FREE ESSAY ON FLANNERY O'CONNER AND GROTESQUE CHARACTERS

FLANNERY O'CONNER AND GROTESQUE CHARACTERS

Flannery O'Conner and Grotesque Characters
One of the most interesting characteristics of Flannery O'Conners writing is her penchant
for creating characters with physical or mental disabilities. Though critics sometimes
unkindly labeled her a maker of grotesques, this talent for creating flawed characters
served her well. In fact, though termed grotesque, O'Conners use of vivid visual imagery
when describing people and their shortcomings is the technique that makes her work most
realistic. O'Conner herself once remarked that "anything that comes out of the South is
going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which
case it will be called realistic."
In O'Conners "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" the villain is a one armed hobo named
Tom T. Shiftlet. Using his gift of gab and the promise of "fixing the place up." He
manages to take up on the remote farm of an old woman named Lucynell Crater and her
mentally retarded and completely deaf daughter "Lucynell Crater". The old woman quickly
decides that despite his handicap she would like to make Tom her son in law. His goal
soon became, fix up the old car he was sleeping in and hightail it out of there with the
car and some of the old womans money in his pocket. On the pretense that he would need it
for a honeymoon trip, he convinces the old woman to fix the car and give him some cash.
The story ends with him marrying the retarded daughter, leaving with her on a honeymoon
trip, then abandoning her in a rundown diner on the side of the road. 
"Good Country People" is a story about Joy Hopewell, a very well educated young woman
living in the rural south. Joy lost a leg in a hunting accident when she was ten and
since then had been forced to wear a wooden replacement. She also had a weak heart and it
was this affliction that forced her to remain amongst these "good country people" whom
she considered to be intellectual inferiors. Though she had great confidence in her
intelligence she had very little self-esteem. Joys' handicap made her feel ugly, so ugly
that much to her mothers' dismay, she had her name legally changed to the ugliest one she
could think of, Hulga. One day a traveling bible salesman named Manley Pointer made a
sales call and ended up having dinner with the family. Manley took a liking to Joy and
secretly asked her to meet him the next night. She agreed, thinking he was really very
simple and beneath her intellectually, but because she relished the attention she decided
to humor him. In the final irony of this story, simple Manley turns out to be a very
shrewd con man who lures Joy into the loft of an old barn with the intent of having sex
with her. When she realizes this and resists, he steals her wooden leg and departs
leaving her helpless.
Flannery O'Conners "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Good Country People" don't
seem to have much in common at first, but they actually have several common grotesque
elements. Both make use of handicapped characters, Joy Hopewells wooden leg, Tom
Shiftlets missing arm, and Lucynells deafness and mental retardation. Even the characters
names in both stories tend to add to the image O'Conner was trying to create. Consider
Joy (Hulga) Hopewell, who is joyless, hopeless, and unwell, and Tom T, Shiflet, which
immediately brings shiftless to mind. Flannery O'Conner spent most of her adult life
handicapped herself. In addition to her keen powers of observation, this was likely the
source of her talent for this style of writing. Inevitably she transferred some of her
personal experiences to her work, perhaps she was mirroring a personal tragedy with these
two stories. The strongest common element is a female character left devastated when a
man takes advantage of their handicaps.