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Basit
Farmingdale State College
Flannery O’Connor: An Enigmatical Character
Zobia Basit
English 102
Justin Dolce
March 8th, 2018
Flannery O’Connor: An Enigmatical Character
In literature, authors will often write about passions and tragedies in a manner which appeals to a general audience. In rare instances, the emergence of an author with a style out of the norm comes about and changes the way a reader perceives a particular writing. Roman Catholic Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, from Georgia used her intense devotion for writing to create defective characters to bring light to the flaws in the real world regarding religion in the South. She attempted to use her resourcefulness to express her feelings through the stories that she developed revolving them. In a quote by Flannery, she stated, “whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one,” The reader can assume Flannery writes abstruse stories because she has been familiarized with odd characters throughout her lifetime and even within herself. Despite her characters’ distorted demeanor, Flannery left her readers feeling a questionable sympathy towards them at the end of every story. “To be able to recognize
a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general
conception of man is still, in the main, theological... I think it is safe to say that while the
South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” This quote, and many of the works written by Flannery O’Connor, are impactful because her stories mixed abnormalities and grace in a grotesque manner that attracted readers for peculiar reasons.
Flannery was an only child born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25th, 1925, and given the full name Mary Flannery O’Connor. Since the beginning of her childhood and into her adolescence, she had grown up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in the South. When she was 12 years old, her father fell ill with lupus erythematosus, which affected her father’s ability to fight off infections. The worsening of his ailment and eventual passing had forced the family to relocate when she was 15. The family ended up in a rural neighborhood in Milledgeville, Georgia, where her mother was raised. Flannery went to Georgia State College for Women to study for a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Literature. After her graduation, she went on to attend writer’s workshops and further studied creative writing at a university in Iowa. Altogether, this constructed her profound passion for writing and guided her works to be predominantly consummated by the relationship between God and the individual. In 1950, Flannery inherited the same debilitating blood disease that had ended her father’s life. Over the next decade, she was exhaustively in and out of a hospital in Andalusia, where she received treatment for Lupus. It is in this time period when her short stories w...
