The Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor

Art by Elliot Skow

Flannery O’Connor’s stories are, by her own account, “preoccupied with the grotesque.” The reason, some argue, is that the grotesque is fascinating to the southern imagination. And indeed her grotesques have many southern precedents, most notably those of William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury is famously narrated in part by an idiot. But even if writing about freaks is a natural impulse for southern writers, and has a natural appeal to southern readers, O’Connor denies that this explains their appearance in her fiction. Her grotesques are due, not to a sensibility she and her readers share, but to convictions of hers that her readers reject. O’Connor was Catholic, writing largely for (what she took to be) a secular, nihilistic culture. And

the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him,

but which his audience does not regard as distortions at all. Now maybe every writer is out to change their readers’ way of seeing. Still, some changes are harder to bring about than others. Charles Dickens succeeded by describing, in lurid detail, the concrete reality of factory work and child labor. But if one wants to open people’s eyes to the spiritual sickness of their society—well, how is one to do that? O’Connor’s challenge is to make the “distortions in modern life”

appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.

Dickens’ audience was (I would guess) largely receptive to his ideas, just ignorant of the facts. But O’Connor’s audience was, in her words, actively “hostile” to the vision of reality she wanted to convey. Difficult ends call for extreme techniques; for O’Connor, the grotesque was among those techniques.

But how does that technique help achieve her end? Part of the answer is in O’Connor’s remark, that

the writer who produces grotesque fiction may not consider his characters any more freakish than ordinary fallen man usually is.

In “Good Country People,” for example, Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman appear as caricatures of petty, stupid, gossipy women. They’re held in disdain by Mrs. Hopewell’s daughter Joy, who with her keen intelligence and (yes) PhD in philosophy, thinks she sees through them. Joy’s tragedy, it seems, is to be forced to waste her education living with her mother in the rural south: Joy has a heart condition, and is missing a leg, which was blown off in a terrible accident. Joy’s fake leg makes her a grotesque in body, but as the only character with a seemingly-normal mental life, the reader is encouraged to identify with her.

When a devout yet simple-minded Bible salesman shows up, Mrs. Hopewell is annoyed to no end, but she cannot bring herself to be rude to him, and she invites him to dinner. He later asks Joy to a picnic, and though she disdains him, she fantasizes about seducing him—not, it seems, out of lust, but our of a desire to exercise power over someone, when she is otherwise so helpless. The turn comes when Joy and the boy retire to a hayloft and begin kissing. He demands that Joy say she loves him, and she rejects the whole idea of love, telling him

...it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.

And,

We are all damned...but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.

But almost immediately, her invulnerability is shattered. He asks where her wooden leg joins on, and “her face instantly drained of color”:

No one ever touched [the leg] but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.

Despite her avowed nihilism, it appears that some things are sacred to her: she refuses the boy’s request. But when the boy says the leg is “what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else,” her hostility turns to vulnerability:

She decided for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her.

She agrees to show him her leg, and “it was like surrendering to him completely.”

She demonstrates how to take it off, and he does it himself, and

She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again.

But he steals the leg, admits that the Bible salesman routine was a scam to get to her, and shows her what real nihilism is:

you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!

Joy is left alone in the loft, helpless to climb down.

The boy, who seemed to Joy, and was made to seem to us, an innocent simpleton, is revealed to be a conniving monster. Our view of Joy is meant to change as well. As I interpret the story, it’s Joy’s intellectual secularism that is meant to “seems natural” to O’Connor’s audience, but which O’Connor regards as a “distortion.” Her aim is to transform how we see Joy’s worldview, from something normal and rational, to something grotesque: a nihilism that suppresses and distorts, but has not destroyed completely, a natural yearning for love, if not as well for the sacred and for surrender.

Does O’Connor succeed? Was this your take of the end of the story? It’s also worth asking about the movement from the particular to the general. How does a story about the bad effects of (so-called) nihilism on one woman, become a critique of the nihilist worldview as a whole?

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See also: Flannery O’Connor for Atheists.