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Flannery O'ConnorParker's Back
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Authorial Context: Flannery O’Connor
Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She wrote fiction in the Southern Gothic tradition. Most of her works are set in the South and feature characters wrestling with their relationship to the Judeo-Christian God. O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family. Her father suffered from lupus erythematosus, an inflammatory disease caused when the immune system attacks its own tissues, which eventually grew so debilitating that the family moved to O’Connor’s mother’s childhood home in rural Milledgeville, Georgia. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Despite inheriting lupus erythematosus, which eventually led to her death in 1964 at the age of 39, O’Connor completed two novels and two short story collections and frequently lectured on spirituality and literature.
While her first published book was the novel Wise Blood in 1952, O’Connor is renowned and celebrated as a short story writer. Her writing often features characters who are wrestling with some question of morality or spirituality as they navigate a bleak and violent world. Although there are elements of horror and the grotesque in her work, she used the Southern setting as a vehicle to explore the inexplicable presence of God in all things. She wrote of being a novelist in the South: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (O’Connor, Flannery. “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” Mystery and Manners. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). This idea of God haunting a landscape is apparent in many of her works, which despite featuring violence and poverty as their subject matter, have strong undertones of divine forces at work.
Literary Context: Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of literature that is heavily influenced by gothic aesthetics (such as a sense of moodiness, darkness, and decay) and explorations of the American South. It began gaining traction in the post-Civil War South, which was characterized by poverty, violence, religious extremism, and racial tensions. In exploring this dark subject matter, which highlighted a sense of alienation from the Northern states, many writers began to lean on grotesque and bizarre imagery and characters. Representations of the South in literature before the Civil War had often portrayed the South as a peaceful, rich, pastoral, hospitable civilization. Southern Gothic writing strove to take the mask from this fantasy, and reveal the underbelly of racism, sexism, isolation, and poverty.
Among the well-known writers of Southern Gothic fiction are Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. Common elements that can be identified in Southern Gothic literature include impoverished southern landscapes, dark humor, grotesque characters, transgressive behaviors, religious imagery, and supernatural elements such as ghosts. In his short story “The Bear,” Faulkner wrote, “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?” (“The Bear.” Go Down, Moses, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 65). This vision of the South as a troubled landscape is the root from which Southern Gothic literature grew, exploring how the complex and violent history of the South continues to impact its peoples and places in both subtly sinister and explicitly vicious ways.
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