Flannery O'Connor's Reflection Of Redemption In The Bible Belt Of The Southern America

Flannery O'Connor?1925-1964?is one of the most outstanding female writers in Southern America in the first half of the 20^th century.During a short writing caree of no more than twenty years,she completed two long novels as well as thirty-one short stories.Her collections of correspondence,reviews and essays edited by Sally&Robert Fitzgerald published posthumously.Her works received tons of appreciations and several of them many awards,recognized as one of the greatest American southern writers after William Faulkner of the 20^th century.Flannery O'Connor was born and grew up in Savannah,Georgia in the South,which was traditionally labeled as the�Bible Belt�due to its thick religious atmosphere.She was a pious Cathyolic influenced by her family of an extremely long tradition of the Catholic Coviction.O'Connor claimed many times that a writer writes out of her own experience and she wrote from her entire being.As a result,reading of her life can help us to appreciate her works.Dioanosed with disseminate lupus in 1951She was confined permanently in Melledgeville,a small and uneventful town with her mother,Influenced Teilhard de Chardin's concept of�passive diminishments�,She never saw her life struggled with in incurable disease as a victim,actually she regarded her sickness as one of God's mercies.The life of Millegeville provide O'Connor�s essential setting for her stories,most of her writing materials comes for the sourthern land.Christianity was for her not only a pillar of strength but also a perspective through which she was able to observe and explore various socal problems and troubles prevalent in American at that time.To be exact,religiousness is the main them in her fiction,in order to have a whole understanding of O'Connor's fiction,it is imperative to approach it through the religious lens.Worth noicing is the fact that O'Connor herself,announced on numerous occasions that she was a Catholic and she saw the world through the angle of Catholicism.Though being a pious Catholics,her works express the ecumenical vein,O'Connor claims her theological sympathies many times with the fundamentalist Protestant South of the Bible Belt,such as their religious zeal,adherence to the Bible,doctrins of originals,redemption and judgement,and obsorbed and materialized these religious properties into her fiction writing as the religious base of her stories.It is not much to say that The Violent Bear It Away shows more theological astuteness than Wise Blood,it is almost ten years between the completion of this two works,and O'Connor's theological instincts developed considerably.Through the exploration of O'Connor's correspondence,essays and book reviews as well as her personal library,we found her theological affinities with Baron Friedrich Von Hugel,recognized him as his spiritual mentor,and routinely quoted praised and acknowledged him,decared his great influence on her writing after Wise Blood.Based on the Comparation of her early stories with later sotires,illustrate three of her typical themes she attributes directly to in the influence of Von Hugel and gained her theological weight and sophistication after wise blood,1.Grace through nature;2.purgatory of burning;3.the cost of salvation.This change in theological weight and vitality of expression becomes apparent in The Violent Bear it Away.