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Abstract:
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Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction overflows with race-related themes. The southern racial hierarchy clashes with integration and multiculturalism in her fiction. Critical response to these themes has been divided. Some critics, like Melvin G. Williams, assail O’Connor for being racist and unqualified to examine such issues. Others hail O’Connor’s visionary style that unsettles the reader.
The wide-ranging response to O’Connor’s race-related themes is perhaps due to the southern writer’s style. In her essay “Flannery O’Connor and the Aesthetics of Torture,” critic Patricia Yaeger notes that the southern writer “uses the predicaments of her characters to ask, ‘What happens when the values supporting southern bodies collapse under contradictory codes?’” Many of O’Connor’s characters experience a sense of Freudian uncanny, a feeling of home/unhomely. They must reflect on the assumptions and misconceptions that they have regarding race. Further, those who read O’Connor’s fiction experience a sense of the uncanny. They too must examine how they define race, particularly when O’Connor deliberately omits the race of some of her characters, so readers must construct race—and recognize that they too are beholden to preconceived notions of ethnicity. |
