SOURCE: Schleifer, Ronald. “Rural Gothic: The Sublime Rhetoric of Flannery O'Connor.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, edited by David Moden, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, pp. 175-86. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993.

[In the following essay, Schliefer proposes that O'Connor effectively uses the backdrop of the rural South and combines it with elements of the supernatural to present a world of powerful possibilities in her fiction.]

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners … We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in speech.

—Flannery O'Connor

In A Portrait of the Artist, that most ungothic of literary works, Stephen Dedalus explains to his friend Lynch that although Aristotle had not defined pity and terror in the Poetics, he, Stephen, had:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.¹

Stephen is attempting to define tragic art, yet his definitions are useful in developing a sense of the larger movements of gothic fiction—of the serious contemplation of the supernatural in literature. The novel, I would argue, seeks to achieve some sense of Stephen's “pity,” to create the texture of a social world in which we can join in sympathy with its human sufferers. What has characterized the great novelists in English—from Defoe through Fielding and George Eliot to the human comedy of Ulysses itself—is an abiding sense of sympathy for the human sufferer, or its opposite, a sense of irony toward him. Another way to say this is to argue that the novel seeks to hide and to erase its own origins, to present itself and its characters on their own terms within the context of “the texture of existence that surrounds” them,² whereas the gothic romance seeks to reveal its hidden origins. The novel deals with the middle between apocalyptic ends; it deals with ongoing life, with what William Spanos, following Kierkegaard, calls the “interesting … the intentionality of inter esse meaning ‘(i) “to be between,” (ii) “to be a matter of concern.”’”³

The gothic romance, on the other hand, seeks extremes; it seeks to articulate a sense—an “experience”—of the sublime, and to this end proceeds, as Peter Brooks has noted, by means of the logic of the excluded middle.⁴ “It is not made from the mean average or the typical,” Flannery O'Connor has written, “but from the hidden and often the most extreme” (MM [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose], 58); “it is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (MM, 113). The gothic romance, when it is serious, seeks essences; it seeks origins—both its own and its characters'. That is, it seeks Joyce's “secret cause” and achieves, in the course of that quest, the terror Stephen talks of. Origins are always supernatural; they are always beyond what can be known in a rational, logical way. That is why Stephen talks of the “mystical estate” of fatherhood as the basis of the Catholic Church in Ulysses, because “it is founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void.”⁵ Origins always articulate what O'Connor calls “mystery” and what the literary tradition calls the “sublime”: the manifestation and apprehension of the Sacred within quotidian reality. The gothic tradition arose, Brooks argues, “at the dead end of the Age of Reason, [when] the Sacred reasserted its claim to attention, but in the most primitive possible manifestations, as taboo and interdiction … [The gothic tradition] reasserts the presence in the world of forces which cannot be accounted for by the daylight self and the self-sufficient mind.”⁶ The daylight self and the self-sufficient mind are inhabitants of novels, where union with the human sufferer is enough and supernatural origins are beside the point: we need not know Moll Flanders' real parentage and name to feel the sympathetic understanding she occasions; and although Tom Jones's parentage is of some importance, it is precisely his indifference to such questions that makes him so appealing.

The gothic novel, however, presents precisely the need to discover origins: its characters, from The Castle of Otranto on, seek to find (or find thrust upon themselves) their parentage and their origins. The gothic is a haunted literature (it is no accident that both Joyce and O'Connor come from a Catholic tradition that takes the presence of the supernatural seriously), and what haunts it—whether it be Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, or the governess's ghosts in “The Turn of the Screw”—is some supernatural origin, some inhuman silence, forces beyond the self-sufficiency of the daylight self. These forces raise the question of identity and origin for the characters of gothic romance: “who and what am I?” ask Frankenstein's monster and Lewis's Monk and Kafka's K.; “how can I discover those forces beyond myself that originate myself, my own ‘secret cause’?” To put these questions in literary terms especially appropriate to Flannery O'Connor, how can we discover the origins of the power of literature, the originary force of metaphorical language? Such discoveries, as Stephen suggests, are made in terror, made in the loss of self within its secret cause. “To know oneself,” O'Connor has written, “is, above all, to know what one lacks” (MM, 35): it is a way of exploring the self and the world in a manner different from sympathetic understanding, through terror, violence, and encounter with the supernatural. O'Connor goes on to say,

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.

(MM, 35)

Seeking the Father of Souls—the secret cause and origin of identity and the “rich speech” that manifests identity—the writer and the reader must pass the dragon outside; they must, as O'Connor continually insists, recognize the literal reality of the Devil, the poverty of our self-sufficiency, and the necessity of grace. Such self-knowledge is a form of agony; as O'Connor says in what I believe is her best story, “The Artificial Nigger”—a story whose plot literally repeats the plot of St. Cyril's parable, with the artificial nigger a silent figure on the side of the road—such knowledge grows “out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.”⁷ It is this “mysterious passage” that the gothic tradition offers us when it is most serious, a passage to and through origin and identity to their secret cause.

Nowhere are origins and identity more pressing problems, as Roy Male has shown,⁸ than on the frontier, where one continually encounters “mysterious strangers” who raise questions about one's own as well as others' identity. One such modern frontier is O'Connor's South: it is especially a “frontier” for a Catholic writer in the predominantly fundamentalist Protestant South. Like the gothic romance Brooks describes, O'Connor seeks in her work to “reassert” the Sacred in the quotidian world, to situate her characters on the mysterious passage between the “manners” of novels and the “mystery” of union with secret causes. Tzvetan Todorov's study, The Fantastic, situates gothic fiction in the “frontier” between natural and supernatural understandings of experience. In fact, although he does not use it, “frontier” itself is an apt metaphor for the situation of the gothic as Todorov defines it: “the fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”⁹ This is O'Connor's “frontier,” that of a fiction which is always

pushing its own limits outward towards the limits of mystery, because … the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer … will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves.

(MM, 41-42)

The gothic, that is, presents a world beyond the understandings of metaphor, a world of mysterious inhuman forces that cannot adequately be explained by the metaphors of psychology or sociology or well-meaning humanism. It is a literature of presence unmediated by the substitutions of language, presences which are inhuman, terrifying, secret, sublime.

Yet O'Connor's frontier is more literal than this: her constant gesture is to place her characters between the natural and the supernatural by locating them, often on a literal journey, between the cities and the rural country of the South. “What the Southern Catholic writer is apt to find, when he descends within his imagination,” she notes, “is not Catholic life but the life of this region in which he is both native and alien” (MM, 197). Rufus Johnson in “The Lame Shall Enter First”—a character who embodies, as many of O'Connor's characters do, the reality of the Devil—has a history of “senseless destruction, windows smashed, city trash boxes set afire, tires slashed—the kind of thing … found where boys had been transplanted abruptly from the country to the city as this one had” (CS [The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor], 449). This is where the supernatural is most clearly and terrifyingly encountered—on those frontiers between the country and the city, faith and faithlessness, Protestant fundamentalism and cosmopolitan skepticism. Yet Rufus Johnson, as the well-meaning humanist-protagonist of the story learns, cannot be explained: he is simply a literal force, the force of the Devil, to be encountered on this “frontier.” “I have found,” O'Connor writes, “that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader” (MM, 40), and she found this because the strangeness of that frontier in our culture—that location of the clashes between terror and pity—forces upon her characters confrontations with themselves and origins beyond themselves. “While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” O'Connor says, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (MM, 40).

To speak of the “literal” force of characters is to speak of one particular aspect of rhetoric, of the power rhetoric has to make its effects as literal as events in the world. In such an examination of rhetoric the opposition between the literal and the figurative is beside the point: discourse creates literal effects that move us as effectively as nondiscursive events. In this understanding, discourse creates (or “occasions” or “provokes”) experience,¹⁰ and such experience is not subject to description in terms of the opposition between “literal” and “figurative” correspondence between discourse and its object. In this understanding, “rhetoric” is not the means of expressing pre-existing experiences; rather, it occasions experience.

O'Connor has precisely this concern with rhetoric. “The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with this God,” O'Connor has written, “is how he shall make the experience—which is both natural and supernatural—understandable, and credible, to his reader” (MM, 161). This is O'Connor's rhetorical problem, to make the Sacred literal in a world in which it seems at best metaphorical, originating in a mode of perception rather than in the created world. The problem of her rhetoric, then, is the problem of the gothic, the problem of the sublime.

The act of “facing oneself” is the recurrent action of O'Connor's stories, the action of gothic romance. Perhaps the most striking example of this is that of O. E. Parker in “Parker's Back,” who literally “faces” his own back with a giant tattoo of Jesus, the eyes of which “continued to look at him—still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence” (CS, 526). This is a representative gothic gesture: to make the metaphorical literal. Gothic romance does this, as Todorov and others have shown,¹¹ by narrating dream and nightmare as reality and projecting our deepest impulses and fears onto the landscape. The face on Parker's back—its “all-demanding” eyes—made Parker feel “that his dissatisfaction was gone, but he felt not quite like himself. It was as if he were himself but a stranger to himself, driving into a new country though everything he saw was familiar to him, even the night” (CS, 527). Such a feeling—a feeling that the reader is never sure Asbury achieves or not, hence the relative failure of “An Enduring Chill”—is what Freud calls the “uncanny,” “That class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”; “the uncanny,” Freud says, “would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were.”¹² The uncanny is familiar and strange, just as Parker is both familiar and strange to himself with God's constant eyes literally upon him, and he is in a country in which he is both native and alien.

That country is the country of the frontier, between the familiar and strange, the natural and supernatural. One gets there in O'Connor by “facing” oneself, by seeking origins and seeing oneself, as Mr. Head does, with God's own eyes, with God's eyes upon one. The gothic, I have suggested, “literalizes” the metaphorical: like the more general category of the sublime, it deals in effects rather than meanings and thus is not subject to the distinction between literal and figurative description; in it, this distinction collapses in the “literalness” of experience. O'Connor effects this collapse in the highly figurative rural speech of her characters that they understand as fully literal. It is for this reason that her backwoods characters so often use country clichés in their speech: her act is to make us see the familiar as strange, to make us see literally and thus strangely what we usually don't see at all because it is so familiar. “Christ!” someone says in the pool hall when Parker reveals his tattoo (CS, 526), and suddenly—almost supernaturally—O'Connor creates Christ's presence, as literal as it is for Parker, by means of the cliché of astonishment. In “The River,” Bevel learns of Jesus:

He had found out this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewell, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert. … If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “damn” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated him out of something sometime. …

(CS, 163)

Such a discovery is the terrifying revelation of what we already knew: “carpenter” in this context takes on the full presence of its literal meaning of a maker, and Bevel (something a carpenter makes) is faced with a terrifying prospect of seeing himself anew.

Such an “experience” of the literal—the confrontation with the literal self, its literal origin, a powerfully literal meaning—are the repeated actions in Flannery O'Connor, and they take place in what John Hawkes has called “her almost luridly bright pastoral world,”¹³ on borderlines between the city and the country or between day and night. This is why so often O'Connor's stories end at sunset, as in “Revelation,” when Mrs. Turpin watches her hogs as the sun goes down:

Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlour at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.

(CS, 508)

From this sight she looks up as the sun goes down and sees her vision of a vast hoard of souls going to heaven, “whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs” (CS, 508). The metaphor O'Connor uses is almost an allusion to Otranto with its giant statue coming to life, but the language is that of Mrs. Turpin, another in O'Connor's procession of good country people. That language informs a rural vision, Hawkes's lurid pastoral world, with a sense of supernatural force so that the whole is seen in a new light. Here again O'Connor creates the presence of the supernatural, of mysterious forces beyond the daylight self, in pig and sunset. “Revelation” begins with Mrs. Turpin's confrontation with a Wellesley student in a doctor's office, yet it ends with her own uncouthness—her own rural sensibility—miraculously transformed on the frontier of a secret life.

That life is Mrs. Turpin's life, but dark, unknown, strange: it is the life revealed in the college girl's fierce remark: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (CS, 500). It is the inhuman life of wart hogs from hell that, literalized, leads strangely to Mrs. Turpin's vision of heaven. Mrs. Turpin “faces” herself with the hog; she sees her own secret life in the elemental life of her farm and discovers, as Parker had, the presence of God in and beyond His creation, in and beyond the hogs, the people, the peculiar light of the setting sun.

This is the light of grace, and it appears again at another sunset situated on the urban frontier at the end of “The Artificial Nigger.” There Mr. Head and his grandson, Nelson, after the small inferno of their day in Atlanta, discover in the accidental image of suffering presented by a dilapidated statue of a Negro the “action of mercy.” What is powerful in O'Connor is her ability to create the presence of Christ and grace felt through and beyond the world of nature. How she does this is the problem and the secret of her art. It is an art that is gothic and that depends, fully, on its situation on one of the frontiers of our culture. Herman Melville wrote in The Confidence-Man, “it is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”¹⁴ O'Connor, like Melville, presents another world of white trash, black niggers, freaks, lunatics—in a word, a world of “good country people”—which is tied to ours yet strangely literal in its very landscape and language.

That tie with our world is the tie with what she calls the “action of mercy,” and in her best work it is “tied” through her metaphoric language becoming literal.¹⁵ Love is the burden of “The Artificial Nigger”: face to face with a broken-down statue of a Negro, Mr. Head and his grandson are “faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat” so that they “both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy” (CS, 269, emphasis added). This encounter creates a sense of humility for Mr. Head until, three paragraphs later, “he stood appalled … while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it.” In the course of these paragraphs (and in the course of Mr. Head's experience), simile is rendered as assertion until, before our eyes, grace manifests itself, the action of mercy, the secret cause, appears:

[Mr. Head] stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

(CS, 269-270)

This is the “secret cause” that Joyce speaks of, a sense of God's presence and love in the heart of Mr. Head. But what is remarkable about this passage, I believe, is that we never question the fact that the realization described—its language and its theology—is simply beyond the frontier language and evangelical Christianity of Mr. Head. Head, hick that he is, believes that an inferno underlies Atlanta and fears to be sucked down the sewer: he literalizes his own metaphor (see CS, 259, 267). In other words, O'Connor is able, here and elsewhere, to create a sublimely literal irony. Throughout “The Artificial Nigger” the language of the narrator constantly paraphrases Mr. Head's thoughts and language in a rhetoric completely beyond his backwoods rhetoric. This paraphrase makes that language itself—its ignorance, its racism, its violence—entirely invisible.

What reveals itself here is that Catholic grace, like the Mormon's magical glasses, includes the ability to see “through” and to understand another language. Thus the narrator notes, “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat” (CS, 269), but Head simply breathes, “An artificial nigger!” and says “They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one” (CS, 268, 269). “Nigger” is Head's word, “Negro” the narrator's, yet O'Connor wants us to see through the rhetoric to the “literal” fact, wordlessly experienced by Head and narrated in a technical theological discourse far beyond Head's experience and understanding. In other words, O'Connor creates the rhetorical effect of godly presence by narrating in a language that implies its own transparence, implies that the literal inhabits the metaphorical so that, as another theological writer, Søren Kierkegaard says, “through a negation of the immediate phenomenon the essence remains identical with the phenomenon.”¹⁶

Such an effect is created by being situated on a “frontier” between rural discourse and cosmopolitan theology. But more than this, O'Connor is enacting the “mystery” of grace as well. Throughout this story—as in most of her stories—O'Connor faces her cosmopolitan readers with the language and experience of rural ignorance. When Head tells Nelson that the sewers of Atlanta are literally hell, we know that we know more than these ignorant characters. But when the story finally presents the sure knowledge that Mr. Head, despite his racism and ignorance, can count himself among the saved—that “he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time” and that “since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise” (CS, 269-70)—at that moment its readers, like St. Cyril, are faced with a mystery which cannot be understood by the self-sufficient mind of humanistic intelligence. At such moments the cosmopolitan understanding of her readers is faced with a discourse whose power is beyond the comprehensions of the irony that had seemed to govern the story's narrative throughout.

This power is that of sympathy: the passage suggests that Head, like his cosmopolitan reader, can only understand the “secret cause”—here the sin of Adam—by experiencing the agony of his own egocentric denial of “poor Nelson” (or in the case of the reader, “poor” Mr. Head himself). Mr. Head is not truly a part of the world he lives in—neither is Mrs. Turpin, O. E. Parker, and most of O'Connor's protagonists—and his struggle, like that of the others and like our own, is to find some connection in a world that simply seems alien, other, without human response. It is a world, as the Misfit says in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in which, without an answering Jesus, there's no pleasure but meanness, “no real pleasure in life” (CS, 133)—a world in which, as O'Connor says, we are native and alien.

How to discover a human response in such a world is the great problem: Mr. Head can, as he has done all his life, depend on himself and his ability to give “lessons” and be a “suitable guide for the young” (CS, 249), or he can discover, in terror or in love, but above all in humility, supernatural forces outside himself that lead him to other human sufferers who can respond to himself.

Most of O'Connor's heroes fall into terror: they find, as Parker does, the terrifying cost of God's enduring eye; or they find, as the Misfit does, the senselessness of not knowing God is there. As O'Connor herself says, “Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence” (MM, 204), and such absence is inhuman; it leaves our world literally senseless and results in the senseless violence—the inhuman violence—of all those who do not fit: the Misfit, Rufus, Shiftlet, and all the rest. But others—Mrs. Turpin, Mr. Head, Bailey's mother—discover love amid their terror: they discover the literal language of God already in their own Southern slang. They achieve humility when they realize that they are not fully self-possessed, that their “calm understanding,” in the narrator's paraphrase of Head's evaluation of himself, leaves out their own mysterious origins and leaves out forces—articulated by Head's exclamation, “An artificial nigger!”—beyond themselves.

The action of mercy, then, is the action of rhetoric that finds meaning in a senseless world, that suggests the literal in its figured values; it offers a sense of grace, a sense of the supernatural, in the world in which O'Connor characters, both native and alien, do not quite fit.

What the rural Southern frontier finally offers O'Connor is that position in the world—that situation—where the strangers you meet can be anyone, can, in fact, be supernatural: Jesus, the Devil, the Holy Ghost.

“I can tell you my name is Tom Shiftlet and I come from Tarwater, Tennessee, but you never have seen me before: how you know I ain't lying? How you know my name ain't Aaron Sparks, lady, and I come from Singleberry, Georgia, or how you know it's not George Speeds and I come from Lucy, Alabama, or how you know I ain't Thompson Bright from Toolafalls, Mississippi?”

(CS, 147-48)

All these names, as Roy Male has suggested, are filled with light,¹⁷ and they set forth the action—sometimes the failed action—of O'Connor's gothic fiction: to discover or create light out of the dark frontier of rural Georgia. “I think,” O'Connor wrote, “[the Catholic writer] will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment of sociology or culture or personality development” (MM, 207). That sense of supernatural force that the backwoods prophets feel in the world repeats itself in the uncanny force and presence O'Connor achieves within the cliché-ridden language of her fiction. Both acknowledge the supernatural and discover that it can be found on the edges of our culture, dark and empty as they may be, on the rural frontier.

Notes

1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1969), 204.

2. Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 103; future references, abbreviated MM, will be included parenthetically within the text.

3. William V. Spanos, “Hermeneutics and Memory: Destroying T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets,” Genre, 11 (1978): 532.

4. Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” ELH, 40 (1973): 252. For a complementary treatment of the gothic tradition, see my “The Trap of the Imagination: The Gothic Tradition, Fiction, and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’” Criticism, 22 (1980): 297-319.

5. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 207.

6. Brooks, 249.

7. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (New York: Modern Library, 1974), 269. Future references to O'Connor's stories will be to this edition, abbreviated CS and included parenthetically in the text.

8. Roy Male, Enter, Mysterious Stranger (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).

9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25.

10. For a discussion of the collapsing of the distinction between literal and figurative use of language, see Ronald Schleifer, A. J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), ch. 5, esp. 201-08.

11. The Fantastic, treats this throughout; see also Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966).

12. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology (New York: Collier books, 1963), 21.

13. John Hawkes, “Flannery O'Connor's Devil,” Sewanee Review, 70 (1962): 399.

14. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 260.

15. For Blake's similar transformation of simile to metaphor, see my “Simile, Metaphor, and Vision: Blake's Narration of Prophecy in America,” Studies in English Literature, 19 (1979): 569-588.

16. The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 265.

17. Male, 30.

This essay is a revised version of “Rural Gothic: The Stories of Flannery O'Connor,” that originally appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (1982), 475-85. That essay was reprinted in Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor, ed. Melvin Friedman and Beverly Clark (New York: G. K. Hall, 1985) and Flannery O'Connor: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986). The present essay was especially revised for this collection.