The Southern Whites’ Anxiety In Flannery O’connor’s Short Stories

In the treasure house of American literature, Flannery O’Connor holds her place as one of the most important woman writers in the 20th century whose works contribute to the flourish of southern renaissance, and she is also recognized as the most outstanding southern writer secondary only to William Faulkner. In her 39 years’ short life, O’Connor completes with great efforts two novels,31 short stories and some letters and commentaries. Though a pious catholic, O’Connor depicts the south with a strong sense of social responsibility and reveals the spiritual crisis and miserable living condition of the southerners in the process of secularization.Though her stories are all set in the actual southern scene, it is generally agreed that the grotesque characters, startling plots and chilling endings are intentional distortions for religious purpose. Thus her works were criticized for being horrible and distorted the years after its publication, but they proved to be also of realistic value and got more and more critical attention later on. Generally critics tend to take O’Connor’s identity as a southerner, a woman and a catholic into consideration, and seek to reveal the value of her works from the above three main perspectives. While the deep revelation of characters’ spiritual world made her works open to psychoanalytical criticism, such research is still lacking in quantity and depth. This thesis concentrates on the southern whites’ spiritual world in O’Connor’s short story collection The Complete Stories and tries to define the driving force for their grotesqueness in reality as anxiety. Their anxiety springs from contradictions in their personal, social and historical identification, which will be exemplified in the following chapters.In the introduction part, O’Connor’s personal life and the general condition of her works will be introduced in the first place. After that, there is a literature review on previous research on her works both home and abroad. Then a brief introduction of psychoanalytical theory of anxiety and the defense mechanisms will be introduced, together with Jung’s theory of human psyche.Chapter One aims to reveal the southern whites’ anxiety over the contradiction between their spiritual self and the body. They are classified into two categories, namely woman characters who suffer from gender disadvantage and the grotesques suffering from bodily incompleteness.Chapter Two concentrates on the whites’ anxiety over the contradiction between themselves and the others. In their association with family members, whites of other classes and the black race, their unconscious anxiety and violent ways of trying to get released will be analyzed.Chapter Three serves to reveal the whites’ hesitation and loss in face of the choice between the past and the present, and between the south and the north. The anxiety springing from the irresolvable problem will be further analyzed.Chapter Four seeks to find out reasons for the whites’ anxiety. The reasons are to be explored from three aspects, namely the social changes, people’s loss of faith and the projection of the author’s anxiety.The conclusion part reviews the above analysis and emphasizes the realistic value of O’Connor’s short stories. The seemingly grotesqueness is a reflection of the southern whites’ spiritual crisis, and the author’s concern for their inner world and spiritual redemption is where the true value of her works lies.