O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor is both a southerner and a catholic and she uses both to fuel her characters and plots in her writings. I am also a catholic and somewhat of a southerner. I was born in Chicago, but moved to Memphis when I was pretty young. In her stories, she incorporates the old southern way of thinking and dressing and such into many of her characters. For example, the grandmother in “A Good Man,” the wife and Parker in “Parker’s Back,” and the wife and husband in “Revelation.” Each one of these characters shares some traditional southern traits. She does this, I feel, because she does not want her writings to become ordinary. She wants her writings to reflect how people in the old south behaved. Traditional southerners behaved in a way that for many was very religious, racist, and a way of showing respect to elders and the way life was. All three women characters in the three stories that we read are very religious and two out of the three were very racist. They believed that they were part of a higher class of people and that if you were from a good family then you were part of the higher class, and of course if you were white. By making these people reflect traditional southern customs, she makes them unlike what most people are writing about. Most writers are writing about modern people in gray suits and not paying attention to what O’Connor called ‘the greater freaks’, which to her where the traditional southerners. It is also interesting that she would include religion in many of her stories because she was a Catholic, which was, and still somewhat is, frowned upon in the south. Most southerners were raised Baptist which carries a whole different set of norms than Catholicism. I believe that she included religion because, although not Baptist, she was very religious and saw that religion was the only way to see the good in the world.