The form of satire in Flannery O'Connor's short stories

Abstract

My thesis examines the satiric form of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and it links that satire to mystery, the term O’Connor used to signify the Christian vision she sought to convey through her work. My thesis recognizes that there is a fundamental tension underlying such a study, which is that satire and mystery have a very uneasy relationship – because the former is violent and is based on negativity, while the latter stands in for a positive theological system with all that it implies for Christian behavior and morality. The first part of my analysis concentrates O’Connor’s “The Barber”, “Judgement Day”, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “The Partridge Festival”. These were chosen to be chronologically and thematically representative of her short story corpus. I close-read the satire in these stories, specifically focusing on the objects of that satire: racial bigotry, false religiosity and unquestioned social mores. I find that satire in O’Connor is a dominant form and that its quality is double-edged. O’Connor’s short stories propose, within the narrative, a freighted sociopolitical issue - and then critique both sides of the spectrum. In the third chapter, I analyze two key moments in “Revelation” which show evidence of a more positive spiritual vision: the argument that Mrs. Turpin engages in with God, in which silence is shown to point to the presence of divine mystery, and in Mrs. Turpin’s metaphorical vision of heaven. Her more imaginative, (and by consequence less literal) picture of heaven indicates that Mrs. Turpin has matured morally. The religious presence that I find is significant because in many of O’Connor’s short stories, there is little or no other explicit portrayal of positive moral values, including Christianity. As a result of this lack, some critics have argued that her fiction is demonic or relativistic in its morality. In the final chapter, I discuss