[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 parent, almost always there is only one child, very rarely siblings.

The family in O'Connor's stories bears no resemblance to most we associate with Southern fiction, although unquestionably they are of the Gothic, grotesque school. There is, as one critic states, “horror … at the core of family life,”¹ in the stories of O'Connor. In all her work, parents and children want and expect things of each other that can never be given. Either the parents are cold, calculating, selfish, or totally indifferent to the child, as in her stories of parents with small children; or the children are people who are grown up only chronologically, who remain adolescents, totally dependent, hostile, and filled with a sense of self-importance and superiority. In the smoldering atmosphere of anger, rejection, and repulsion, violence usually erupts. If the child does not kill himself or the parent directly, something he does leads to an act which is a type of violation. Fear and repression often bring about a displacement of anger. Sometimes, but this is rare, the result of the explosive act is the beginning of understanding. But more often, the reader is left to sort out the effects of the final deeds on the characters.

Because there are too many stories to discuss in a short paper, I have chosen a few which seem to me to represent major character types as well as significant concerns about relationships in O'Connor's stories. In some of the stories the parent-child relationship is central; in others it is peripheral. Yet, whether or not the focus is on the family, the basic behavior remains unchanged. “I really don't know much about children, that is … what goes on in their minds. I like to watch them from outside.” (HB [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor] p. 529). O'Connor wrote in a letter to a friend. But a number of her stories concern small children. In “The River” and “The Lame Shall Enter First” the central theme pertains to the failures of the parents to care for or about their sons, so that both boys commit suicide. In an ironic contrast, although both children want to escape, Harry, away from his mother, Norton, to his dead mother, both seek the same thing basically. They want escape, but more than that, Harry longs for an unknown kingdom of love that has been promised him, and Norton longs for reunion with the loving dead mother he knew. For each child, life as it is contains coldness, emptiness, and cruelty. Although both boys are too young to have any comprehension of death, nevertheless, death holds more expectation for them than life does. The fact that Norton has only a father, and Harry has two parents, or that Norton's father is ostensibly an upright man, whereas Harry's parents seem to have no purpose whatsoever, does not alter the resemblances between the families. In each, the boy appears to be little more than a nuisance that the adult has to bother with. Not that much is done for or given to the child, but his very existence interferes with the parent's life. The burdensome children have no place in the world. Harry is sent off with baby sitters so that the parents are free of responsibility; Norton's father sees him as a trial he must put up with. Harry's mother, Mrs. Ashfield, speaks of her child as a liar; Norton's father, Mr. Sheppard, constantly refers to his son as selfish. Neither parent seeks or finds anything of value in the child. Mrs. Ashfield and Sheppard remain locked in their own lives, and the lost children find a way out of the dread of the emptiness of daily existence. Without conscious recognition that he is seeking death because he longs for love, each child kills himself: Harry by drowning, Norton by hanging—violent, and Gothic choices, but logical for the child. Harry has been promised by a preacher the “River of Faith, … of Life, … of Love, … the rich red river of Jesus' blood.” (CS [The Complete Stories] p. 165). In seeking that love the child chooses literally to become a part of the river. Norton, promised by an older boy that he will be reunited with his mother in heaven if he does not live long enough to become a sinner, tries to launch himself into space, where he is certain he has seen his mother. When Harry tells his mother about his baptism he states: “… I'm not the same now … I count.” (CS p. 171). The disinterested mother makes no effort to learn what he means, and the next morning, Harry returns to that “strange country” he had been baptized in, determined to baptize himself again, but without the help of anyone, and to continue until he “found the Kingdom of Christ in the river.” (CS p. 173). Sheppard, like Mrs. Ashfield ignores the signals. He either misses, or underestimates, or is hostile to what he perceives to be his son's view of religion, space, and most of all the child's continuing grief over the loss of his mother. The father finds the boy's sorrow excessive and unnatural. For his child has no charity.

Many critics have pointed to O'Connor's ironic naming of the father in “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Sheppard, the father, does not protect his own flock, but seeks others to shepherd. In “The River,” the family name of “Ashfield” stands in stark contrast to the natural environment where the boy seeks and finds his death, “the strange woods” that he has never seen before—the woods a symbol of the mystery of religion,—and the muddy river in which he seeks the love he has never known. The fact that O'Connor has a four year old boy take another name needs to be noted, because the writer stresses it at several points in the story and because it is something she does also in “Good Country People” and “The Comforts of Home.” Name changes tell us about the other self the character wants to be. Difficult as it is to accept even the unconscious desire for such change in a small child, it is significant in the structure of the story, “The River.” Harry, upon hearing the preacher's name, decides to adopt it. He renames himself “Bevel.” Since name changes are made not only for their own sake—that is, as an indication of conflict in the character—but also because they hold a particular meaning in a story, we find some interesting possibilities in the name Bevel. Bevel is the slant of a line when not at right angles with another; a bevel gear cuts into a surface; a bevel square is an adjustable instrument for drawing angles or adjusting the surface of work to a particular inclination. The fact that the preacher's full name is Bevel Summers serves to reinforce the difference between Harry Ashfield, the child, and Bevel Summers, the boy preacher. When Summers takes hold of Harry to baptize him, the child recognizes in the preacher deep intent and seriousness of a kind he has never encountered before. Thus, symbolically, the name suggests what Harry seeks. O'Connor stresses the importance of the name change in a subtle way throughout the story. At the beginning, as soon as the baby sitter takes him from the family apartment and asks his name, the child tells her it is Bevel; from that point on, the author speaks of him as Bevel, until the sitter returns him to his home that night. There, Mrs. Ashfield speaks of him as Harry, and she mocks his change of name. When Harry leaves the apartment the next morning, intent on returning to the river, the author gives him no name at all: he is neither Harry nor Bevel, but only “he” for the remainder of the story. Harry/Bevel, the lost child is the seeker, the slant of line, the adjustable instrument.

The endings of the two stories are different in ways that are characteristic of changes between the early and later stories. Where the story “The River” concludes with the death of Harry, “The Lame Shall Enter First” bears a resemblance at the end to another parent child story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” In that story, at the moment of his mother's death, the son feels a rush of love for her—too late of course—and we are told that a burden of guilt and sorrow lies before him. In that same collection of stories, the father in “The Lame Shall Enter First” recognizes that he has done more for a stranger than for his own son. Three times he repeats that statement—which is an affirmation of his betrayal, yet ironically, recognition comes too late. Thinking he can make it all up to the boy, and filled with “a rush of agonizing love” (CS p. 481) he rushes to tell his son that he loves him, and that he will never fail him again. But for Sheppard as for Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” self-knowledge comes too late. Both Sheppard and Julian will live out lives in sorrow and guilt. O'Connor strikes the perfect chord, poignant and melancholy in both endings. She touches the reader's deepest feelings, the recognition of the might-have-been's of human relationships.

Another type of parent child dissociation is seen in two stories in which the parent child figures are mother and daughter. In one, “Good Country People,” they are central; in the other, “Revelation,” the mother and daughter are significant in the role they play for the major character, who has the revelation.

“Good Country People” has a familiar type of O'Connor character, the “thirtyish adolescents [who] do battle with their old mothers.”² Each is a grown single child who lives with his or her parent. In “Good Country People,” Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter, Joy, live together on a rural Southern farm. Like the boy, Harry, in “The River,” Joy tries to change her identity by changing her name to Hulga, a name whose sound and connotation suggest the heavy physical ugliness which she emphasizes as well as the heaviness of spirit which is hers. Joy/Hulga sees the change of name as a major triumph in her lifelong battle with her mother, for “her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy,” but she “had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.” (CS p. 275). Hulga has an artificial, wooden leg, a weak heart, a Ph.D. in philosophy, and very little to do in her life. The wooden leg has deformed “her whole character,”³ states Miles Orvell. Her body, says Josephine Hendin, “has formed her mind, shaped her identity, and turned her life into a reaction against her own body.”⁴ Carter Martin sees the artificial leg as the symbol of Hulga's soul.⁵ On the other hand, Stanley Hyman sees Hulga as an intentional self-caricature, of the “cruelest” kind.⁶

In addition to her obvious resemblances to O'Connor Joy/Hulga has attributes that relate her to Mary Grace in “Revelation,” to Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” to Mrs. May's two sons in “Greenleaf,” and to Asbury in “The Enduring Chill.” Hulga despises or denies everything her mother values; yet for the mother the daughter “becomes a symbol of everything Mrs. Hopewell wants to deny.”⁷ The mother's world is the life of the farm, which she, a divorced woman, runs with the aid of a tenant family. Her perceptions are so limited she cannot understand human suffering, certainly not her daughter's. She is certain that if her daughter looked on the bright side of things she could be beautiful. Instead, her glum daughter, who is “brilliant” but “without a grain of sense,” dislikes what the bright side holds: “dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men.” (CS p. 276). Although Joy/Hulga is a grown woman, Mrs. Hopewell treats her as if she were a child. And while the daughter resents the mother's overprotection, she continues to play the role of the child. She is dependent, does not work on the farm, behaves badly with guests, is sullen and rude, and childishly calls attention to herself constantly by needlessly dragging the wooden leg across the floor. Her clothing is that of an adolescent; and when she meets a Bible salesman, thirty-two year old Joy/Hulga tells him at first that she is seventeen. Literally crippled in her physical body, Joy is also crippled by her mother's “love.” Mrs. Hopewell's views are uttered, as Orvell says, “with a force … staggering in its banality.”⁸ All the cliches and platitudes one can think of are Mrs. Hopewell's: “It takes all kinds to make a world,” she tells Mrs. Freeman, the tenant farmwoman. “Nothing is perfect.” “Other people have their opinions too.” (CS pp. 272-273). But her sweet banalities are only surface expressions, for the irony is that Mrs. Hopewell doesn't accept her daughter's difference. Mrs. Hopewell, certain that she knows what a lady is, wants her daughter to fit that description. Equally convinced that she knows what good country people are, Mrs. Hopewell identifies the Bible salesman as one of that breed, thus indirectly and unwittingly encouraging her daughter to take up with the man. Hulga, thinking to deceive him, is left deceived and helpless at the end, a victim not only of her own making and his, but also of her own childlike, though hidden, acceptance of her mother's views.

The mother-daughter relationship in “Revelation” bears multiple similarities to the earlier story. The unnamed mother of Mary Grace is like almost all of the mothers in O'Connor's stories; they are women who expect “their children to conform to stereotyped, though alien, patterns of behavior and outlook.”⁹ And Mary Grace, herself, resembles the other daughters of the fiction; she is unattractive, overweight, clumsy looking. Her face is blue with acne. Her clothing while different reminds us of Hulga's. Further, Mary Grace is another daughter who is an intellectual. Like Hulga, she reads constantly. But reading for both of the young women is more than a desire for knowledge. Each tries desperately to escape the mother, to close out sight and sound of the person she wants to be freed of and cannot be. Hulga is not free because of her illness, and Mary Grace is still a student. Dependency on the parent is so great that it plays an important part in the contempt with which each of the young women regards her mother

Mary Grace's mother, well-dressed, well-mannered, speaks the same banal language as Mrs. Hopewell. She chats meaninglessly at first with the central character of the story, Mrs. Turpin, in a doctor's reception room, where she waits with her daughter, and Mrs. Turpin waits with her husband. As the wait becomes longer, the mother-daughter relationship becomes well-defined. A strong hostility exists between the two, one that neither voices directly, but the tension is obvious. As the daughter focuses her anger on Mrs. Turpin, rather than on her mother, who is the real source of it, the mother uses Mrs. Turpin as a means of talking indirectly about her daughter. Mary Grace is a bookworm, who goes to a college her mother does not approve of. And she spends all her time reading, never going out to have fun, something the mother, like Hulga's mother, thinks the daughter should be doing. The mother turns remarks of Mrs. Turpin's about tempers and pleasantness to her advantage so that she can needle her daughter. “‘I think the worst thing in the world,’ she said’is an ungrateful person.’” (CS p. 499). She continues, more pointedly and explicitly with each statement, as she mentions knowing “a girl” who has everything anyone could want, and who is an unpleasant, critical complainer. No matter that the Turpins ignore her, as the mother does. The intimacy between her mother and total strangers, making her the target, becomes unbearable for Mary Grace and she strikes out. But Mary Grace cannot attack the real focus of her anger, her mother; in fact, she cannot even admit to herself that it is the mother she would like to injure. No longer able to contain her rage, she hurls her book at Mrs. Turpin. A twin of Hulga, who protects herself from her relationship with her mother by using the tenant farm woman, Mrs. Freeman, as a deflector of sorts, Mary Grace avoids any direct encounter with her mother. Her infantile dependency is revealed as the girl lies on the floor, her fingers “gripped like a baby's” (CS p. 501) around her mother's thumb. Though the mother moans as she sits on the floor next to her daughter awaiting an ambulance and then leaves quietly with her as Mary Grace is taken out, nothing has changed or will change. The temporary friendship the mother struck up will be forgotten, but Mary Grace has once more proved, this time more forcefully and devastatingly, that she lacks all the qualities the mother prizes. Further, her dependency on her mother has only been reinforced. The damage she has done has been to herself.

“The indefatigably optimistic mother,” a phrase used by Josephine Hendin, appears even more obvious in those stories in which the relationship is that of mother and grown son: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Greenleaf,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Comforts of Home,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Although the mothers are different in various ways, their similarities far outnumber the differences. Julian's mother, Mrs. Chestny, resembles the grandmother, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in her concern about proper clothing, about recognition of social status, in her distorted memories of an elegant past, and her sense of racial superiority. Their focus on appearance, on correct behavior, on class structure is also akin to that of Mrs. May in “Greenleaf.” The five women live with their children; all have a blindness to their offspring's failings and failures; all have a kind of innocence about the world (although Mrs. May has less than the others); and all, except Asbury Fox's mother in “The Enduring Chill,” die as the result of violent action.

Just as the women remind us of one another, so do the sons. With the exception of Bailey, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the sons are unmarried and dependent on their mothers, physically and financially. Yet, the mothers take considerable pride in the children, exaggerating their achievements and praising them to anyone and everyone, to friends, relatives, neighbors, and total strangers they encounter. The sons appear to take the exaggerated pride of the mothers as their due, even when they themselves have moments of doubt and recognition about their limited abilities. Filled with a sense of superiority to their mothers, they not only accept the excessive regard in which they are held, they feel misunderstood and unappreciated by those very parents.

Like the mothers in “Good Country People” and “Revelation” these women dominate their children, who respond with acts of deflected hatred. The politeness and platitudes infuriate the sons. They long to rebel, yet fear it. They live in an atmosphere of silent fury, of repulsion, and impotence. Direct confrontation must be avoided and rage displaced. The sons long for freedom which can come only with their own deaths or their mother's; ironically, they are too weak, too unprepared for a life on their own, too dependent on others, to be able to function without the strong mother. But, directly, or indirectly, the sons play some role in the death of the mother, as the fathers do in the death of the sons in “The River” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Bailey's inability to assert himself against his mother's pressures leads the family to the fatal area in which they are all murdered by The Misfit; Julian's deliberate provocation of his mother and the subsequent attack on her by a black woman lead to her death; Wesley and Scofield May's refusal to help their mother capture the Greenleaf's bull brings about the death Mrs. May has predicted would come to her at any moment; and Thomas, in “The Comforts of Home,” accidentally shoots his mother, while aiming to kill the young woman he sees as the rival for his mother's affections.

Only in “The Enduring Chill” is there no death, although Asbury Fox, because of serious illness which he thinks is a prelude to his imminent death, has come home reluctantly and angrily to die. Asbury's relationship to his mother, as well as her views of him, their physical surroundings and the ironic turn at the end of the story, remind us of the mother and daughter in “Good Country People.” Each, wanting to thwart the mother, yet afraid of direct confrontation, takes action which injures him or her, not the mother. Warned by the blacks on the farm of his mother's injunction about drinking unpasteurized milk, yet not knowing the scientific reasons for it, Asbury defiantly breaks the rule. Hulga, constantly told by her mother about young girls having a good time with nice young men, sets out to seduce the apparently simple, apparently religious Bible salesman. In each situation, they pay a heavy price for their actions: Asbury ruins his health and will be dependent on his mother for the rest of his days; Hulga loses her artificial leg, the symbol of her freedom, the loss is a mocking reminder of her dependency.

The most complex of the mother-son relationships is that of Thomas and his mother in “The Comforts of Home.” As in the father-son story, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” a third person becomes involved in the situation. But the complexity is greater here because in this instance the son is a grown man in his thirties and the outsider is a woman. A name change occurs also in this story; however, in “The Comforts of Home” it is the outsider who rejects her original name for a new one. Sarah Ham becomes Star Drake; from hog to male duck, the suggestion is made. But a drake is also a term for an eighteenth century cannon. The name suggests a masculine force that Thomas himself lacks. Sarah/Star's presence undermines Thomas in ways that become more and more untenable. Like a child, he is unwilling to share his mother with anyone; he is jealous of the loss of complete attention, and he insists that his mother choose between him and the stranger. He has an ever growing sense of panic and rage when his mother ignores his ultimatum. Feeling threatened to the core of his being, Thomas begins to sense the constant taunting presence of his dead, violent, and exploitive father. The father's physical power and force are referred to both specifically and obliquely in ways that outline Thomas' own lack of these. In the final scene, in the struggle between Thomas and Sarah/Star, it is the father's voice that yells “fire” in Thomas' ear, when the mother thrusts herself in front of the younger woman “to protect her.”

As the reader looks at the quick sequence of events, it is easy to read the violent conclusion as an accident. Surely, Thomas did not mean to shoot the mother he has loved, the one whom, as we are told earlier in the story, “He loved because it was his nature to do so.” Yet, we are also told “there were times when he could not endure her love for him … times when … he sensed about him forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control.” (CS p. 385). At the end of the story, it is not Sarah/Star in front of him as he holds the gun and hears his father's words, but his mother. And he shoots. The deliberate listing of the order of events leads the reader to the fact that on some level the son wants to, acts to rid himself of the mother, to destroy finally and irrevocably all that she represents; his dependency on her, his endless childhood, his impotence. Only through her death can he free himself. It is a strange turn of the oedipal cycle. Thomas, through his violent action, unconscious though it appears, does what other adult children long for, but never do. They insult or provoke, as Julian does in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”; they snarl and quarrel, as the May boys do in “Greenleaf”; they are sullen, like the children in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; or they write secret Kafka-like letters, like Asbury does in “The Enduring Chill.” But only in “The Comforts of Home” is the confrontation a direct one.

One comes to the end of an examination of parent-child relationships in O'Connor with the recognition that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the narrow world with which she dealt, as one critic has said of her general approach, “she found the human heart a pretty dark place.”¹⁰ From the ties and bonds of blood there is no escape. Entrapped and dependent emotionally or physically because of age, or inability, or malaise, or illness, the child struggles in a circle from which there is no way out except death; and the darkness of death becomes preferable to the darkness of life. On O'Connor's darkling plain where there is neither joy nor love nor certitude, nor peace nor help for pain, it is not human love that protects, saves, or heals; there is only the light one must reach beyond the far, dark tree line.

Notes

1. Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O'Connor (Bloomington, Indiana, 1970), p. 150.

2. Hendin, p. 31.

3. Miles Orvell, Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Philadelphia, 1972), p. 139.

4. Hendin, p. 72.

5. Carter Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Kingsport, Tennessee, 1969).

6. Stanley Hyman, Flannery O'Connor (New York, 1970).

7. Hendin, p. 73.

8. Orvell, p. 137.

9. Martin, p. 223.

10. Warren Coffey, “Flannery O'Connor,” Commentary 5, vol. 4 (November 1965), 99.