Black "Prophets" And White "Prisoners"

Flannery O'Connor,a devout Roman Catholic,seems to have a strong interest in reducing her characters into animals.Among them,monkeys and apes that are closely related to Darwin's Theory of Evolution caught my attention.Interestingly,O'Connor rarely equates black people with monkeys or apes,but she frequently compares white people to them.Such a phenomenon deserves in-depth analysis.Focusing on the monkey and ape imagery in O'Connor's short fiction such as "The Artificial Nigger","Enoch and the Gorilla","The Heart of the Park","Judgement Day" and so on,this thesis explores O'Connor's attitude towards blacks,whites and Darwin's Theory of Evolution with the method of close reading.On the one hand,O'Connor realizes that the black people who suffered more have the quality of saving all mankind.Her black people are enlightened by God before white people and become prophets.On the other hand,she also recognizes that black people have a similar fate as apes and monkeys.They only exist as empty Others,becoming "mirrors" reflecting white people's desire for self-satisfaction.What O'Connor really wants to satirize and save are white people.In her view,the business society far from God is destined to go to nothingness,and white people who have lost their faith are driven by original sin and reduced to caged monkeys and apes.However,O'Connor is partial to white people,and her white apes have the opportunity to obtain God's salvation and become saints after suffering from God's ordeal.She gives white people more power than black people,and what really save whites are white people themselves.Under the cultural context of Christian Apocalypticism,she believes the dogma is the guardian of mystery,that is spiritually significant in ways the ordinary people cannot understand.What people should do is to believe the Church.She opposes Darwinism that attacks religion with reason,and holds that science should be employed to explain and enrich the doctrines.