Flannery O'Connor's Footprint Essay

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Flannery O'Connor's footprint: When do her characters gain reliability and how the attitude of the society plays a role?

O'Connor is considered one of the foremost short story writers in American literature. She was an anomaly among post-World War II authors -- a Roman Catholic from the Bible-belt south whose stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God's grace in everyday life. The predominant feature of O'Connor criticism is its abundance. From her first collection, O'Connor garnered serious and widespread critical attention, and since her death the outpouring has been remarkable, including hundreds of essays and numerous full-length studies. She was recognized for writing "A Good Man Is Hard to find," which was written in the 1950s and very much a horror story about death and the very scary moment when each individual has to face it and how they will handle it. In the short story "Everything That Rises Must Converge," follows a woman that is scared to ride the integrated bus so her son Julian, a recent college graduate, prepares to escort his mother to her weekly weight-loss class at the YMCA, which she attends to decrease her high blood pressure. Her son escorts her there every week for the reason that she has refused to take the bus alone since mixing of black and white people. "Good Country People" despite a woman's academic degrees, a woman named "Hulga" is unable to identify evil until it is too late. With that being said, Flannery O'Connor's short stories were influenced by her hometown, during the period of civil rights advancements, and the reaction of the townsfolk's to these new rules, while applying the idea of the Catholic religion in resurrection and rebirth

O'Connor's work was influenced by her hometown. For instance, the first component of her life that affected what she wrote was religion. She stayed as a Roman Catholic during the course of her life, and a lot of her stories reflect moral and spiritual concerns swayed by her faith. Then, her stories are typically set in the Deep South, and reflect her deep personal information of small town and rural Georgia life. Another foremost component of her life that affects her writing is disability and disease. As a person who saw her father die of lupus when she was an adolescent, and then when she was older came down with the disease herself when she turned 25 years old and then required to have crutches in order to walk after 1955, she frequently incorporated characters suffering from some disability or illness in her stories, such as Hulga, the protagonist of "Good Country People," who has a leg that is prosthetic. A lot of critics believed that O'Connor was misleading her readers with misinformation about herself. In her biography, she made the point that the following year, she went off to Georgia State College for Women. However, some authors state "went off being slightly misleading, given that the college was a block from her home" (Gooch). There she started to write with growing momentousness.

An accepting of Flannery O'Connor must consider traditions in which the South well-versed her writing skills. A lot of the body of critical breakdown of O'Connor's work has a lot to do with her position as an exclusively Southern writer and in the interior the Southern literary practice. Flannery O'Connor talked about southern ways of doing things in discussions in regards to her writing and described the South as 'Christ haunted'. (Mankowski) O'Connor wrote with a consciousness of the 'ghosts of the South' and the darkness they cast upon Southern fiction. Her elegance has been defined as prejudiced by the spoken backgrounds of the South (Gooch) The custom of storytelling that was a sturdy component of Southern culture also deeply influenced her writings. For this writer, the telling of a story was the best way to get her ideas out there for people to see, as "The South is more like a story telling part. The Southerner knows he can do more fairness to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing difficulties or proposing concepts." (O'Connor) In subject Flannery O'Connor never wander away from the Southern world she was familiar with because it was what made her comfortable.

"She inscribes of the old farms, red clay roads, the loves and biases and the (to her) retrograde Protestantism of the South, and there are not numerous Catholics that live there. On the other hand the appearance of Grace as conceived by a beautifully disciplined Catholic mind hovers continuously just behind the prospects.

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" (Owens)

Being into Catholicism strongly influenced Flannery O'Connor work. On the other hand, her Southern place meant that even though her faith was severely Catholic, she had much in familiar with fundamentalists from the South more than intelligentsias from the nonspiritual modern world. (Farmer)The tensions that were going on among her Catholic and Southern personalities are seen as giving the oppositional changing aspects among evangelist and narrator predominant in her writing. The custom of speaking that was an necessary part of Southern fundamentalist faith was powerfully conflicting to secularism and the effect of this is noteworthy in the writing of Flannery O'Connor (Flannery O'Connor's Desire for God) Owing to bring more concerned with profounder matters of humankind and God than making a Southern fictional world, O'Connor has been labelled as 'conventional Southern.' (Sederberg)In joining Southern and Catholic impacts in her work, she was able to come up with a style of writing that stood out from other Southern authors in its innovation. (Neil)

When it came down to her beliefs, Flannery O'Connor demonstrated an understanding for the people that were considered to be displaced, or 'freak', usually involved in a struggle with God. These were the people that she looked at as being the outcast from the world. O'Connor was able to speak of the prominence of the 'freak' in her collected works as a number for our vital movement. She likewise spoke of a Southern Individuality that was formed by the scriptures and a history of violation and defeat. One of her close friend Sally Fitzgerald made reference to the change that was going on among the Georgia O'Connor and she wrote about it (Owens). Her conceit felt in the direction of the country south is well documented. (Farmer) In any circumstance her obsession with the weakness and irreverence of man is claimed to be on account of her Southern ancestries.

Some have mixed emotions when it comes to Flannery O'Connor wanted change or not. She was from the Deep South during a time where it was racial segregation almost everywhere. The question of adjustment, as it lies unreturned at the end of "Everything that Rises Must Converge," is vital to an examination of O'Connor's place in positions of social responsiveness. As concentrating as she was in how individuals are "placed in society" socially (in any case insofar as that social location proposes a theological measurement), she was particularly less concerned in actual social change. Numerous opponents have remarked on how O'Connor appears to have been all but totally unfeeling to the Civil Rights Crusade, although it is clear that numerous of the stories such as (Everything That Rises Must Converge) are well-versed and lively by the movement (Neil). From mentioning to the Catholic Church's attention in substances of race as "chattering in regards to racial justice" (Sederberg)in 1962, to talking about in 1964 that O'Connor favors Martin Luther King (although he isn't "the ages huge saint") to the "moralizing predicting preaching" type of Negro like Baldwin (Bernens)O'Connor goes on to expresses theses ranges of what she felt on civil rights. There are times when it appears that she was totally indifferent in the movement or just not interested in it at all. Sometimes it appears that she felt to some extent threatened by it. Occasionally she even proposes that she is an integrationist, disappointed about inequalities she witnesses. Nevertheless constantly she tackles Civil Rights with hesitation, for it looks like that her notion of social change did not have much to do with fundamental politics, rebellion, or action of any type. In a letter transcribed to Janet McKane in 1963, O'Connor deliberates a fresh event having to do with local black addition exertions.

In addition, in regards to Everything that Rises Must Converge Flannery O'Connor makes the suggestion that the South has at all times established and treasured these behaviors, which "on the other hand lopsided or insufficient they may have been, delivered enough social discipline to hold the readers together and give them some kind of an identity" (Sederberg). The difficulties here, clearly, are that first, O'Connor hearkens to a time when there was one Southern (white and black) individuality; and that second, Flannery O'Connor undertakes that the "behaviors" have worked for everyone sufficiently, if not in the same way. She understands that things are changing at a fast pace, making the point that the "new manners will have to be founded on the old ways….....

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