Glimpsing Andalusia in the O'Connor-Hester Letters
Christine McCulloch, Emory University
Abstract:
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Using letters from the Flannery O'Connor-Betty Hester collection, Christine McCulloch explores O'Connor's life at Andalusia, her farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, as expressed through her commentary on its landscapes and characters. Supplemented by Nancy Marshall's photographs of Andalusia and excerpts from the letters housed at Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, this essay suggests connections between Andalusia as a lived space and the imagined spaces that O’Connor created through her fiction. |
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Essay Sections:
Introduction | O'Connor's Southern Identity | Writing Rural Georgia | Company at Andalusia | The Issue of Race | Notes | Recommended Resources
Introduction: A Visit to Andalusia, August 2007
The road leading to the farmhouse is long, rutted, and unpaved —the land surrounding it, quiet and unkempt. I pass a dilapidated milking shed as the house appears in relative contrast — pleasant, somewhat imposing, and upright. It is larger than I had expected and inviting despite its desertion. A small sign indicates parking in a grass lot around back.
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When I get out, I notice a few others milling about on self-guided tours, their voices hushed either in reverence or as a result of the heavy August heat. Perhaps both. I enter the house via the narrow, bricked berth of the screened-in porch, noting the painted rockers, empty, still, and angled toward the close-cropped lawn. Once inside, I am struck again by the size of the place — its quiet, cavernous rooms; high, wainscoted ceilings; and comparatively small furniture. The light is pale on the clay-colored walls (newly painted in 1959); the floorboards creak underfoot. Most things are just as O'Connor and her mother, Regina, left them — scant, ascetic, homely, and yet comfortable. One has the sense, poking about, that they are not the ghosts haunting the place so much as we are — an inconstant trickle of curious tourists, avid readers, spiritual pilgrims, bored children, and interested academes. Perhaps this is because the space itself — the walls, floors, rooms, stairwells, and sweeping grounds — is still imbued, however faintly, with the lives of those who came and went there. |
Nancy Marshall, O'Connor's chair, Andalusia, Spring 2007. |
The 2007 release of Flannery O'Connor's letters to longtime personal friend and intellectual confidante, Betty Hester, compels their readers to revisit Andalusia and consider the ways in which, while circumscribing the locus of much of the author's life, it also provided a point of imaginative departure for much of her fiction.1 The O'Connor-Hester letters suggest that Andalusia served a dual function for O'Connor, providing the solitude and seclusion necessary for her work as a writer while accommodating a nearly constant flow of visitors—so creating a space for lively exchange. In her introduction to The Habit of Being, Sally Fitzgerald observes: "[O'Connor] enjoyed company and sought it, sending warm invitations to her old and new friends to come to Andalusia. Once her inviolable three-hour morning stint of writing was done, she looked for, and throve on, companionship."2 This brief essay explores some of the ways in which Andalusia accommodated O'Connor's need for reflection while playing host to an often absurd and comedic parade of characters, many of whom found their way into her stories.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | O'Connor's Southern Identity | Writing Rural Georgia | Company at Andalusia | The Issue of Race | Notes | Recommended Resources
