Reading Saint Flannery: Modernism, Sexuality, and the Culture of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Because flannery O'CONNOR was a Christian writer who suffered considerably from a painful and debilitating disease, died young, and left a legacy of remarkable stories and novels, critics of many persuasions have canonized her in ways few writers have been canonized. Since it is hard to argue with a saint, the vast majority of readers have capitulated to O'Connor's pronouncements on how to read those works. Several critics — myself among them — have reminded us how effectively O'Connor has set the terms of the discourse about her. Working in the modernist age, she thought herself not a modernist, but a throwback to an earlier age. Consequently, one of the more interesting, but generally ignored, questions about Flannery O'Connor is how to periodize her work. Whatever her claims, it is clear sheismodernist in important ways. We see that in her use of myth, for example, and in how she uses the devices of lyrical or poetic fiction such as powerful controlling metaphors and recurrent image-motifs to knit together a form in place of traditional emplotments. In her practice, moreover, she is a modernist easily allied with New Criticism. Of O'Connor's adherence to its tenets, Frederick Crews says, “As she freely admitted, she came into her own as an artist only after undergoing a full New Critical initiation at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Andrew Lytle, with Brooks and Warren's then ubiquitousUnderstanding Fictionproviding the models” (144). Indeed, says Crews, “Even the most impressive and original of her stories adhere to the classroom formula of her day: show, don't tell; keep the narrative voice distinct from those of your characters; cultivate understatement; develop a central image or symbol to convey your theme ‘objectively’; and point everything toward one neatly sprung ironic reversal. No one ever put it all together with greater deftness” (144–45).