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

O'Connor makes rural Georgia the setting of her fiction not only because it is familiar, but also because she finds a means of entering, through its peculiar apertures, an altogether different metaphysical locus. For this reason, her metaphor of the topical as "poison" is intriguing. O'Connor's narrative voice is aggressive and predatory — often venomous. Her characters frequently fall into the traps she has set for them, and their ensnarement, if successful, is followed by an emancipatory revelation. As Claire Katz observes, "O'Connor as narrator plays the role of scourge."5 Like the "stinger" of Christ lodged in Hazel Motes' mother's head, O'Connor demonstrates "that the violence of rejection in the modern world demands an equal violence of redemption — man needs to be 'struck' by mercy."6 Katz continues: "Using her stinger, exercising the scorn characteristic of the superego, [O'Connor] imposes on the characters a humiliation so intense that they are forced to acknowledge their impotence."7 It is the realization of this powerlessness that, in turn, becomes curative. Katz concludes: "Potency is the Lord's — or the narrator's."8

O'Connor thus works to exact from her characters — many of whom can be considered victims of a crippling secular egoism — a heightened spiritual awareness. Consider O'Connor's commentary on Richard Chase's 1957 book, The American Novel and Its Tradition:

O'Connor's fiction must cut its characters — its readers, even — before they can be healed. The function of the writer, her serpent's tongue, is cleft. Nevertheless, O'Connor remained wary of identifying herself as a Christian novelist, a Catholic novelist, or a southern novelist. Of a subsequent interview she writes:

Qualifications and reservations aside, O'Connor did write in and of the agrarian Deep South for which Andalusia provided a model. The 544-acre estate consists of "gently rolling hills divided into a farm complex, hayfields, pastures, man-made and natural ponds, and forests."9 Quiet and secluded, this countryside afforded its inhabitants few distractions. O'Connor writes to Hester: "I live on a farm and don't see many people. My avocation is raising peacocks, something that requires everything of the peacock and nothing of me, so time is always at hand" (2 Aug 1955). She later advises her friend: "you can bring [the story I suggested you review] with you for you will have nothing better to do here than sit on the porch and read yourself blind or walk around and smell the sweet flowers" (letter dated 'Benjamin Harrison's Birthday').10

This rural landscape figures prominently in O'Connor's fiction. "The Enduring Chill," a short story published in 1958, features a working dairy farm much like Andalusia. The sour protagonist's reluctant homecoming is described as follows:

[Asbury Fox's mother] turned into their driveway, a red road that ran for a quarter of a mile through the two front pastures. The dry cows were on one side and the milk herd on the other. "There's the house!" [she] said as if they were all blind but her. It rose on the crest of the hill — a white two-story farmhouse with a wide porch and pleasant columns.11

This description —from the "red road" to the "cow pastures" and "pleasant columns"— resembles Andalusia, as does the narrator's account of the interior:

He went into the house, pausing in the hall only long enough to see his pale broken face glare at him for an instant from the pier mirror. Holding onto the banister, he pulled himself up the steep stairs, across the landing and then up the shorter second flight and into his room, a large open airy room with a faded blue rug and white curtains freshly put up for his arrival. He looked at nothing, but fell face down on his own bed. It was a narrow antique bed with a high ornamental headboard on which was carved a garlanded basket overflowing with wooden fruit.12

Due to her progressive illness, O'Connor's room was located on the first floor of the "white two-story farmhouse," but it, too, featured a "faded blue rug" and a "narrow antique bed" with a similar headboard. Although Asbury Fox's character — a writer like O'Connor — is unable to work in what he deems such an oppressive, backwater environment, O'Connor spent her most productive years at Andalusia. The quiet hours of the morning (specifically, from nine to noon) were devoted, with militant discipline, to writing. Neither O'Connor's mother nor the occasional houseguest dared disturb her. Upon encouraging Hester to come up for a long weekend, O'Connor writes: "Bring some work you want to do or something you want to read. You won't even see me in the morning. You can do your own work or go to town with Regina and set and watch the bugs" (6 Aug 1960).

Nancy Marshall, O'Connor's bed, Andalusia, Spring 2007.

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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