cite this page | printable version

Introduction | O'Connor's Southern Identity | Writing Rural Georgia | Company at Andalusia | The Issue of Race | Notes | Recommended Resources

Although critics and biographers have never cast O'Connor as a rural recluse à la Emily Dickinson, she remained acutely aware of a tendency to present the southern writer in "as mean and poor folksy [a light] as possible" (14 Nov 1959). Of a photographer's pending visit to Andalusia, O'Connor writes: "Tuesday Miss Betsy Locheridge is to come down here and interview me for the Sunday supplement. You will probably find me tricked out in the personality of the Georgia Farm Girl or Good-Earth-Loving Author or something equally horrendous" (19 Sept 1959). After the interview she confirmed this supposition, quipping:

While gimlet-eyed she may have appeared and tormented her characters certainly were, O'Connor embraced this "tricked out" persona, on occasion, in her letters. A defining feature of the Hester correspondence is the author's tendency to color her language with streaks of local slang ("it don't," "it ain't," "naw," "bidnis," "lemme," etc.). "[O'Connor] could write fine country talk," notes Fitzgerald, "and often did, to amuse her friends and herself."3 A hybrid creature much like the hybrid space she inhabited, O'Connor spent her career negotiating the tension between her self-professed identity as a "southerner" and the fiction she hoped would transcend the perceived limitations of regionalist writing (5 Dec 1959). In commenting on a recently published short story by her contemporary, Eudora Welty, O'Connor frames the problem thus:

O'Connor recognized race as a national issue, but much of her fiction can nevertheless be characterized as "topical." Her "characters and setting," observes Thelma J. Shinn, "are admittedly, even blatantly, narrow, placing her within the Southern regionalists like Eudora Welty and producing 'the strong sense of rich red-clay reality underlying and reinforcing all her work.'"4 Although some stories — namely, "The Geranium" and "The Artificial Nigger" — take place in cities such as New York and Atlanta, most others ("The Displaced Person," "Greenleaf," and "The Enduring Chill") describe " atypical life" on working farms like Andalusia.

<<< Previous Section | Next Section >>>

All images of letters displayed are Copyright 1959, 1960, 1963 by Flannery O'Connor; Copyright renewed 1987, 1988, 1991 by Regina Cline O'Connor. Permission granted by The Mary Flannery O'Connor Charitable Trust. All rights reserved. Letters available through Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

Introduction | O'Connor's Southern Identity | Writing Rural Georgia | Company at Andalusia | The Issue of Race | Notes | Recommended Resources

Published: 23 October 2008

© 2008 Christine McCulloch and Southern Spaces