Title: Flannery O'Connor and the social classes
Author(s): Barbara Wilkie Tedford
Source: The Southern Literary Journal. 13.2 (Spring 1981): p27. From Literature
Resource Center.
Document Type: Article
Full Text:
The way Flannery O'Connor deals with the traditional social structure in the
South in her fiction shows that it was of major concern to her and was the source
of much of her power and humor. Too often the criticism of her work has
concentrated on theological implications, sometimes without considering the
value of her stories as works of art or their relationship to the place where she
came from. This is not to say that there is not a significant religious and moral
dimension in all her best fiction. But the way she deals with her characters on the
secular level as they live their daily lives in a region with a distinctive class
structure illustrates much that is powerful in her art.
From her first published story ("The Geranium," Accent, 1946) to her last
("Judgement Day," Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965) she dealt with
the social hierarchy in varying degrees. It may be true, as C. Hugh Holman
suggests, that she herself considered a preoccupation with categorizing people a
useless and defeating exercise. She certainly satirizes Mrs. Turpin's penchant for
doing this in "Revelation." And it may be true, as Holman contends, that "such
things seem finally to be of much less interest to her than they are to most
Southern writers." (1) Yet many of her short stories deal with characters who are
troubled over racial issues and make platitudinous comments, revealing their
prejudices, or who try unsuccessfully to demonstrate their broadmindedness. A
number of stories also deal with characters who express their attitudes toward
respectable people ("good country people") and poor white-trash. Sometimes the
self-styled respectable people lament the difficulties involved in hiring
dependable help from among the lower classes. Mrs. Turpin, for example, says,
"niggers don't want to pick cotton any more. You can't get the white folks to pick it
and now you can't get the niggers-because they got to be right up there with the
white folks." (2)
This, of course, is not the voice of Flannery O'Connor. Even though she used the
blunt words "nigger" and "white-trash" in her letters to close friends and revealed
a humorous concern over the problems her mother had in managing the hired
help on their farm, she herself was tactful in her dealings with people and, by
contemporary standards, enlightened in her attitudes. Her fiction, letters, and
essays suggest that she seems to have considered all men sinful in the eyes of
God and equally dependent on his mercy and subject to his grace, but she could
use the man-made social distinctions evident everywhere around her to good
advantage in her satire. Her fictional world includes a hierarchy rather medieval
in its design. Mrs. Turpin's classification, for example, with its inherent
contradictions, ranges from niggers and white-trash to landowners, to form a
chain of being that for her might even begin with the hogs and extend upward to
God. The problem of Old Dudley, the southern white man transplanted to the
northern city in "The Geranium," who is troubled by the blurring of class
distinctions that allows blacks to live beside whites in an apartment building,
continues to be a problem for many of O'Connor's characters even in "Judgment
Day," her final story, which reexamines the very dilemma posed in "The
Geranium." The late story "Revelation" is the comic masterpiece that focuses the
whole question of hierarchy and solves it magnificently in the vision Mrs. Turpin
sees while "scooting" down the hogs with the hose.
Mrs. Turpin lives on a farm, which she and her husband, Claud, run with the help
of some Negroes. She, like other O'Connor characters who manage farms,
expresses her attitudes toward social classes. And these farm stories make use
of a ready-made social structure in which the characters seem to know their
place. There is in them a good deal of comic dialogue that reveals characters'
attitudes toward a person's proper place in society and on that farm in particular.
But into the closed society, the self-sufficiency of each farm some type of
intrusion comes to upset the balance maintained by the owner, who, with the
exception of Mrs. Turpin, is generally a widow with maybe a child or two and who
runs the farm with hired help. These women and the stories in which they appear
are Mrs. Cope, "A Circle in the Fire"; Mrs. McIntyre, "The Displaced Person";
Mrs. Hopewell, "Good Country People"; Mrs. May, "Greenleaf"; Mrs. Fox, "The
Enduring Chill"; and Mrs. Crater, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." All
except Mrs. Crater have what appear to be fairly prosperous farms of a good
many acres, with hired help to run them. All these women express what might be
termed the conventional wisdom about the unwillingness of the more shiftless
classes to work hard. All are the targets of satire, and something momentous-even calamitous--happens to them, except for Mrs. Fox and Mrs. Hopewell,
whose children are the ones to suffer indignities at the end. In other words, most
of these women are not rewarded for holding to their virtues.
Running a farm, of course, involves steady management and hard work.
Laziness and incompetence have no place in the dairy barn or the hayfield. But
Shannon Burns points out in a recent article on O'Connor's view of the work ethic
that those characters who are comfortably established in the world may put too
much faith in this secular work ethic. He suggests that "the American work ethic
limits human vision so severely that only shock or violence can shake her
characters into an awareness of another dimension." In fact, he says, "Not only
does hard work not always pay off, it often leads to annihilation." (3) It is true that
Mrs. May and Mrs. McIntyre suffer cruelly, and certainly Mrs. Turpin cannot
understand why with all her good honest hardworking qualities she should be hit
in the face with a book and called an "old wart hog" from hell. Although she does
not consider her creed secular--she is a God-fearing woman--she and other such
self-styled respectable citizens fall into the trap of feeling superior to their
unfortunate neighbors. As Burns suggests, they constantly measure others
according to their own standards of honesty and hard work. And so they must get
their come-uppance.
The downfall of the farm owners is managed with great skill. These stories
contain wonderful examples of comic irony derived from characters' attitudes
toward the rural social order. For example, into Mrs. Turpin's carefully ordered
existence, about which she is so complacent, bursts an unexpected intruder-Mary Grace, the college girl with acne, whom Mrs. Turpin had classified and
pitied. The comic catastrophe happens in the doctor's office, but its full effects
are felt back on the farm at the hog pen. Mrs. May, likewise, feels superior to the
Greenleafs, especially Mrs. Greenleaf with her white-trashy religion, but the
Greenleafs are her downfall in the end when their intruding scrub bull gores her.
Mrs. McIntyre's horror of inter-racial marriage eventually brings about her
downfall when the displaced person, Mr. Guizac, at first a welcomed intruder,
does not seem to respect the race distinctions prevailing in Georgia. Mrs. Cope
feels superior to the poorly dressed, ill-mannered boys who come uninvited to
her farm in "A Circle in the Fire," but they sense her attitude and get revenge by
setting the woods on fire. Mrs. Hopewell at first sizes up the Bible salesman as
beneath her notice until he cleverly makes her think he is from "good country
people." He, of course, is another outsider who gets the last laugh. Even Mrs.
Crater, although a home and land owner like the others but really of a lower
class, finds a way to feel superior to Mr. Shiftlet when he shows up presumably
looking for work. She once refers to him as "a poor disabled friendless drifting
man" (p. 152).
Merely summing up the situations in these stories does not, however, convey the
sense of comedy with which O'Connor writes. Many commentators have stressed
the moral and theological implications of her fiction and focused on the grim
aspects of her humor. After all, it is horrible that a furious girl attacks Mrs. Turpin,
the bull gores Mrs. May, the tractor kills Mr. Guizac, the boys set fire to Mrs.
Cope's woods, the Bible salesman steals Hulga's glasses and wooden leg, and
Tom T. Shiftlet abandons Lucynell. Even Mrs. Turpin's seemingly harmless nighttime game of "naming the classes of people" is described with a devastating
touch at the end. It is one of the best passages in these stories:
On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she
would
have been if she had been one, but most of them then next to them-but not
above, just away from--were the white-trash; then above them were
the
home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she
and
Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money
and
much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it
would
begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money
were
common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people
who had
good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were
colored
people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored
dentist
in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with
registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had
fallen
asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in
her
head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box
car,
being ridden off to be put in a gas oven. (pp. 491-92)
We smile at Mrs. Turpin's folly in trying to reassure herself by classifying people
that she is a worthy person. But her harmless daydream turns into a nightmare,
just as the human tendency to categorize did result in several million people
"being ridden off to be put in a gas oven." This passage from "Revelation"
illustrates an important point about O'Connor's humor. Reacting to it involves a
Hobbesian sudden feeling of superiority as well as a feeling--one might say a
shock--of recognition that our own follies are being satirized. We feel superior to
Mrs. Turpin and her classifying, but we also recognize ourselves in her. In the
doctor's office, she sizes everyone up and labels some of them "kind of vacant
and white-trashy," or "worse than niggers any day." She naturally looks with
approval on the "well-dressed lady" and pities the scowling ugly girl with acne.
We see the scene through her eyes and are amused at her. Awareness of class
distinctions is surely an important source of comedy not only in "Revelation" but
also in the other stories set on a farm.
At the bottom of Mrs. Turpin's scale are the Negroes and the white-trash. She
and Claud have Negroes working for them, but she has trouble assigning
positions for them in her ranking. She imagines what would have happened if
during her creation Jesus had given her a choice between being a nigger or
being white-trash. She would have tried to wriggle out of choosing, but in the end
she would have said, "`All right, make me a nigger then--but that don't mean a
trashy one.' And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro
woman, herself but black" (p. 491). She continually thanks Jesus for making her
the way she is and not confronting her with such a horrible choice. We are ready
for Mary Grace to throw Human Development at her and shut her up.
Later, in a wonderful scene, Mrs. Turpin, who complains about her undependable
Negro hired help, still cannot resist telling them about her shocking experience in
the doctor's office. Despite her feelings of superiority toward them, she confides
that she was insulted and tries to dramatize it effectively to the wondering
women:
"She sho shouldn't said nothin ugly to you," the old woman said.
"You so
sweet. You the sweetest lady I know."
"She pretty too," the one with the hat on said.
"And stout," the other one said. "I never knowed no sweeter white
lady."
"That's the truth befo' Jesus," the old woman said. "Amen! You
des as
sweet and pretty as you can be."
Mrs. Turpin knew exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it
added
to her rage. (pp. 504-5)
Mrs. Turpin wants them to acknowledge her superiority, of course, but they slyly
overdo it. When she tells them she was called "an old wart hog from hell," their
comic astonishment does not please her, either. They again insist that she's "the
sweetest white lady" they know and Jesus is satisfied with her. "Idiots! Mrs.
Turpin growled to herself. You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger.
You could talk at them but not with them" (p. 505). So she changes the subject,
dissatisfied with herself and them.
Where there are Negroes in the other farm stories, they cautiously tend to their
business and play up to the white folks only when they have to. Flannery
O'Connor could draw on her own experience at Andalusia in depicting blacks.
Her letters to her close friends contain numerous references to their doings. For
instance, she tells one friend that the originals for Astor and Sulk in "The
Displaced Person" are to be found at Andalusia. She relates how the 84-year-old
one mistakenly "fertilized some of my mother's bulbs with worm medicine for the
calves." Then she confesses, "I can only see them from the outside. I wouldn't
have the courage of Miss Shirley Ann Grau to go inside their heads." (4) She
later informs her correspondents when this old Negro, Henry, died, how Jack got
new teeth in time for the funeral, Shot's tribulations over getting his driver's
license, Shot's accident with the hay baler, and the various stabbings and
shootings evidently brought on by imbibing "the local moonshine." She confides
that sometimes her mother threatens to sell the dairy herd and go into raising
beef cattle because it is less trouble. This happens eventually.
Although she felt that she could only see them from the outside, O'Connor
certainly presented Negroes convincingly in her fiction. They work hard and keep
the milking parlors and dairy barns clean, but they sometimes exasperate the
women who hire them. Mrs. May, for example, tries to get the Greenleaf Negro to
say something bad about O.T. and E.T., whose gumption contrasts so painfully
with her own sons' lack of interest in the farm, but he disappoints her; "`They
never quads,' the boy said. `They like one man in two skins'" (p. 326). Mrs. May's
superior pose is shaken a few sentences later when the "Negro looked at her
suddenly with a gleam of recognition. `Is you my policy man's mother?' he
asked." He has touched on a sensitive area, so she quickly changes the subject,
and we smile.
In "The Enduring Chill," Asbury, home for a visit from New York City, tries to
corrupt the Negroes in the dairy barn, but his mother has them too well trained.
He thinks she represents the oppressor of the poor and he wants to show them
that he is on their side. He is collecting material for his play about "the Negro"
and wants to study them in their natural habitat. He manages to get them to
smoke with him while the cows are being milked. "It was one of those moments
of communion when the difference between black and white is absorbed into
nothing." Thus O'Connor pokes fun at Asbury's pretensions. Of course the milk is
sent back from the creamery for having "absorbed the odor of tobacco" (pp. 36869). And Mrs. Fox is sure all three were smoking despite Asbury's taking all the
blame. His next experiment is even less successful. Randall and Morgan, the
Negroes, refuse to drink warm milk from the communal glass: "`She don't 'low
that, ... That the thing she don't 'low" (p. 369). Later Asbury overhears them
discussing him:
"How come he talks so ugly about his ma?"
"She ain't whup him enough when he was little," Randall said.
The insufferableness of life at home had overcome him and he had
returned to New York two days early. (p. 370)
And so the Negroes vanquish the would-be "interleckchul," as O'Connor might
say.
The Negroes on these farms become instruments of O'Connor's comic irony.
They help to show up the follies of the white people who pay them (or whose
mother pays them, in the case of Asbury). They seem to stand firm in their
common sense. Although Mrs. Fox means to deride Randall and Morgan when
she tells Asbury," `Those two are not stupid.... They know how to look out for
themselves'" (p. 368), she is telling the truth. They know how to do the dairy
work, and they understand Asbury's foolishness. Similarly, in "A Circle in the
Fire," although Mrs. Cope considers the Negroes "as destructive and impersonal
as the nut grass," the two who work for her show a steadiness that offsets her
hysteria. She shrieks for them to hurry to put out the brush fire. "`It'll be there
when we git there,' Culver said and they thrust their shoulders forward a little and
went on at the same pace" (p. 193).
The other group on the lower rungs of Mrs. Turpin's social ladder, the whitetrash, usually don't work on the farms but are always lurking at the edges to be
looked down upon. About this group of people O'Connor has much to say in her
letters. She observes the white hired help on her mother's farm and reports their
doings to her correspondents. In the summer of 1952, she wrote to the
Fitzgeralds:
You would relish the [present farm help]. My mama says she has
never
read Tobacco Road but she thinks it's moved in. I don't know how
long they
will be with us but I am enjoying it while it lasts, and I aim to
give my
gret reading audiance [sic] a shot of some of the details sometime.
Every
time Regina brings in some new information, our educ. is broadened
considerably.(p. 41)
That particular shiftless family soon left, "but I learned a lot while they were here,"
O'Connor writes (p. 47). In another letter O'Connor relates an episode with great
glee:
Mrs. P. [farm wife] met Mrs. O. [former farm wife] wandering
around
downtown yesterday. They didn't take to each other atall but Mrs. P.
never
loses an opportunity to get any information about anything
whatsoever so
she stopped her and asked if Mr. O. was working yet. Well, says [his
wife]
(whine), dairy work is so reglar, we decided he better just had get
him a
job where he could work when he wanted to. Mrs. P. has not got over
this
yet. She never will. She manages to repeat it every day in [Mrs.
O's] tone
of voice.... (p. 50)
In fact, the continuing saga of the various farm families makes for amusing
reading throughout The Habit of Being. We see where O'Connor gets her
material. Once she tells "A": "I might write a novella about life on the farm with
plenty of niggers, poor white trash, and gentry of various kinds ..." (p. 368). But
here we must note an important difference between the letters and the fiction. It
lies in the point of view. In her letters, O'Connor talks about classes of people
only when she is addressing close friends, as one would expect of a southern
lady of her time. In her fiction, all the snide comments about niggers and whitetrash come from characters who are themselves satirized. O'Connor pokes fun at
people who set themselves up to judge others. She generally lets the so-called
lower classes serve as comic instruments of justice. And just as O'Connor
presents the blacks sympathetically, while often letting her other characters
speak ill of them, she describes the white-trash only through the eyes of the
superior women whom she is mocking because of their attitudes. Mrs. May, in
particular, considers herself able to spot white-trash. When she visits O.T. and
E.T. Greenleaf's farm, three Greenleaf dogs, "part hound and part spitz," rush at
her. "She reminded herself that you could always tell the class of people by the
class of dog ..." (p. 323).
We of course, along with the women for whom they work, can feel superior to
vulgar Mrs. Pritchard, who wants to discuss the pregnant lady in the iron lung ("A
Circle in the Fire"); to Mrs. Shortley, who wonders if the displaced people will
"know what colors even is"; and to Mrs. Freeman, who "had a special fondness
for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children,"
and lingering diseases ("Good Country People," p. 275). But Mrs. Hopewell
considers the Freemans good country people and not trash. "She had had plenty
of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant
family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be
around you for very long" (pp. 273-74).
Mrs. Cope, Mrs. McIntyre, and Mrs. Hopewell all feel superior to their farm
families, but they put up with them because they say they cannot get anyone
better. Mrs. May does not even talk with Mrs. Greenleaf, whom she considers
downright trashy, what with her wallowing in the dirt and praying over her morbid
newspaper clippings, but Mr. Greenleaf is the best she can get to work for her.
The relationships between these farm owners and their chief tenants' wives are
always developed with a deft comic touch. For example, Mrs. Shortley, before
the arrival of the Guizacs, had always been Mrs. McIntyre's confidante and
shared in her views of the lower classes. But then Mrs. McIntyre begins to look
with more approval at the Pole and shares her opinions with Mrs. Shortley:
Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. "At last," she said, "I've
got
somebody I can depend on. For years I've been fooling with sorry
people.
Sorry people. Poor white trash and niggers," she muttered. "They've
drained
me dry. Before you all came I had Ringfields and Collins and
Jarrells and
Perkins and Pinkins and Herrins and God knows what all else and not
a one
of them left without taking something off this place that didn't
belong to
them. Not a one!"
Mrs. Shortley could listen to this with composure because she
knew that
if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they couldn't have talked
about
trashy people together. Neither of them approved of trash. (pp. 20203)
In the pecking order of the McIntyre farm Mrs. Shortley can look down on the
Negroes. She thinks that if anyone will have to go, it will be Astor and Sulk, for
just as tractors replaced mules, so Mr. Guizac will replace them. She takes it on
herself to inform them of this: "`The time is going to come,' she prophesied,
`when it won't be no more occasion to speak of a nigger'" (p. 206). She even
begins to feel sorry for them and in a magnanimous moment tells Chancey
Shortley, "`I hate to see niggers mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity for
niggers and poor folks. Ain't I always had?'" (p. 207). But unknown to her, Mrs.
Shortley's time is indeed short. Mrs. McIntyre ceases to confide in her, and in an
eavesdropping episode Mrs. Shortley discovers that she is the one who will be
leaving the farm. She and Chancey have been relegated to the category of all the
other sorry people who have worked for Mrs. McIntyre, and are to be displaced
by the Displaced Person, the one who has come over from that foreign land with
the unreformed religion. Mrs. Shortley had previously explained the predicament
of displaced people to Astor and Sulk, with the intention of putting the Negroes
down:
"It means they ain't where they were born at and there's nowhere
for
them to go--like if you was run out of here and wouldn't nobody have
you."
"It seem like they here, though," the old man said in a
reflective
voice. "If they here, they somewhere."
"Sho is," the other agreed. "They here." The illogic of Negrothinking
always irked Mrs. Shortley. "They ain't where they belong to be at,"
she
said. "They belong to be back over yonder where everything is still
like
they been used to. Over here it's more advanced than where they come
from."
(p. 199)
She tells them that Mrs. McIntyre said, "`This is going to put the Fear of the Lord
into those shiftless niggers!'" But in the end Mrs. McIntyre feels that Mr. Guizac is
"extra and he's upset the balance around here ..." (p. 231), so she allies herself
with Mr. Shortley and those same Negroes against the Displaced Person. This
brings about the final collapse of the social order on her farm as well as her own
decline into ill health. As Louis D. Rubin, Jr. puts it, the Displaced Person "has
irretrievably disrupted the customary patterns of Southern rural society." (5)
Mrs. McIntyre and the other hard-pressed farm owners represent the higher
levels in the social ladder, the "gentry of various kinds," who as often as not
suffer calamity in the end. These women farm owners all consider themselves
completely respectable and upright. But viewed from a higher perspective,
presumably ours and O'Connor's and finally God's, their virtues seem pitifully
inadequate. We smile, feeling suddenly superior, when we read in "Good Country
People," that "Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to
use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack" (p.
272). Mrs. May, in "Greenleaf," is another struggling widow who sees only good
qualities in herself. When she looks out at her cows grazing in the pastures, she
sees her farm as a "reflection of her own character." Her friends admire her
industry." `Everything is against you,' she would say, `the weather is against you
and the dirt is against you and the help is against you. They're all in league
against you. There's nothing for it but an iron hand!'" (p. 321). To her annoyance,
however, her son Scofield, the Negroes' insurance policy man, makes fun of his
mama's iron hand and mocks her attitudes.
Similarly, Mrs. Cope, in "A Circle in the Fire," must keep the nut grass from taking
over and try to stave off disaster on her farm. In a comic scene at the beginning
of the story she is weeding the borders and trying to get Mrs. Pritchard (her
counterpart of Mrs. Shortley) to change the subject from the woman in the iron
lung who had the baby and died:
... she pointed the trowel up at Mrs. Pritchard and said, "I have
the best
kept place in the county and do you know why? Because I work. I've
had to
work to save this place and work to keep it." She emphasized each
word with
the trowel. "I don't let anything get ahead of me and I'm not always
looking for trouble. I take it as it comes."
"If it all come at oncet sometime," Mrs. Pritchard began.
"It doesn't all come at once," Mrs. Cope said sharply. (p. 178)
But trouble comes almost immediately. The son of a former tenant arrives,
bringing with him two friends. To her horror he has a suitcase and seems bent on
staying awhile since he says," `Come back to see how you was doing,'" and the
smallest boy blurts out," `Said he had the best time of his entire life right here on
this here place. Talks about it all the time.'" "`Never shuts his trap about this
place,' the big boy grunted, drawing his arm across his nose as if to muffle his
words" (p. 180).
It becomes clear that the tenant boy has grown to love the farm his daddy
worked on and also that he could come to resent its very existence when he can
no longer live on it. He soon comes to resent Mrs. Cope's insistence that the
property is hers." `After all,' she said in a suddenly high voice, `this is my place'"
(p. 186). Mrs. Pritchard, who relishes disaster, describes the boys' misbehavior to
Mrs. Cope in a comic passage:
"You take a boy thirteen year old is equal in meanness to a man
twict his
age. It's no telling what he'll think up to do. You never know where
he'll
strike next. This morning Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and
that big
one ast if it wasn't some place they could wash at and Hollis said
no it
wasn't and that you didn't want no boys dropping cigarette butts in
your
woods and he said, `She don't own them woods,' and Hollis said, `She
does
too,' and that there little one he said, `Man, Gawd owns them woods
and her
too,' and that there one with the glasses said, `I reckon she owns
the sky
over this place too,' and that there littlest one says, `Owns the
sky and
can't no airplane go over here without she says so,' and then the
big one
says, `I never seen a place with so many damn women on it, how do
you stand
it here?' and Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk
by then
and he turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the
other."
(p. 186)
And so not only do these owners of farms have to contend with the current hired
help; sometimes, at least in the case of Mrs. Cope, they also have to be
concerned with delinquent children of former tenants coming back to bother
them.,
Although possibilities for disaster are always present in the farm stories, the
actual tone of the stories is comic. Calamity comes, but comic descriptions and
dialogue managed with devastating irony make us smile knowingly while we
recognize ourselves in the characters. The situations on these farms involve
problems with the social order that are finally resolved in "Revelation" with Mrs.
Turpin's glimpse of eternal truth in a hog pen. It is comedy of a high order,
ludicrous but glorious too. Looking up from the contented sow and piglets, which
are grunting and panting "with a secret life," she sees the vision of "a vast horde
of souls rumbling toward heaven." All her categories of people are ascending on
a streak of light:
There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time
in
their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and
battalions of
freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.
And
bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she
recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always
had a
little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She
leaned
forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others
with
great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order
and
common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet
she
could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues
were
being burned away. (p. 508)
The southern hierarchy will not survive intact in heaven. As Walter Sullivan put it,
"... no one escapes the need for grace: even the virtues of this world, being
worldly, are corrupt.... Passing before [Mrs. Turpin] is that gallery of rogues and
lunatics who are the personae of Flannery O'Connor's work--all, of them loved
from the beginning, and all of them saved now by God's mercy, terrible and
sure." (6)
Mrs. Turpin's vision does bring together all the people of O'Connor's fiction, and it
is fitting that it takes place at the hog pen. The sublimity of the vision and the
incongruity of the setting demonstrate O'Connor's comic genius once more.
Earlier in the story Mrs. Turpin had looked around the doctor's waiting room and
judged the occupants, noting with particular disapproval a white-trash woman,
whose every utterance confirmed her own feelings of superiority. But the white-
trash woman also has opinions about decorum, as she reveals when Mrs. Turpin
tells the "pleasant lady" that she and Claud have a few hogs on their farm: "`One
thang I don't want,' the white-trash woman said, wiping her mouth with the back
of her hand. `Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the
place'" (p. 493). Such ignorance is to be scorned, Mrs. Turpin knows. After all,
her hogs are "Cleaner by far than that child right there, she thought. Poor nasty
little thing." But later she is shaken at being labeled an "old wart hog," and this
attack on her notion of the rightness of her place in the universe must be
resolved at the hog pen. The farm setting is the perfect place to examine the
chain of being that stretches from the hogs to God beyond the streak of light. The
story concludes with Mrs. Turpin walking back to the house as the crickets sing
hallelujahs in the dusk.
Flannery O'Connor tells the story about the time she once
lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me,
and
when she returned them, she said, `Well, them stories just gone and
shown
you how some folks would do,' and I thought to myself that that was
right;
when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly
there--showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of
everything. (7)
When we read these stories, the ones set on Georgia farms as well as the
others, we can smile with superiority over what some folks will do, but this gives
way to the shock of recognition when we see ourselves.
(1) "Her Rue with a Difference," in The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of
Flannery O'Connor, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1977), p. 81.
(2) Flannery O'Connor, "Revelation," in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 493. All references to her stories are to this edition.
(3) "Flannery O'Connor: The Work Ethic," The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, 8
(Autumn 1979), 54-55.
(4) To "A.," 19 May 56, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 159. All references to her letters are to this
edition.
(5) The Faraway Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), p.
238.
(6) Death By Melancholy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972),
p. 35.
(7) "Writing Short Stories," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 90.
Tedford, Barbara Wilkie
Source Citation
Tedford, Barbara Wilkie. "Flannery O'Connor and the social classes." The Southern
Literary Journal 13.2 (1981): 27+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Oct. 2011.
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