Chapter 7. Exploring Contexts — The Author's Work: Flannery O'Connor (294-99). Flannery O'Connor. "Good Country People" (310-23). Mary Gordon. From "Flannery's Kiss" (337-39). Eileen Pollack. From "Flannery O'Connor and the New Criticism" (343-45). Chapter 8. Cultural and Historical Contexts — Women in Turn-of-the-Century America" (347-52). Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The Yellow Wallpaper" (354-65).
NOTES ON FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S LIFE (1925-64), WORK, AND "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE"
O'Connor's work invites biography and psychological study because she was indebted to the formalist notions of her teachers at the U of Iowa Writing Program, R.P. Warren among them. New Criticism foregrounds the medium of language, and somewhat de-emphasizes biographical, historical, and other dimensions of artistic creation and analysis. Above all, it borrows from Romanticism an insistence that you simply can't treat artistic form like a container into which you can then pour some meaning or content, and afterwards draw a little cartoon bubble outside the container and write the extractable "moral" therein. That's blasphemy, as far as Brooks, Warren, and Company are concerned. Why the insistence? Well, I suppose they're fending off marginalization at the hands of scientific discourse and methods, which were becoming dominant even in their day: so while the study of literature shouldn't be thought of as strictly "scientific," it nonetheless has a kind of rigorousness of method based on an intense focus on the complexities and rich potential of the literary medium: language not in its descriptive or dictionary dimension, but in its connotative, poetical dimension. There's a lot of pedagogical and general value in taking such a stance -- it's better than simply writing off literary works as social and historical documents with no further interest. If you know how to read sensitively, chances are that you've been brought up in some approximation of the New Critical interpretive tradition: you've learned how to attend to the particularities, the twists and turns, of language itself. Not a bad thing to be able to do, even if it's much undervalued in these days.
But with regard to staying with the text, as the old experiment goes, "Don't think of a golden mountain or a unicorn." And voilà, you think of a golden mountain and a unicorn. And that's for the best since when a method hardens into dogma, it loses most of its value.
For one thing, O'Connor writes about her own milieu, the places where she grew up and spent her life. She became ill with lupus, an autoimmune disease, and didn't get to travel all over the world the way so many authors have done. She lived with her Southern aristocrat mother in Georgia most of her life, and may well have felt some resentment about that.
Her work is suffused with and structured by her Catholic religious beliefs, though not in a heavy-handed or didactic way because she's skilled enough to avoid tipping her hand as an author. But she focuses pretty intently on what has to happen for a given eccentric, defiant character to become open to redemption, open to receiving grace from God. O'Connor is clearly aware of her designs on an audience, formalist ideals or no.
We should have a look at her critical principles, which I should have assigned since they're only a few pages long in our excerpts. Then we can ask the following: if you had to go against the New Critical grain and extract a theme or a moral from this story, what would it be? And then to make amends to good old Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks (the leading lights of New Criticism), how does O'Connor enlist her skill to make our theme/moral seem kind of hollow, as if we really shouldn't be extracting, abstracting, and separating out chunks of meaning that way? How is the point deeply embedded in the tale itsef?
"Good Country Folk" displays O'Connor's mordant sense of humor – "Joy-Hulga's" wooden leg is a crutch, and of course that's sort of what a prosthesis is in the first place: something to lean on in place of something you've lost. So while it may be a metaphor for Joy's atrophying or wooden soul, there's something literal about it, too: her crutch is a crutch! The story's title invokes a Southern category and dwells in it, questions it. I think the spiritual struggle centers on Joy and is cast in terms of a medium-range con job (a long con involves making the sucker think he or she is actually in on a scam): Joy thinks she is more sophisticated than others and can therefore seduce the simple-minded Bible salesman, but the fellow has his own con job going, his own sexual/fetishistic agenda. In his own strange way, he's a predator. Joy the philosopher didn't see that coming. The loss of Joy's leg is probably the catalytic "violence" in this story – when the salesman takes her leg, she is left raw, incomplete, open – though not in a simple-hearted state of innocence because, I suppose, she's too jaded for that. One thing that comes through is the inadequacy of fallen human cleverness, of intellect as a means of asserting one's own independence or self-sufficiency.
Notes on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1925-64)
The story is a testament to the constrictive, definitional power of ideology. The medical-psych profession is a system of words and practices that go together to define human nature into male and female, and then to call out or provoke behaviors that can be classified and used as a means of control. (This is why Foucault says ideology works more by eliciting and naming than by sheer repression, though obviously both may play a role.) The unnamed woman's husband is downright unctuous in his good intentions. Well, that's what ideology does: it makes oppression seem only natural and right. You can torture Aztecs and Mayans and destroy their culture while believing fervently that you're saving souls for Christ, as the Conquistadores did, and you can drive an isolated woman utterly mad by refusing her any creative or behavioral outlet, by confining her to her role as homemaker and wife and mother, and by subtly convincing her that she's somehow a bad person for wanting to pursue a career. Not to get this point, by the way, is to impoverish your ability to analyze and talk about social issues and political events in a convincing manner. I mean, no doubt Mubarak and Qaddafi and other chaps in their leadership positions believe protesting citizens are "greasy rats," traitors, or simply misguided children who need to be punished and controlled lest chaos ensue. No doubt certain American governors believe they're doing right by their states when they try to gut the power of public and private employee unions; viewed from another angle, their actions may well appear to do the bidding of ruthless corporate interests who hate the very name "union" because they want all employees isolated and completely powerless to demand things like a safe workplace and reasonable wages and benefits. The power of ideology is that it lets you do bad things righteously, and to ignore what's really happening – it's easier and more "useful" to replace reality with orderly visions that suit your moral and economic imperatives. And it often works for quite a long time. One thing that literature teaches us to watch out for is exactly this peril of becoming the thrall of ideology. Shows the process of building up illusions and then stripping them, along with the cost of that stripping away and even an assessment of the extent to which it's achievable.
A brief quotation from S. Weir Mitchell, creator of the so-called "rest cure":
American woman is, to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which nowadays she is eager to share with the man? (Mitchell 141)For further discussion, refer to the audio mp3 file of my comments in class, available from www.ajdrake.com/wiki.
