O'Connor, Flannery - Helen S. Garson (essay date 1987)
Helen S. Garson (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: Garson, Helen S. “Cold Comfort: Parents and Children in the Work of Flannery O'Connor.” In Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited, edited by Karl-Heinz Westarps and Jan Nordby Gretlund, pp. 113-22. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1987.
[In the following essay, Garson regards the theme of parents and children as an important one in O'Connor's fiction.]
Her world was narrow, said the poet, Elizabeth Bishop, of Flannery O'Connor's stories. A limited number of themes interested O'Connor; and certain character types and relationships appear and reappear to form a pattern in the two novels and the two short story collections. More than half the stories focus on parents and children: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons. Rarely are there two parents. Sometimes there are surrogate parents, grandfathers, uncles, granduncles. Just as most of the families have a single...
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