Spatial Interpretation Of Alienation In Flannery O’connor’s Short Stories

Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic and original artist, died at the promising age of 39 and thereafter has been remembered by most of her readers as a short story writer skilled in the portrayal of grotesque characters and the exertion of Catholic doctrines. The enduring quality of her works that teaches compassion through apparent violence, truth through disillusion, and humanity through distorted human nature ensures her lasting influence. Numerous critics have centered their efforts on the themes of Catholicism, grotesqueness, and racism in her stories, a few spare their attention on the theme of alienation in her works.This thesis aims to probe into the theme of alienation in O’Connor’s short stories by fermenting Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory. The French philosopher has put forward a spatial triad that classifies the space into the representation of space, representational space and the spatial practice.This paper mainly takes advantage of the concept of the representation of space in the explication of predominant ideologies in O’Connor’s short stories. Parallel structure is adopted to present racist, materialistic, and egoistic representations of space and their relations to alienation most characters suffer from. It will be evidenced that the above-mentioned spatial representations, in most cases in the subsequent analysis, act as the force of otherness that invades in the inner space of characters andsuppresses their real self to different degrees. With the real self being alienated, these characters alienate others for they are no longer able to perceive the objective world as it is or to regard other people as equal human beings. It is worth mentioning that when the characters are fully aware of the invasion and regulation of the spatial representation of space,their repulsion and antagonism to it is also likely to act as the force of otherness that alienates their real selves.By ranking all the different cases under the influence of the representation of space together, the thesis summarizes a general principle. The principle, hiding within the heterogeneous incidences of alienation and indicating the way out of the crisis of alienation, can be concluded as thus: no matter whether the character submits to or resists the spatial representation, the concealment of his real self leads to alienation, and the revelation of it disalienation. Hence, the moment of unexpectedness or violence stereotypical in O’Connor’s stories functions as the moment of epiphany that reveals the truth of the real self of main characters and ignites the dissolution of their alienation.