Flannery O’Connor’s Racial Grotesqueness and Metaphorical Black Codes in “The Artificial Nigger” and “Judgment Day”

Abstract

This paper examines the American geographical descriptions of racism and a long history of racial separations in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger” (1955) and “Judgment Day” (1965). O’Connor’s writing displays ambiguity between restoring the white’s lost comfort zone and acknowledging the rebellious changes in modern society. Whites lost status because in the American South African-American people and foreigners began to substitute for whites’ in professional roles in the mid-twentieth century. O’Connor’s white characters psychologically reside in the glorious world of the past. The American South has a special background due to the defeatism since the Civil War. In the paper, I argue that O’Connor’s stories show the social changes regardless of her complex views of mystery and religion. In addition, she to some degree rebels against the reader’s expectation of equilibrium by shaking the conventional Southern structure and unveiling a reality of the upcoming Civil Rights movement regarding racial equality.