O'Conner's childhood home is on the tourist beat here in Savannah. Perhaps you have to be southern to understand her though I doubt it. You realize of course she was a satirist (Southern Gothic division) and a devout Catholic?
Yes, that's painfully obvious. Her satire is completely in service to her faith.
I haven't read her stuff in years but I don't recall any bitterness or anti-intellectualism. Do you have any examples?
Regarding Julian, "Everything That Rises Must Converge":
"Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,...”
" “Some day I'll start making money,” Julian said gloomily- he knew he never would..."
“I think you're doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You've only been out of school a year. Rome wasn't built in a day.”
Regarding Joy, "Good Country People":
"Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an
artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was
thirty-two years old and highly educated."
"when Joy had to be impressed for these services,
her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell
would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which
the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust
slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”"
"Her
name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from
home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she
had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any
language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed
without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was
Hulga"
"When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk
without making the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was
certain – because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not
speak."
"Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it
would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had
certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no
more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was
nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone
through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again.
The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might
see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had
not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good
country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who
knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well
picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the
same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow
sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought
this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply
that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of
sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other
people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed."
Via Wiki, other stories:
"The main character Sheppard is a liberal, atheistic rationalist who is unsympathetic with the grief of his young son, Norton, despite the death of Norton's mother only a year before the story takes places. Sheppard believes helping other people improve their lives is the greatest virtue in life, and he is frustrated with his inability to help Norton's grief and resulting foibles. Sheppard tells Norton that his Mother is dead, and no longer exists.
Eventually, Sheppard invites Rufus Johnson, a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent, to live with them against Norton's wishes. Sheppard met Johnson while volunteering at a juvenile incarceration facility, and desperately wants to help Johnson turn his life around. Johnson holds Sheppard in contempt and strongly believes in good and evil, but believes that he himself is evil and resists all of the naive attempts by Sheppard to help him. Against Sheppard's wishes, Johnson tells Norton that his mother is in heaven above the earth, and he will only see her again if he dies as a child before he is corrupted. The story ends with Johnson being taken away by the police for a burglary and with Sheppard then finding Norton hanged dead from an attic rafter above the telescope that Sheppard purchased to help Johnson expand his horizons."
"The story involves Asbury, a writer from New York who returns home to his mother's farm in the South after being diagnosed with a serious illness. He is out of money, unsuccessful and believes he is dying."
There are no successful, happy educated people in O'Connor's world. Not one.
All her stories were ultimately about faith and religion and all her protagonists get their comeuppance in bizarre and extreme ways that are admittedly not to everyone's taste but she is often riotously funny.
I found them contrived and didactic.
Did the instruction explain that O'Connor was a [satirist], not a realist?
Yes, of course. But ideology-based satire doesn't really work if you don't buy into the author's prejudices, does it?
It sounds to me like you're prejudiced against her because of her religious faith.
Maybe, but to be fair that's all she writes about. As a moderately educated atheist her work goes over with me about as well as a blackface minstrel show would go over at an NAACP meeting.
