Reading Flannery O'Connor by the light of feminist theology: transcendental politics in patriarchal familial structures

Abstract

Viewed from the countercultural perspective of feminist theology, Flannery O'Connor's fiction illustrates a complex set of interactions between supernatural agent and the human family. Correspondences between the divine father and human father give to the all-knowing, all-judging human patriarch a favored spiritual role. As a result, the position of others is diminished; they are deprived, physically malformed and spiritually depraved. Yet in O'Connor's works, the father is absent time after time, creating social and religious conflict. Through the agency of such familial structures in O'Connor's fiction, three tenets of patriarchal religion repress woman's ability to establish spiritual community with others: the ubiquity and propriety of male control in hierarchic family relations, the "naturalness" of childbearing for married women with its concomitant devaluation as an act that occurs outside of culture, and the ideological stance that it is a pure and godly act to punish woman for resisting her assigned role. The more egalitarian concept of woman as standing directly in relationship with God, seen in the work of Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, reveals (through its stark contrast) the repressiveness of traditional theology's endorsement of patriarchal family forms. This concept highlights the reiteration in O'Connor's works (especially in "The Displaced Person," "The Artificial Nigger," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "A Circle in the Fire," "A Stroke of Good Fortune," "Greenleaf," and "Good Country People") of the notion that suppression, ridicule, and violation of woman's desire for self-determination are acts of religious devotion.