O’Connor’s Subversion Of Southern Traditional Values

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) occupies one of the most prominent positions in the history of postwar American literature. In fact, she is identified today as one of the best short fiction writers. She succumbed to lupus when she was only39. In her short life, she accomplished under great pain two novels, thirty-one short stories, a large amount of correspondence and numerous essays. As a Southern writer, O’Connor made full use of her regional advantage. Although she adopted the Southern scenes and manners in her fiction, her attitude towards the Southern traditional values is rather negative and pessimistic. The South she described is a violent, chaotic and perverse waste land filled with devils and freaks. In fact, O’Connor rather demonstrated a sharp breakaway from the Southern traditional values in her fiction.This thesis aims to demonstrate how O’Connor subverts Southern traditional values one by one and further explore the reasons for her subversion. The first chapter consists of the life experience and literary achievements of Flannery O’Connor, the Literature review, the originality and the organization of this paper.Chapter two focuses on analyzing O’Connor’s subversion of social values including racial ethics and traditional family values. In her fiction, she challenges the racial ethics of whites’superiority and blacks’inferiority. Though no blacks feature as main characters, they are sometimes described as capable, intelligent and well-to-do. However, her white protagonists are mostly ridiculous, ignorant and weak-minded. O’Connor also subverts Southern traditional family romance. The most distinctive feature in O’Connor’s fiction is the broken family. In the most of her stories, we can not find any trace of father figure in the family with only single mother and her children living in the farm. Moreover, instead of affection and respect between the generations, we can only sense estrangement and hatred.Chapter three concentrates on analyzing O’Connor subversion of traditional identities including class identity and gender identity. In terms of class identity, the self-righteous middle-class whites can no longer assume social superiority in face of the rise of the poor whites and blacks. They either live in the illusion that the original social hierarchy is still in effect and continue to assume social importance or engage in desperate struggle trying to preserve the class distinction. However, all their efforts are in vain, and at last they are brought back to the grim reality even at the cost of their life. As to gender identity, O’Connor subverts traditional socially assigned gender roles. In her fiction, the women are often described as capable and assertive and strong-minded while men are relatively femininized and weak-minded.Chapter four focuses on analyzing O’Connor’s subversion of religious values. O’Connor is universally acknowledged a pious catholic writer who stoutly upholds the religious values, and her essays and public talks only strength this belief. However, just as Harold Bloom warns us that we should trust the tales not teller, if we examine her stories carefully, we will detect that O’Connor is not so ardent Catholic as she professed to be. The prevalence of death, devils and violence in her fiction rather reveals her subversion of religious values.Chapter five is devoted to probe into the underlying reasons of O’Connor’s subversion of Southern traditional values. First of all, O’Connor’s life experience must play an important role in his literary creation. Most of her stories are written during her persistent fight against the lupus, which inevitably gives rise to O’Connor’s dark view of the World. Besides these personal factors, social and ideological elements also play their due roles. O’Connor’s career spanned the1950s and early1960s, which marks the rise and flourish of postmodernism. Writing in the postmodern context, O’Connor fiction reveals her adoption of postmodern conceptions of decentralization and opposing binary opposition. Moreover, the grotesque and violent elements imbued in O’Connor’s fiction are not far from the social reality. Living most of her life in rural south, O’Connor is familiar with Southern violence and perversity. Thus, the chaotic and perverse South she described is to a large extend based on Southern social reality.The last chapter is the conclusion of this paper. It summarizes that O’Connor’s personal disease, the social ideological influence and Southern grotesque and violent reality all contribute to O’Connor’s breakaway from Southern traditional values.