SOURCE: Walters, Mark. “Violence and Comedy in the Works of Flannery O'Connor.” In New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, edited by Regina Barreca, pp. 185-92. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992.

[In the following essay, Walters views O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective in order to examine the relationship between violence and comedy in her work.]

Flannery O'Connor is not often read from a feminist perspective. This is not surprising; she herself made clear that she was largely concerned with spiritual matters, with the “demonstration of God's mystery at work in the world.” Understandably, then, much O'Connor criticism has centered on the metaphysical implications of her fiction. But certainly that fiction should be addressed within contexts other than those she herself deliberately articulated, and certainly the effects on her art of her being female, female in a patriarchal South, merit attention. I believe, in fact, that looking at O'Connor's work from a feminist perspective can add much to the ongoing discussion of its most significant and mystifying element, i.e., the relationship between violence and comedy.

For O'Connor, or any American woman, to make comedy was and is in itself an act of defiance. Humor, of course, has long been connected to rebellion or, at the very least, irreverence. But for the female writer this rebellion seems three-fold: she typically debunks a certain convention, as would any male humorist; in the very process of debunking, she revolts against traditional expectations of female passivity; and by engaging in comedy, she calls into question the long-standing American belief that women are not and should not be funny.

As Alfred Habegger suggests in his study of 19th-century writers, because women were perceived as saints, they could not indulge in comedy and still maintain that particular illusion; to be funny was to be unladylike (141). Obviously, one effect of making women saints, making them “ladies,” is to deny them sexuality, to keep them “little girls” forever. Habegger asserts that this attitude still exists; and I believe that it is one conflict point from which we might read O'Connor's humor.

In a 1955 letter to her editor, Catherine Carver, O'Connor writes:

I have just got through talking to one of our honorable regional (with a vengeance) bodies. … After my talk, one lady shook my hand and said ‘That was such a nice dispensation you gave us, honey.’ Another said, ‘What's wrong with your leg, sugar?’ I'll be real glad when I get too old for them to sugar me.

(Letters [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor] 120)

Because O'Connor was not only aware of but seemingly perturbed by the Milledgeville community's seeing her as the eternal child (she was thirty years old at the time of this letter), one function of her humor may have been to assert her adulthood, and in turn, her sexuality. Comedy may have allowed her to become something other than a saint. Moreover, it is significant that those whom O'Connor perceived as most culpable in the maintenance of that saint/child illusion were the ladies of the community themselves.

Habegger also asserts that “American humor has been the literature … of bad boys defying a civilization seen as feminine” (119). Certainly, if this is true, a woman is forced to identify against herself while reading American comedy (cf. Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader). But to begin practicing that art, to begin writing, necessarily entails not just identification against the self, but an attack on that self. Whether the writer's protagonist is male or female, the convention being defied is, in American humor, feminine. Naturally this places the woman humorist in a quandary: to relinquish her art is to confirm women's exclusion from comedy and to exercise it is to rebel against her “self.”

But this is in fact a quandary only if the female humorist buys into the notion that women are to be equated with civilizing forces. If she does not buy into this, then she becomes a kind of resisting writer, either depicting the forces to be rebelled against as unmistakably masculine or, alternately, manifesting them in grotesquely ladylike figures who are then killed off. It is perhaps more than coincidence that the Southern ladies of Milledgeville—ladies for whom propriety assumed great importance—were among the most disapproving critics of O'Connor's work, and that such ladies repeatedly meet violent (and comic) ends in that work.

I want to assert, though, that O'Connor was more than a little ambivalent about killing off such ladies, that she could never detach herself completely from them, and that this simultaneous sympathy and repulsion for the women about whom she grew up informed and darkened her comedy. In support of this reading, I want to look particularly at O'Connor's treatment of mother-daughter relationships in her work and at her own relationship with her mother, Regina O'Connor. I also want to suggest how this ambivalence leads into her usurpation of the mother-in-law joke and, further, how such a joke inevitably becomes an attack on the self.

Louise Westling has noted the mother-daughter patterns in O'Connor's short stories and has pointed to the recurrent “hardworking widow who supports and cares for her large, physically marred girl” (510). That the mother is representative of patriarchal values—she is, most often, a “lady”—and that the daughter is just as often disagreeable and defiant, but unable or unwilling to relinquish entirely the mother-daughter bond, is significant. A daughter's ambivalence toward her mother marks these stories and, as I will point out, O'Connor's personal letters.

A number of critics have suggested that a specific strain of humor—the mother-in-law joke—arose from men's perception of the strong mother-daughter bond. The humor of these jokes rests most often upon the doing of violence to the mother-in-law, who is equated with civilizing forces. It is especially helpful to look at this particular kind of comedy with regard to O'Connor because, unlike humor in general, it explicitly demands that female bonding which critics have often overlooked in her fiction. Seeing that O'Connor exercised a darker and more complex variation of the mother-in-law joke while not denying the bond on which it rested, clarifies the possibility that her violent comedy arose from ambivalent concerns inseparable from her femaleness.

Loxley F. Nichols has traced the humor of many of O'Connor's personal letters to a playful conflict between the writer and her mother, a conflict that, she suggests, at times became uneasy and more clearly angry (28). For instance, O'Connor writes:

The other day she [Regina] asked me why I didn't try to write something that people like instead of the kind of thing I do write. Do you think, she said, that you are really using the talent God gave you when you don't write something that a lot, a LOT, of people like? This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my bloodpressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

(Letters 326)

Obviously, Regina was a lady for whom decorum was primary. O'Connor, on the other hand, was the daughter who was at once repressed by and dependent upon her. On a larger level, with Regina as representative of the female community of Milledgeville, O'Connor is again “sugar,” the eternal child whose mother is likewise an eternal innocent in the patriarchy that sees them both as saints. But O'Connor could never completely extricate herself from the ladylike idea which held her in check; in fact, Nichols argues convincingly that O'Connor's letters indicate that she was “more like Regina than she realized or cared to admit” (25). And so like those male humorists who write mother-in-law jokes in response to the threat of female bonding to their own primacy and control, O'Connor's own sense of her relationship to her mother(s) may have contributed to her version of the same joke.

In “Greenleaf,” for instance, O'Connor describes Mrs. May in terms which establish her as the conventional mother-in-law figure, this despite the fact that her only children—two sons—remain unmarried. We first see her standing at her bedroom window: “Green rubber curlers sprouted neatly over her forehead and her face beneath them was smooth as concrete with an egg-white paste that drew the wrinkles out while she slept” (311). O'Connor further plays out the lines of the joke by setting Mrs. May up as that oppressive and civilizing force against which is pitted the easygoing male, Mr. Greenleaf, her hired-hand, who is responsible for her land and livestock—that to which she is most closely bound—and so is representative of the persecuted son-in-law in this daughterless story. Appropriately, Mrs. May sees Greenleaf as lazy and irresponsible, as “too shiftless to go out and look for another job” (313). Mrs. May will of course get her come-uppance, violently.

But what distinguishes O'Connor's joke from the masculine version and what suggests that she was not extricating herself completely from that mother figure is that she restricts the point of view to Mrs. May, giving us the sense that—despite the irony of the narrative—the males are indeed outsiders. O'Connor also depicts the males closest to Mrs. May—her sons—as decidedly unsympathetic and, further, in the habit of addressing their mother in the very sorts of terms against which O'Connor herself bristled: “sweetheart” and “sugarpie.” Finally, by not providing Mrs. May with a literal daughter, O'Connor allows her to assume a version of that role herself: Mrs. May is at once matriarchal protectress and wooed maiden, a grotesque representative of the very bond upon which the mother-in-law joke rests. Her would-be lover is the bull who stands beneath her bedroom window, “gaunt and long-legged … chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor” (312).

Despite at first portraying the bull as an awkward and naive country youth—traditionally the least threatening of a girl's suitors—O'Connor begins to make clear that something is in fact to be feared and that that something is unmistakably masculine, Dionysian, sexual. Still beneath Mrs. May's bedroom window: “The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown. She had closed the blind then; in a few seconds she heard him move off heavily” (312). But what is just darkly hinted at in the early stages of the story is realized at the conclusion: the bull, that ostensibly bumbling youth who calls for his sweetheart beneath her bedroom window, meets Mrs. May on his own turf, so to speak, and brutally consummates their relationship:

[Mrs. May] stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip.

(333)

O'Connor has, at this point, played out the mother-in-law joke: the aggressive matriarch has been dispatched forcefully before the representative son-in-law—Mr. Greenleaf—can arrive to help. The persecuted male has indirectly (here, through the bull) reasserted his dominance and ruptured the mother-daughter bond without relinquishing the appearance of being likeable and easygoing.

But O'Connor also plays out this joke from a decidedly feminine perspective. She merges the matriarchal identity with that of the pursued daughter, and she strips the country youth of his guileless appearance, depicting his ultimate conquest in frightening and sexual terms. O'Connor thus rewrites one version of the marriage myth.

But perhaps most significant, overall, is that O'Connor does in fact kill Mrs. May. Through her story she is able to overthrow the well-bred lady to whom she could only respond with frustrated silence in her actual life. But because she could not seem to separate herself entirely from that ladylike idea, those ladylike figures, O'Connor would seem to be killing a part of herself in these stories, a necessary consequence of such ambivalence. To get at this issue more precisely, it is helpful to consider the theme of female self-hatred.

Ellen Moers suggests that “the savagery of girlhood,” the themes of “self-hatred” and “the impetus to self-destruction,” account for the persistence of the Modern Female Gothic (107). She attributes these themes to “the female's compulsion to visualize the self,” to consider whether or not she is pretty. Moers concerns herself with the way this compulsion is expressed in Southern women writers' depiction of “freaks,” and she calls attention to Freud's study, “The Uncanny,” as a means of getting at the base of Southern Gothic horror.

Moers, however, does not do as much with Freud's work as she might to connect it to the Southern writer's creation of the “grotesque.” Freud asserted that the uncanny exists “when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (157). Elements making up the uncanny can include fears of castration, penetration, and being devoured. (Significantly, not only is Mrs. May in “Greenleaf” penetrated, but at the beginning of the story she dreams of being eaten by the bull.) Especially important to our discussion of O'Connor, though, is a point made by Claire Katz, that the “grotesque” results from the “admixture of the uncanny and the comic” (59). In other words, we might see the “grotesque” as the striking manifestation of the meeting between fear and the desire to revolt against or overthrow that fear. Moers makes a similar point, but she neglects to mention the comic, an omission that results in a one-sided reading of the Female Gothic, the dark side only.

We might, however, make use of Moers' thesis that the employment of the grotesque signals a “self-hating self,” a response to the patriarchal emphasis on beauty that women have adopted and maintained with rigor.

Hulga is the name that Joy Hopewell, in “Good Country People,” assumes to mark her ugliness. She goes clomping about on her wooden leg, wearing a “six-year-old skirt and yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it,” and, according to her mother, she has “never danced a step or had any normal good times” (274). She is, according to traditional feminine standards, a freak; and she must be, according to Moers' thesis, an expression of O'Connor's self-hate. But this is the point at which I want to leave Moers and suggest a way in which we might read a concluding scene in the story as a comic display of anger directed away from the self.

With the arrival of Manley Pointer, we are set up for another version of the naive country suitor unmasked and, consequently, another rewriting of the marriage myth. Pointer, the young Bible salesman, after portraying himself as an innocent, sexually seduces Hulga in order to steal her wooden leg.

Louise Westling argues that in this seduction scene, O'Connor is providing “the profound symbolic material … for an understanding of rape” (519). But what Westling fails to account for is O'Connor's use of the grotesque, her merging of the uncanny and the comic, and how this allows her and Hulga to triumph over Manley Pointer.

Nichols, again with reference to the personal letters, shows that “even on those occasions when O'Connor appears not to have the upper hand, when laughter is seemingly provoked at her expense, a closer look reveals that she is still in control, still manipulating the scene” (21). She cites O'Connor's recordings of a number of exchanges in which Regina is allowed the last word, a last word whose absurdity is amplified by O'Connor's own silence. A review of the concluding lines of dialogue in most of O'Connor's short stories will, I contend, demonstrate the same strategy.

At the conclusion of the Manley-Hulga seduction scene, a scene in which two elements of the uncanny—penetration and castration—are enacted, O'Connor grants Manley the final and most obviously ridiculous line: “‘you ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born’” (291). In other words, O'Connor turns her wit on the violator, rebels against him, by allowing him to speak and Hulga to remain silent.

But O'Connor does not end the story with that scene. She takes us back to those representative ladies, Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, and, in the final comic indictment of that group's passivity, blindness, and resulting complicity in at least one version of the marriage myth, gives them, respectively, the following lines: “‘[Manley] was so simple … but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.’” And “‘Some can't be that simple … I know I never could’” (291).

Certainly O'Connor's choosing to conclude with “the lady” as comic target suggests her own understanding of what oppressive force needed first to be overturned in the struggle for freedom, just as her earlier allowing of Joy/Hulga to be as easily duped suggests how close she was to the limitations of that oppressive force. In this proximity to and distance from her subject matter we find the roots of that ambivalence which gave rise to her humor. We see the comic writer's necessary denial of and bonding with the Lady within herself, a process which provokes her art and makes it uniquely female.

Works Cited

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” On Creativity and the Unconscious. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper, 1958. 157.

Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Katz, Claire. “Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 46.1 (March 1974): 54-67.

Nichols, Loxley F. “Flannery O'Connor's ‘Intellectual Vaudeville’: Masks of Mother and Daughter.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 20.2 (Fall 1987): 15-30.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. 1976. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

O'Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1978, 271-91.

———. “Greenleaf.” Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1978, 311-34.

———. Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1979.

Westling, Louise. “Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters.” Twentieth-Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 24.2 (Winter 1978): 510-22.