Agrarians were, and those characters who represented for her a modern, cosmopolitan, secular, Northern-oriented consciousness, such characters as Rayber of The Violent Bear It Away, Asbury Fox of “The Enduring Chill,” Julian of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People,” were subjected to a ruthless satire.

To say that religious issues mattered more to O’Connor than political ones did is not to say that O’Connor was blind to the political and cultural transformation of the South of her day, or that she had nothing to say about the integration struggle that was proceeding throughout the years of her career, although she never wrote about it as Warren did in Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South and Who Speaks for the Negro? or as Welty did in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is set during the period immediately after the integration of buses, and contrasts, with irony in both directions, the attitudes toward race of the progressive Julian and his racist mother.