“Useful Idiots: Flannery O’Connor and the Curse of Superiority”

Abstract

Flannery O’Connor has recently garnered attention for the manifestations in her own life of the racism she depicted in her fictional characters. These characters register her ambivalence toward her readership, which she imagined as Northern, secular, cosmopolitan, liberal, and largely white. O’Connor populated her stories with caricatures of variously impoverished whites from the South. Drawing on these stories as well as her letters and essays, I show how she designed these characters as “useful idiots” upon whom her presumed readers could project the sin of racist violence. In so doing, O’Connor exposed the presumptions of intellectual, moral, and political supremacy made by her Northern readers when describing what she calls as “Southern degeneracy.” Here I examine two moments—one from history and another from our contemporary moment—when O’Connor implicates herself or is implicated by national conversations about the South and the history of white supremacy that it nurtures.