On Identity Crises Of Female In Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories

Flannery O’Connor(1925-1964), as a famous female writer after the WWII, was regarded as a fabulous Southern writer after William Faulkner and enjoyed a high reputation as some of the new generation of Southern Women writers, such as Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty as well as Katherine Anne Porter. O’Connor’s works are imbued with Gothic style from her Southern identity and religious atmosphere from her Catherine character. In the short course of life, she wrote two novels:Wish Blood(1952), The Violet Bear it Away(1960) and31peaces of short stories, which are partly included in a collection, named A Good Man is Hard to Find(1955). There is also a collection including all her short stories, named The Complete Stories(1965) which was published posthumously. As a unique female writer after war, her works initiated a lot controversy among critics and readers.Three distinct labels on O’Connor are Southern Characteristic, Religion and her Female Identity which, after the publication of her works, are interpreted by a lot of critics at home and abroad. However, these interpretations are focused mostly on her religious view, the grotesque images and feminism. There are few theses at home focused on the perspective of female identity crises, so this paper, through analyzing her works and combining the social background at that time, is mainly on O’Connor’s concerns about the crises of the female identity in her works and in the society, the types of twisted female identities, and the aphasia of these female under the patriarchal society.The first chapter focuses on the normal female images patterns who are the punished mothers. One of them are the lonely masculine women and the other one are the selfish fogyish women who lived in the past glorious life. In the precessing of changing, they could not find the correct selves and have complete identities, no wonder they would have a tragic ending.The second chapter, by analyzing O’Connor’s works, focuses on the frustrated daughters. Some of them were highly educated but tried hard to get rid of the control of the traditional roles. Some of them were in the processing of obtaining correct self identities even though there were so many obstructions set by the patriarchal society. It would be a long way to construct the complete identities.The last chapter deals with the aphasia of these twisted women in the patriarchal society. They, encountering the doubts from themselves and also the conflicts from the patriarchal society, had no power of discourse at all. In the process of fighting with the outside threatens, they became the ideal others and the others of themselves, immersing into the permanent dilemma.O’Connor, though not a typical feminist, is never a misogynist. In the androcentric society, she expressed her concern of female identity out of strong social responsibility in a unique way. How to obtain the correct identities and to be a complete human being would be the ultimate issue that O’Connor concerned.