Flannery O’Connor and the Terrors of American Sentimentality
In a recent issue of the New Yorker,
Paul Elie accuses novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor of
possessing “a habit of bigotry.” He argues that her opinions and
language about race are seriously flawed, and that her admirers must
come to terms with this unsettling reality when interpreting her
fiction.
But Elie’s orientation is backwards. As O’Connor herself understood,
art is not meant to be approached by way of dissecting the artist; the
only way to appreciate O’Connor as a writer is to closely examine her
stories, which emphatically are not racist. Elie’s argument is
both wrong and dangerous—it is a sign of the type of terror O’Connor
prophetically sees coupled to the sentimental pursuit of justice
unhinged from charity and friendship. Elie’s Case for O’Connor’s “Habit of Bigotry”
As evidence of her racism, Elie points to the personal letters
O’Connor wrote her mother in 1948 at the age of eighteen while visiting
New York and Massachusetts with extended family. The letters reveal
O’Connor’s shock to see a black man in the same college classroom as her
cousin, and that she avoided sitting next to black people on the
subway. Elie understands that these were the reactions of a teenager
leaving the 1940s South for the first time, but asserts that she never
successfully or fully excised these racist attitudes from her soul, and
that they therefore have to be taken into account when interpreting her
work. They are part of the character of the artist, and therefore part
of the art.
The proof of O’Connor’s enduring bigotry are letters written at the
height of her talent to her friend, the Civil Rights activist Maryat
Lee, in which O’Connor plays the part of gradualist reformer lamenting
the forced demise of Southern society by Northern radicals. Elie
acknowledges that there is a playfulness to these letters, but insists
that they are not always in jest, that much of what O’Connor says to her
correspondent reflects her real opinions about race. And because these
letters come in her more mature and reflective years, Elie uses them to
claim that O’Connor’s bigotry was “clearly maintained and growing more
intense as time went on.”
One of the passages from O’Connor’s correspondence to Lee cited by
Elie comes from a May 1964 letter written just months before her death.
Here O’Connor says:
About the
Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying
pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never
silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem
but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I don’t think is
the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has
to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him
but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person
be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a
minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,”
says Cassius, “and you leave, that don’t mean you hate the tiger. Just
means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.”
Cassius is too good for the Moslems.
Unlike O’Connor’s youthful letters to her mother, many of her letters
to Lee, including the brunt of that quoted above, have been available
to readers since the publication of Mystery and Manners in
1979. Elie claims that O’Connor fans have been downplaying these types
of comments for a long time, happily accepting those parts of her
correspondence that are witty and wise but refusing to acknowledge her
racism. These admirers cheer at the Christian spirit that went into
O’Connor’s stories, with little if any comment about her bigoted
opinions. But, says Elie, these letters to Lee “were written at the same
desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of
correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature.”
For Elie, a reassessment is necessary of O’Connor’s work, considering
all parts of the author’s character—the racially-biased side as much as
the daily-mass side. O’Connor’s admirers are mistaken, Elie tells us,
in elevating the published letters and occasional prose that they like
while explaining away the racial epithets and evidence of bigotry. This
approach “cordons off the author from history” by refusing to look
squarely at her more controversial statements: “Those remarks don’t
belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They
belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.”
In terms of her fiction, Elie’s only substantial example is the
vision of Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” the story of a proud Southern
lady who unreflectively equates the class hierarchies of her community
with God’s divine plan. She wonders what she would have done if Jesus
had made her choose between being black or white trash, and she gives
thanks that she was made a respectable white lady with “a little of
everything.” She is offered, however, a chance to grow in self-knowledge
after encountering a hostile Wellesley student in a doctor’s waiting
room. The young girl throws a book at Mrs. Turpin and tells her,
memorably, to “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
Mrs. Turpin interprets the incident as a message from God, and after
questioning him in the spirit of Job, experiences a revelatory vision of
souls marching heavenward in a subverted form of the hierarchical
categories that shape her imagination. For Elie, this is a
“segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and
class, equal but separate.” O’Connor’s racism is thus part of her
fiction.
Part of Elie’s turn to “Revelation” is to clarify his point about
O’Connor’s letters to Lee. Both correspondents would frequently and
playfully use pseudonyms meant to caricature their positions on race.
O’Connor would sometimes sign hers as “Mrs. Turpin,” and Elie sees in
this O’Connor’s embrace of a racist worldview that the writer’s fans are
loath to admit. The time of reckoning, however, has come. We must face
O’Connor’s true feelings about race and shake our heads at her willing
blindness to the truth of human equality. If we refuse to acknowledge
this side of O’Connor, we can never fully understand her literature;
rather, we’ll make it out to be far more holy and exemplary than it is.
Whatever goodness it has is stained by her habit of bigotry. Such is the
thrust of Elie’s essay. Finding the Interpretive Key
Elie’s approach to literary interpretation assumes that O’Connor’s
letters and posthumously published prose can serve as—and should be used
as—the interpretive key to her work. Elie claims that O’Connor
was careful to keep carbon copies of her correspondence and public
lectures because she intended for these to be the interpretive lens for
reading her short stories and novels. Everything came from the same
mind, written on the same typewriter, and thus is part of the same body
of work. The only way, then, to understand O’Connor’s art is to read it
through the autobiographic picture she drew for us through her letters.
Elie has plenty of company in this regard. There is no shortage of
admirers who like O’Connor’s stories because they know she was Catholic,
or a woman, or had lupus. This is why the stakes over O’Connor’s racial
views are so high. If we can’t like O’Connor the person, can we really
like her stories?
I stand with O’Connor in thinking that this orientation is the wrong
way to read literature, particularly from an artist as self-conscious
and deliberate as the one Elie puts on trial for racism. The irony of
using O’Connor’s letters to form an interpretation of her work is that
she frequently admonishes her correspondents not to take this approach.
She insists that her fiction must be read on its own terms, without
distracting adventures into her psyche.
For example, O’Connor jokes in a January 1956 letter to her friend
Betty Hester that she can see two critics that look to the artist to
understand art “chained together by mutual hate on one of the less
important circles of the inferno, eternally arguing if church steeples
are phallic symbols.” In May of the same year she wrote, again to
Hester, that a story should say “something about life colored by the
writer, not about the writer colored by life.” A few years later she
rebuked her friend Billy Sessions for his use of Freudian literary
criticism in the classroom, reminding him that it “can be applied to
anything at all with equally ridiculous results,” adding, “My Lord,
Billy, recover your simplicity.”
A little simplicity can go a long way when it comes to reading
literature. O’Connor would have had as little patience for race-infused
readings of her stories as she did for sex-infused interpretations. In
both cases readers are more concerned with the author’s mind and
character than the fruits of hard work and a dedication to the vocation
of writing. In fact, O’Connor frequently argued against using her
biography as a lens for reading her stories. The writer’s task is to
look at reality and render a vision of what is seen. Vision is, of
course, shaped by social mores and experience, but a good writer tries
to look beyond the temporal to a fuller reality, however mysterious it
may be. O’Connor insisted that her Catholicism broadened her ability to
see, and what she saw was grace acting on nature, God intervening in the
lives of souls living in modern America. But readers need not know that
O’Connor was Catholic, or had lupus, or lived alone with her mother in
rural Georgia, or had a short courtship with a book salesman to grapple
with her vision of the world we inhabit. All that’s necessary are the
stories.
Elie’s essay is a good example of the danger of interpreting art
through the biography of the artist. He argues that because O’Connor
possessed the habit of bigotry throughout her life, her many admirers
must come to terms with the fact that an author they cherish held
unacceptable racial views. He suggests that any serious interpretation
of her work going forward must account for the fact that she was wrong
when it comes to race, whatever we might think of her artistic talent or
theological acumen. He does not say the stories should stop being read,
but that is a logical step for the next critic to make. Elie just
throws the first punch, knocking O’Connor off her pedestal.
O’Connor’s letters, of course, do make for wonderful reading. They
are valuable for understanding the woman who wrote such startling and
memorable tales; they reveal a deeply philosophic soul living a simple
though painful life on a small dairy farm outside of Milledgeville,
Georgia, raising peafowl and other exotic birds, and struggling with the
ravages of lupus while devoting herself wholeheartedly to her vocation
as a writer. O’Connor’s biography is worth knowing, and in many regards
it is inspiring. But we must have the discipline not to conflate the
artist with her art.
A serious
reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction without having heard
of her could not in honesty conclude that the meaning of the stories
justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to different degrees,
questions the racist attitudes of the American South and points to the
individual conversions necessary to bring about the new code of manners
based on charity for which she hoped.
Rather than her correspondence, critics like Elie would do well to
follow O’Connor’s advice and treat the body of O’Connor’s published art
on its own terms. Importantly, this includes her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,
the biography of a twelve-year-old girl who died of cancer, written by
the Dominican sisters who cared for her in Atlanta. Regarding this
essay, O’Connor says in a June 1961 letter to Hester that the
introduction is particularly important for understanding her work. When
critics ignore it, they miss O’Connor’s concern with the modern
proclivity to govern by tenderness rather than faith, a move that
becomes dangerous when tenderness is divorced from charity. O’Connor
predicted that tenderness without charity would end in terror, and in
Elie’s accusation that she possessed a “habit of bigotry,” she risks
becoming subject to the very terror she foresaw.
The passage from O’Connor’s introduction to the Mary Ann book is worth quoting at length:
In this popular
pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other
ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind,
prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.
In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a
tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is
wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of
tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in force-labor camps
and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
O’Connor is not just remarking here on the causes of those depraved
atrocities of mid-20th century communist and fascist nations on the
other side of the world. Her fiction makes clear that her gravest
concerns about modern terrors are of the home-grown variety connected to
her own regime, where tenderness comes packaged in various theories,
including the social-justice variety. People absorbed in such theories
are prone to a sentimentality that can lead them to terrorize those who
see things differently. Fascists and communists excel in terror—but 17th
and 18th century New England Puritans also knew how to scare people
into having the “right” opinions. O’Connor understood that we still have
Puritans among us.
Simply put, Elie is looking in all the wrong places for an
interpretative key to O’Connor’s work. His use of the phrase “habit of
bigotry” is a clever, if underhanded, play on the title of Sally
Fitzgerald’s edited volume of O’Connor’s correspondence, The Habit of Being,
meant to convey O’Connor’s virtues as a person, a Catholic, and an
artist. To the extent that we are concerned with O’Connor’s biography,
an accurate account of her vices is as important as attending to her
virtues—but trying to understand her habits, good and bad, can and
likely will distract us from her art. We end up seeking the source of
her vision rather than the rendered product.
Elie claims that O’Connor intended for her letters and occasional
prose to serve as the interpretive lens for reading her fiction. But
this is strange given that those same letters and essays make plain
O’Connor’s hope that the stories be read on their own terms. She
shuttered at the idea of literature being a game of hide-and-seek, with
audiences trying to find the author behind every Freudian symbol. Are we
to see O’Connor relationship with her mother in “The Enduring Chill,”
or her broken heart in “Good Country People,” or her semi-conscious
racism in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”? Such an orientation
makes it impossible to appreciate and learn from her fiction as it was
offered to the public. O’Connor’s Fiction is Not Racist
Jessica Hooten Wilson offers a good counter
to Elie’s misreading of O’Connor and a more balanced articulation of
O’Connor’s racial attitudes. As she points out, Elie neglects to mention
O’Connor’s friendships with African Americans and civil-rights
activists like Father McCown and Tom and Louise Gossett. In fact, much
of O’Connor’s biography can be used to show that Elie’s portrait of the
writer lacks complexion and nuance; that one would have to be heavily
influenced by the sentiments de jour to think her comments to
Maryat Lee are sufficient evidence of an unreconciled bigotry. I don’t
mean to defend everything she said in those letters or elsewhere. Like
all of us, she had flaws, and was guilty of sin.
But in terms of her biography, a fairer complaint about O’Connor
would look not to her feelings, but her stated opinions on policy
questions about race. Elie is simply wrong that O’Connor fans have been
ignoring the issue. They have been trying to understand it since at
least the publication of Habit of Being, in which Fitzgerald
provides evidence that the real difference between O’Connor and Lee was
not their views on race, but their proposed solutions to the injustices
of the South. Lee was an activist wanting immediate change, while
O’Connor thought the only solution was the development of “a new code of
manners based on mutual charity,” which can only be worked out slowly
over time. Readers like Elie can side with Lee in this debate, but they
cannot justly demonize her opponent as a racist.
Even if one insists that O’Connor was a racist, that does not mean that her work was ipso facto
racist. A serious reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction
without having heard of her could not in honesty conclude that the
meaning of the stories justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to
different degrees, questions the racist attitudes of the American South
and depicts the individual conversions necessary to bring about the new
code of manners based on charity for which she hoped.
Serious exegesis of literature is not to be expected in short essays,
but Elie’s claim about the racism of “Revelation” misses completely the
fact that the vision is reported to us by the narrator through the eyes
of Mrs. Turpin, and cannot in fairness be attributed to O’Connor.
Plainly, Mrs. Turpin experienced a moment of conversion, and that the
revelation she witnesses is personal—a grace from God particularly for
her. It upends her previous attitudes about people she had thought
beneath her—both blacks and whites. It is a corrective of her opinions,
not a reflection of O’Connor’s mind.
Like “Revelation,” O’Connor’s other stories are about individuals who
suddenly have their theories crushed in a moment of grace, a
devastation that opens up the possibility for conversion. The
Grandmother from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for example, thinks of
herself as good, tender souls fully in accord with the theories of
Southern hierarchy that reigned in the mid-20th century. She dresses up
for road trip because if she were to be in an accident, she’d want
everyone to know that “she was a lady” and not some white trash. Not
until she is confronted by the Misfit does she see the shallowness of
her opinions. Thanks to a moment of violence, she dies with more
important things on her mind than appearing as a lady. The Southern
code, including its racist assumptions, ends up meaning very little when
faced with real rather than hypothetical death. Sinners of all types,
racists among them, might act and think differently if there were
someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
In what O’Connor thought was her deepest story, “The Artificial
Nigger,” the suffering of black Americans is united to the suffering of
Christ on the cross. One of the most striking moments of the story takes
place in the opening pages, when a young boy responds to his racist
grandfather’s question about what he sees when a colored person walks
by: “A man,” responds the boy. The point is that social categories that
correspond to skin color are accidental, or artificial, rather than
essential to personhood. The grandfather’s bigotry and selfishness are
tied to the harm he causes his grandson as they walk through the city,
and it is only in their confrontation with severe suffering and
humiliation, represented in a racist lawn statue, that they are
reconciled.
And then there are the stories of social reformers, like Rayber from The Violent Bear It Away
and Sheppard from “The Lame Shall Enter First.” They are the epitomes
of atheistic tenderness wrapped in theory, and everything they touch
breaks. In both stories, a romantic sensibility leads these characters
to care more for misguided youth than their own flesh-and-blood sons.
And in both cases their upside-down priorities lead not just to harm,
but to death. These are tales of the sort of terror that can accompany
sentimentality in America—fathers endangering the lives of their
children in the name of social reform.
The examples of characters like Rayber and Sheppard should give us
pause in the summer of 2020, as America battles a health pandemic and
violent instances of racial injustice. In both cases, our political,
medical, and academic authorities may be motivated by tenderness to fix
these problems, but when rightly read, O’Connor reminds us that seeking
health and racial justice without charity can easily lead to
American-style labor camps and gas chambers.
What this may mean in terms of the COVID-19 response I’ll leave to
the reader to discern; regarding racial injustice, the obvious answer is
character assassination, even of those who have long been resting in
their graves. As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s
grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity.
Racist hunts, like all witch hunts, appear necessary when otherwise good
things, like justice, are tethered to the latest intellectual theories
rather than the time-honored, self-sacrificing demands of charity. One
need not be a Christian to accept this—Plato and Aristotle worried as
much as Thomas Aquinas about justice without friendship. Whatever
opinions O’Connor held about race—and the evidence suggests they are not
nearly as shocking as Elie claims—the vision proffered by her fiction
contains vital tools for helping us navigate the difficult terrain in
which we’re traveling as human beings and citizens. What a shame it
would be if she were subjected to the very terror she predicted.
