As always, they are of my own composition unless noted specifically otherwise.
Entry the First:
Unveiled by Violence
An essay on Flannery O'Connor
Some are shot, others merely
shocked, yet all are in some manner struck – given the opportunity of grace by
the vehicle of violence. This is
the fate of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, several of whom possess a common
trait: namely, the inability to see the truth about themselves (and,
subsequently, of others). In
response to this trait, O’Connor uses violence to tear off the veil of
self-deception and open the avenue for her characters to gain truth and,
ultimately, grace. O’Connor moves
her characters from a position in which they think they know who they are (but are, in fact, overlooking or
denying some significant aspect of their own character) to a state where they
are shown the true condition of their souls and are given two things: grace,
and the choice of what to do with it.
Using violence in this way, O’Connor shifts her characters out of their
persistent and often willful blindness, preparing them to receive grace by revealing
to them both what they are, and, just as importantly, what they are not. Violence in this sense returns
O’Connor’s characters to the “reality” of who they are, thus readying them for
the moment where they must decide who they will become (O’Connor 160). By turning their perceptions of the
world upside down and showing them what they did not want to see, O’Connor
makes it possible for her characters to change.
In the case of Mrs. Turpin from
Revelation, for instance, violence
appears in the form of young Mary Grace.
The girl attacks Mrs. Turpin, injuring her both physically and
spiritually. In particular, her
vindictive statement – “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” –
makes the fundamental difference in changing Mrs. Turpin’s character (O’Connor
171). The intangible, spiritual
violence of Mary Grace’s assessment hits Mrs. Turpin more forcefully than the book
that strikes her head. The sting
of having to face truth sends the self-righteous woman reeling, though only for
a short time. Soon enough, her
spiritual “injury” gives Mrs. Turpin a chance to heal; by exposing to her the
broken, sinful side of her own nature, the violence of Mary Grace’s assault affords
Mrs. Turpin the opportunity to be cleansed. Subsequently, the old “wart hog” realizes that what she has
received by the hand of violence is, in fact, the voice of truth – painful, but
real (O’Connor 171).
In like manner Joy, from Good Country People, becomes aware of
her true self only when she is wronged and wounded. When Manly Pointer, the con-man, strips her body of its
false leg and glasses, he effectively strips her mind as well, forcing Joy out of
her spiritually crippled sate of willful blindness. His violent action removes what prevented her from
recognizing her own flaws, and his theft forces her to see the goodness that
she had already allowed to be stolen.
O’Connor, taking Joy’s perspective, writes that Pointer, “with an
instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her” (O’Connor
144). But it is more the violence
he enacts than Pointer himself that touches her, wounds her, heals her. Or, rather, has the potential to heal
her – the choice to accept or reject grace still lies solely with Joy. Nevertheless, by absconding with her
leg, which she “took care of…as someone else would his soul,” Pointer manifests
to his victim her own interior helplessness (O’Connor 144). And only once she knows the truth, only
once she sees how her learning has made her foolish and how her confession of atheistic
nothingness has rendered her sightless to what is, can she hope to make any
change for the better.
Joy, however, is not alone in
her self-induced blindness. The
Misfit of A Good Man is Hard to Find also
shares her plight, though their common flaw appears in different ways. For the Misfit, his loss of sight stems
from a refusal to see the horror of his crimes. When he meets the family on the road, for example, he sends
all but the grandmother off to the woods to be shot. That is, he sends them to where he physically cannot see
them, and in so doing seeks to ignore the murderous reality of both his actions
and himself. It is as if he
desires to hide in the dark woods of a malformed conscience the bodies of his
sins, thus keeping them from the more discerning eye of his soul.
Another occurrence that sheds
light on his blindness comes after the Misfit consigns Bailey, his wife, and their
children to their deaths. Alone
with the grandmother, he lowers his guard and divulges something that deeply
troubles him, saying: “Listen lady…if I had been there I would of known and I
wouldn’t be like I am now” (O’Connor 158). This admission reveals more about his internal state than
merely his desire to have seen Christ “raise the dead” (O’Connor 158). Instead, his words show that, even
though he does not want to see it, he has some idea of how terrible he is – of
how his soul is “now” (O’Connor 158).
What he doesn’t know, and what frightens him, are the specific details
of his spiritual state. In speaking
of his first experience behind bars, for instance, he admits, “I forgot what I
done, lady. I set there and set
there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this
day” (O’Connor 156). Consequently,
he “can’t make what all” he did “wrong” match up with his sentence; he does not
understand why he has been “punished” (O’Connor 158). Hence, it seems that while the Misfit senses the gravity of
his crimes, he still fears what they might be. As a result, his reaction to the grandmother’s statement, “Why
you’re one of my babies. You’re
one of my own children!” is quite revealing (O’Connor 158). She reaches out to touch him and is instantaneously
shot. The Misfit, unable to bear
her breaking through to his interior, could not stand to let her live. She “touched the truth about” him, and
in seeing through him she began to unmask his true self before his eyes (O’Connor,
“Good Country” 144). For this
reason the Misfit kills her; anything that so exposes him, he feels, must be
eliminated.
Almost equally significant,
however, is what he does afterward.
Following the grandmother’s murder, the Misfit takes off his glasses. This gesture is important because by
removing his glasses, which are a tool meant to aid sight, he shows himself once
more unwilling – possibly incapable – of handling the truth. He does not want anyone – or anything – to help him see. Something in his own act of violence seems
to rebound upon himself, and because it hurts him so he does not want to face
it. Though grace is granted to him
– unasked for, unlooked for, unwanted – whether he accepts that grace is not
quite clear. If nothing else, by
his self-contradiction in the last line, we see that he has somehow changed. He moves from holding that there is
“[n]o pleasure but meanness” to admitting “[i]t’s no real pleasure in life”
(O’Connor 158, 159). The question
remains, though, whether that lack of pleasure is due to the presence of truth,
or whether it is because he has cast the present truth aside. In the end, the action of violence
leaves each character “defenseless,” separating them from whatever shield they
had against the stinging truth of their own natures: the Misfit without his
glasses, Joy without her leg, Mrs. Turpin without her pride (O’Connor 158). What’s more, the stripping away of that
which hinders truth comes into play on both the physical and the spiritual
level. What hobbles each
character’s conscience, what blinds the eyes of their souls, has also been
snatched away, leaving behind only the terrifying truth. By thus forcing truth into the open via
violence, O’Connor opens for her characters the way to truth.
Thus,
in the separate yet similar cases of Mrs. Turpin, Joy, and the Misfit, the
antecedent, violence, paves the way for the consequent: truth. In O’Connor’s stories, the characters
are “returned…to reality,” are made to face truth, because they have been so
prepared by the action of violence (O’Connor 160). What O’Connor does in moving her characters from blindness
to sight thus corresponds to her opinion that “reality is something to which we
must be returned at considerable cost” (O’Connor 160). And each character has been so returned
– each has come to know “reality…at considerable cost” (O’Connor 160). In being robbed by violence of their
blindness, they have paid a great price for the truth. It remains only to be seen, once
violence unveils the truth, if the characters will indeed choose to change.
Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Belmont Abbey College Reader. Ed.
Angela Mitchell Miss. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 156-159. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” The Belmont Abbey College Reader. Ed.
Angela Mitchell Miss. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 144. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Mystery and Manners.” The Belmont Abbey College Reader. Ed.
Angela Mitchell Miss. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 160. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Revelation.” The Belmont Abbey College Reader. Ed. Angela Mitchell Miss. Boston:
Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 171. Print.
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