The Imbalanced Trade for Salvation: Money in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Abstract

The Imbalanced Trade for Salvation: Money in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood Yasuhiro Takeuchi Despite being known as a Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor often writes about what is apparently less spiritually elevated: money. When she writes in her letters “I never believe nothing until I got the money” (Habit 33) or “I hate articles but I like money” (Habit 405), she seems only playfully to suggest her reasonable need for the material basis of an earthly life. But when she says “If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal” (Mystery 78), the value of money is curiously elevated to the equivalent of salvation. Indeed, in the eye of the religious novelist, human beings seem to be in need of both God and money: “Just as in the sight of God we are all children, in the sight of the novelist we are all poor, and the actual poor only symbolize for him the state of all men” (Mystery 132). If, for O’Connor, the spiritually humbling position of human beings is equated with their materially dire situation, it is no wonder that money plays a crucial role in Wise Blood (1952), whose protagonist, Hazel Motes, is known for his idiosyncratic search for God. Critics have already noted O’Connor’s penchant for money-related motifs in Wise Blood and discussed their significance. Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., for instance, contends that O’Connor’s frequent references to wages or prices of products serve to criticize material prosperity for hindering people’s spiritual growth. Since “Material prosperity makes man’s salvation more difficult or impossible,” Littlefield says, “The only one saved is Haze, and that is possible only after . . . he loses his car—the symbol of material prosperity” (130). In a similar vein, Jon Lance Bacon focuses on the significance of salesmen [End Page 233] and of advertisements in the novel such as billboards and posters, and observes that Hazel and the other characters are “circumscribed by the material world . . . in which the spiritual has no place . . . [and] in which everything is for sale” (35). Susan Amper contends that people’s interest in “money and faith” (43) in the late 1940s is reflected in both Wise Blood and the movie Miracle on 34th Street, which appeared contemporaneously. Amper agrees with Bacon that O’Connor “is adamant about the evils of commercialism” (53) and contrasts Hazel’s faith with that of Mrs. Flood, his landlord, “who immerses herself in the world of the material” (56). On the other hand, in the movie, although it advocates the importance of faith (in Santa Claus), “the spiritual and material worlds never diverge” because “faith offer[s] the surest path to happiness and success” (51). These commentators thus regard the novel as a critique of modern materialism, whereas Susan Edmunds, in her historical and political approach to the novel, sees it more radically as an implicit condemnation of the US welfare state in the postwar era—an apparently good and charitable use of money by the government—because, in her view, “O’Connor associates the welfare state’s secular project of social amelioration with a corruption of charity’s biblical meaning” (183). Simply put, God’s love and charity are not fungible with money. Whatever nuanced differences there may be in their arguments, all these critics seem to concur that money and faith are antithetical: the deeper people get involved with commercialism-consumerism or with government-sponsored charity, the further they stray from God. Money could be a source of evil in the real world, as they seem to suggest, but I argue that it is not necessarily so in O’Connor’s fiction. However curious it may sound, the more Hazel is involved with monetary transactions, the closer he can get to Jesus and salvation. In the midst of the market, or the worldly economy, Hazel experiences the economy of God, albeit willingly and unknowingly. Whether Hazel is in search of or in exile from God, the grace of God is present in Hazel’s frequent experiences that may...