A Study On Flannery O’ Connor’ S Fiction From The Perspective Of The Freudian Psychoanalysis

Flannery O’Connor is an outstanding American novelist in the20th century and a controversial southern Catholic writer after the World War Ⅱ as well. She suffers many mishaps in her life, especially her father’s death and her own lupus which lead to her mental traumas. Her life as a hermit in a southern farm makes her writing and her instinctive desire restrained unconsciously. The literary critics have been talking over her fiction since her first novel being published. There are prominent religious motifs, regional characteristics in her creation. What’s more, her fiction contains not only the strong sense of redemption and guilt, but also freaks and violence which are used to analyze humanity and disclose the nature of human being. Also her creation criticizes both the southern social problems and its unenlightened culture. Meanwhile her stories practically present spiritual apocalypse to the confused. O’Connor herself declares that her writing is a kind of redemption.Scholars who are engaged in O’Connor study in both China and in America mainly concentrates on interpreting the significance of the religion, the feature of south, the feminism, violence and race in her fiction. They have already made a conclusion that her special way of creation is a kind of innovation to the southern literature. As far as O’Connor’s mental perspective is concerned, it generally follows the literal way of the New Criticism to analyze her fiction by finding the common between her own life and the characters’experience in her works,which can help to understand the phenomena and the causes of her poetics. However, to some extent, it neglects to trace the mental change while she creates and it doesn’t mine her writing motivations as well as the inner factors of her offering grotesque with Freud’s sublimation theory. Based on close reading her stories and combined with Freud’s psychoanalysis, my dissertation is to explore the essence of the innermost mind of the author and those heroes’ thought as well through looking into the relation between the southern culture and her literary expression. By this, we will be able to have better knowledge of her creating principles and a perfect union in form and content.Psychoanalysis is not only an approach to comment on literary works but a way to observe the world as well. There are many critical concepts such as unconsciousness, mental structure, Oedipus complex, trauma theory in Freud’s psychoanalytical theory which can help explain the literary works in different times and her poetics. With Freud’s psychoanalysis, we have the possibility to enter into the nuclear of her stories and mine their implication.This dissertation consists of three parts:introduction, body and conclusion. Starting with the survey of O’Connor study home and abroad in the introduction, it makes clear the problems to be discussed and something to be further investigated, and it analyzes the reason why Chinese and the Western critics didn’t make timely use of Freud’s psychoanalysis in studying her fiction. Secondly, it introduces the main concepts in the Freud’s psychoanalysis, its being accepted in America and its influence on O’Connor’s writing. Thirdly, it briefly introduces the significance, innovation and the structure of the paper. There are four chapters in the body. Chapter One analyzes the mental motivations that inspire her creation and the background which appears in her creating, introduces the surroundings of her life and her traumas, discloses the social situation before and after the World War II, defines the author’s social identity and concludes that the religious environment she lives in and the literary atmosphere she feels constitute the inner and outside motives of her creation.Chapter two is mainly to study O’Connor’s self-projection in her fiction. From the typical southern heroes she created such as the self-conceited women farm owners, the young man who has strong love and hatred to his mother, the stubborn old man who does not bear any other’s challenge, the proud girl who has got her PhD, the female writer with unconscious illusion and the boyish girl we can see that her creating is just the course to meet her desire of catharsis, idealization and freedom of creation by analyzing these characters’mind.Chapter Three focuses on the mental paradigm in O’Connor’s writing. Freud’s theories such as trauma, stress, anxiety, the Oedipus complex and Libido theory are adopted to analyze their mentality and personality; it explains the innermost cause of shaping the mental paradigm in her stories.The Chapter Four centers on interpreting the dreams in her stories. According to Freud’s theory of dream interpreting, the dream is to meet one’s desire which includes two forms:manifest dream content and the latent dream thought. This chapter analyzes the aging woman farm owner’s anxious dreams, the young man’s death illusion, the female novelist’s daydream creating and explores the symbols, the images, the anxiety, the contradiction between the reality and her unconscious impulse and her moral awareness, from which we can see that the nature of the dreams is a kind of illusion of their inner spirit.The conclusion part explains some viewpoints which deserve to be discussed on O’Connor study. Simultaneously, it summarizes the aesthetic significance of the violence in her fictions within Freud psychoanalysis field. What’s more, the forecast on further O’Connor study is offered here.