Carnivalized Grotesque In The Fiction Of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor is identified today as the best fiction writer second only to William Faulkner in the Southern Literature of America. Her works have managed to attract readers and scholars worldwide since her death in 1964. The complexity of her small oeuvre arouses many controversies, among which the grotesque in her fiction is frequently criticized but inadequately explored. The major criticism of it focuses on the alienation and horror of her grotesque, taking it as a literary technique or image. Yet technique and imagery fail to capture the range of aesthetic ingredients that characterize O'Connor's remarkable works and their subsequent reception. Instead, grotesque is the style of Flannery O'Connor. This thesis attempts to make a genre study of O'Connor's grotesque by first illuminating that O'Connor's grotesque is related to genre. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque genre belongs to the carnivalistic. The essence of grotesque in O'Connor's fiction is further explored by application of Bakhtin's Theory of Carnivalization in three chapters to follow. The carnivalistic nature is ascertained in O'Connor's characterization, plot structure and the use of humor to corroborate that O'Connor's grotesque is highly carnivalized. Her grotesque fiction is of unifying, transforming, heuristic and subversive forces. This thesis endeavors to view O'Connor's texts beyond the gothic gloom and horror with which they have been charged for years. This research demonstrates the ambivalence and changes in O'Connor's fiction. The ambivalence illustrates, to some extent, the reason why O'Connor's criticism is controversial and highlights O'Connor's paradoxical view to the South's past—traditional and rebellious. Furthermore, carnivalized grotesque offers a better understanding of the Southern context of her age.