Grace In The Gothic World Of Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction

Flannery O'Connor(1925-1964) is a representative writer in American southern literature after World Warâ…¡.She is titled as "a Roman Catholic writer".She was born to a devout Catholic family,and the region in which she lived is called "the Bible Belt". Religious customs and religious ideology are deep-rooted.Therefore during her short life she always explained man's fate and social problems in the perspective of religion. Flannery O'Connor won wide acclaim during her life time.She won a number of honors, including three O.Henry first prizes and the National Book Award for The Complete Stories.To many readers,the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate,as well as almost absurdly stark and violent.Her short stories routinely end in horrendous,freak fatalities or,at the very least,a character's emotional devastation.Her preference to the extremities is closely related to her religious belief.Writing to a hostile audience who think god is dead;she had to choose the most shocking way to awaken their religious consciousness.The shocking way refers to the gothic devices used by her,such as grotesqueness and violence.In her works the salvation by god always occur at the most crucial or cruel time.Her characters and readers also feel the presence of god at the most dangerous time.It is at that time her purpose is fulfilled.Her stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God's grace in everyday life.Death in her eyes is not a means of punishment but a chance of rebirth.She was fully Aware that few readers share her faith in religion:"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him,and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural;and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience....To the hard of hearing you shout,and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures" (Fitzgerald 33).This quotation could well explain her tendency toward bizarre action and her use of exaggeration to express her ideas. While amazed by her writing talent,people also feel puzzled by the cruel unexpected violence encountered by her protagonists.Many people think that she bears a very indifferent attitude towards human beings.Critics point out that she avails too many negative words and the characters in her stories are often ugly,stupid,or physically incomplete.They ascribe this to the pain and suffering caused by her incurable disease lupus.Some critics simply put her works into the category of gothic novels.Her writing style also brings her a lot of misunderstanding and criticism.In fact her fiction is totally a product of her religious belief and the external expression of her religious view.Through her works she unfolds a world in which everybody is sinful;and she reveals the ugliness of human nature;and she also provides the salvation way,which is to believe God and receive God's grace.Behind the grotesqueness and violence is her love for all the people in this world.This thesis examines two of O'Connor's gothic devices from the perspective of religion.Grace is explained through the analysis of gothic devices.It consists of five parts, with three chapters coming between the introduction and conclusion.Chapter one presents a preparatory introduction to O'Connor's religious vision.As a devout Catholic,her religious faith profoundly influences her writing.While analyzing her works,we cannot avoid mentioning her identity of being a Catholic.Many critics regard her as God's messenger.Each of her stories has religious concern.She believes that the fundamental cause of her characters' misery is original sin.She tries her best to illustrate sins such as pride and selfishness,which are easily neglected by the people who commit them.Her aim is to make people admit their identity of being sinners and return to God. Grace is the key word or the message she wants to preach.As a quite biblical word,grace is difficult for ordinary readers to understand.However it plays an essential role in almost all of her works.It means the divine love from God.So the definition of grace will be explained in details in this chapter.Chapter two focuses on one of the two most important gothic devices availed in O'Connor's works- the grotesqueness.It is divided into two parts:grotesque characters and grotesque settings.In the fast part,spiritual grotesques and bodily grotesques are examined respectively.Spiritual grotesques are the people who have spiritual limitations,such as pride,selfishness and hypocrisy.These limitations are the reasons which hinder the characters from receiving God's grace.Bodily grotesques are the people who have physical limitations,such as the handicapped and tattooed.These are the signs of their lack of God's grace.O'Connor is good at describing settings.Grotesque settings are discussed in the second part.She avails a lot of symbols while describing settings.Those symbols are more or less related to religion.They contribute to the development of the plot,create suspensions in readers' heart,and add a dark religious color to her works.Chapter three deals with violence and death,another gothic vehicle permeating in O'Connor's works.Actually violence and death are closely related to each other.They refer to killing,bleeding,and unexpected accidents and disasters.Readers always wonder why O'Connor has such a penchant for violence and death.In order to answer this question, I introduce her vision of violence and death first,and then quote several typical killers in her works.O'Connor asserts that the precondition of receiving salvation is to realize one's own fault first.However,sinners lack the initiative to admit or confess their sins,let alone to repent of them.So she has to use violence to awaken her characters from oblivion and place them to a helpless condition so that they can see clearly the harm caused by their spiritual limitations and thus receive God's grace.In Flannery O'Connor's works,violence and religion go hand in hand.Through violence characters' religious faith gets tested and redemption is carried out.She uses violence as a vehicle to arrive at characters' mental clarity,religious or social epiphany,and redemption.The moment of violence is also the moment of grace.All in all,this thesis is mainly about two gothic devices availed in O'Connor's works. The originality of it is the perspectiveâ… choose to analyze this issue.O'Connor's gothic is different from the gothic in the traditional sense.Her gothic is not the gothic for gothic's sake but the gothic for God's sake.In another word her gothic is not intended for sensation-seeking but to fulfill the purpose of rousing people's religious consciousness.In the post-World Warâ…¡western society,money worship is gaining currency while religious faith is ebbing away.O'Connor concludes that all the problems in society can be ascribed to the betrayal of God.Only if we believe GOd can we receive God's grace and get redeemed.Like a prophetess,O'Connor tries to show a bright salvation road to the post-war Americans indulged in pleasure.Her fiction is particularly important in the restoration of people's spiritual life.