Other Works

Some of my writings, I must confess, are neither meant to knot the riddled brain nor engage the poetic palette nor satisfy the story-seeker.  And yet they have their own frame, however different, and their own delights, too.  This page is for those writings which did not fit into the other categories, but which did not bear leaving out.  I hope you will think on them, consider their merits, and savor them as you judge fit.
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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