Finding Flannery O'Connor's “Good Man” in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead is a rich study of need for forgiveness and power of grace. It can also be called, in Rebecca M. Painter's words, a novelized treatise on difficulty of lived virtue (95). (1) ibis novel--in itself but especially as seen in light of Home--gradually reveals how elderly John Ames, who appears at first to be simply a devout and kindly Congregationalist minister, has sinned against his namesake, John Ames Boughton, known as Jack. (2) In course of novel Ames confronts his decades-long rejection of Jack and finally forgives, accepts, and even comes to love him. One way to understand Ames' spiritual journey and Jack's existential questioning is through lens of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Is Hard to Find It seems natural to associate these two writers whose work reflects their Christian faiths. Robinson is a permanent faculty member of Iowa Writers' Workshop, of which O'Connor is probably most famous alumna, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes both authors. Yet but sympathetic approach of Robinson, a northerner and a Congregationalist, to her subject is very different from O'Connor's, which relies on caricature and satire. Robinson even claims that the influence of Flannery O'Connor has been particularly destructive by leading readers to expect serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully (A World of Beautiful Souls). O'Connor communicated her Catholic vision by using the grotesque as a primary way to reach unbelieving reader (Hawkins 28); in contrast, in these two novels Robinson shows thoughtful people in ordinary situations working their way to greater receptivity to grace through following both Calvin's teachings and their own charitable inclinations. As Robinson says, Ames' faith is not dogmatic but a process (Interview Part II with Silverblatt). (3) Regardless of whether Robinson intended Gilead as a response to A Good Man it acts as one by using a similar structure and parallel characters, while showing them in a more sympathetic, warmer way. The conventionally characters, grandmother and Ames, dominate first half of each and control information--the grandmother is viewpoint character for most of O'Connor's story, which is written in indirect free discourse, and Ames is novel's narrator--so that readers distrust Misfit and Jack before they appear. These two new characters then engage in debate about Christianity with initial characters. The resemblance between works is brought out by strong echoes of O'Connor's story in passage in which Ames calls Jack a man. In story, grandmother tells Misfit, just know you're a man, and he replies, Nome, I ain't a man ... but I ain't worst in world neither (139). Near end of Gilead Ames writes that he told Jack, ...You are a man,' and he gave me a look, purely appraising, and laughed and said, 'You can take my word for it, Reverend, there are worse' (231). Similarly, when lack tells Glory what Ames has said, she responds, Well, I could have told you you are a man. I've said it in so many words, surely and he replies self-deprecatingly, You're a miserable judge of character. Mine, especially. No objectivity at all (Home 308-09). Gilead climaxes in Ames' acceptance of lack much as O'Connor's A Good Man exists for moment when grandmother realizes her connection to Misfit. Both O'Connor and Robinson want readers to sympathize with their miscreants and to believe in possibility of their salvation. O'Connor wrote that she hoped that grandmother's gesture would grow like mustard-seed in Misfit's heart and turn him into the prophet he was meant to become (On Her Own Work 113). Robinson, similarly, wants her readers to see Jack's goodness, the greatest goodness [being] perhaps awareness of one's own failure to be good (Interview Part II with Silverblatt), a failure which is inevitable because of man's fallen condition. …