The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1971
Ms. Hen has had this book on her Kindle app for a while, and
she started to read it some time ago, but never finished. She decided to
read it while she was working, since her job is boring these days. She found it
difficult to concentrate on it because the people around her talk a lot. But
she finished it, and she enjoyed it, though she had some issues with it.
Ms. Hen has always been a fan of Flannery; she first read
her because they share a last name, but she started to love her because her
stories are grotesque and shocking. When she read her before, she didn’t read the
stories with a Catholic lens, and didn’t understand how they could be Catholic,
but during this reading, she understands what that means. Flannery was a
Catholic that lived in the South, which is a certain kind of Catholic. She and
her kind were like salmon swimming upstream.
Ms. Hen reread some of her favorites, “A Good Man is Hard to
Find,” and “Good Country People.” These stories are morality tales and try to
show right from wrong. Ms. Hen did some research about “A Good Man is Hard to
Find,” and she discovered that Flannery meant to show that there are two kinds
of bad people, ones who are bad and know they’re bad, and ones that think they’re good, but
are actually bad. This story tries to show that there are no good people, only
bad people. Ms. Hen doesn’t know if this is true in the world, but it’s the
truth that Flannery knew. In “Good Country People,” a young woman gets tricked
into thinking a man is interested in her, and he hurts her. Several of these
stories show that people are scoundrels no matter what they do, and right and
wrong is a black and white area. Ms. Hen does not agree that everything is
always black and white; she thinks there are many shades of gray in the world.
Ms. Hen was shocked by some of the language in this
collection, and her profuse use of the “n” word, but she knew that it was
written a long time ago, and people spoke differently then, especially in the
South. She wanted to find out if Flannery was a racist, because several of her
stories are about racism. She found a great article, which you can
read here:
She found out that Flannery wanted people think she
was socially conscious, but in her letters she wrote the truth, that she didn’t
think much of African Americans. She didn’t like integration, and she didn’t
want anything to do with people not like herself.
When Ms. Hen was in writing school, all the teachers loved
Flannery O’Connor. She is a darling of MFA programs because she wrote perfect
short stories, and it doesn’t matter to them that she saw the world from a different point of view than educated liberals have now. She has become more famous posthumously
than during her life, and Ms. Hen doesn’t know how people should feel about her
now. She was a racist, but that isn’t surprising given when and where she
lived. Should we vilify her now because we don’t like her politics from today’s
standards? It’s an ethical question, and there are several shades of gray, not
right or wrong. She was a great writer, but we can’t judge the artist for the
art.
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