The Body’s Representative Meaning Of Characters In O’Connor’s Three Short Stories

As a southern writer, Flannery O’Connor occupies an important position in the postwar American literature. She has a strong sense of duty and most of her works are set in southern small towns. She aims to awaken the lost people who live in a sinful world to find a better way to save their lost spirit and value through violence or even death. In Flannery O’Connor’s works, characters’ bodies are mapped onto complex cultural and social forms. The thesis aims to analyze the spiritual world in Flannery O’Connor’s short-story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories from the perspective of body.Based on reviewing the related research results, the thesis selects three short stories as research text to discuss body contact, body detachment and body death respectively. In "The Artificial Nigger", the grandfather Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson accompany with each other every day, yet their spirit estranges one from the other. In "Good Country People", under the lure of Pointer, the daughter Hulga separates with her wooden leg and her mother, Mrs. Hopewell. The helpless spirit leads to Hulga’s double personality. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the grandma treats the murderer The Misfit as her son on the moment of her death. The body’s death gives soul’s redemption to the grandmother.In O’Connor’s short stories, the body could be treated as a clue to explore characters’ spiritual world and to give an insight into characters’spiritual predicament. The thesis makes a further study on her stories which reflects chaos and confusion in O’ Connor’s era of America and let readers have a reflection on the current society.