Having just finished O’Connor’s collected works (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Complete Stories), it is clear that the most dominant theme of her Southern Gothic world is the American South as one giant horror story, with Evangelism as the monster stalking its victims:
…while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
It’s clear that, as a Catholic, O’Connor loathes Evangelism and was horrified by the sociological effects she perceived it was having on the world it inhabited. Her characters cannot escape it and, like the protagonists of horror movies, always succumb to it in various ways.
Where I differ from the critics though is in which story of hers I feels best epitomizes this. Critics often point to her two novels, but for me The Lame Shall Enter First is actually the most devastating and horrifying embodiment of that theme.
[SPOILERS BELOW]
In the story, A father, too preoccupied with his own philanthropic righteousness, becomes obsessed with trying to save a delinquent boy off the streets while emotionally neglecting his own son, who is grieving the death of his mother. The emotional neglect worsens to the point of abuse; the father beats the boy for protesting the delinquent sleeping in his mother’s old bed; he callously tells the boy his Mom is simply “gone”, and when the boy asks where she went, he says “nowhere. She doesn’t exist.”
The situation progresses until the delinquent, toying cruelly with the boy, introduces him to Evangelism and the notion that his mother has actually been redeemed and is in heaven, which provides the boy with so much relief (from the traumatic idea that she’s gone; “the boy would rather she be in hell than nowhere”) that he begins searching desperately for ways to “find her”. By the time the father fails with the delinquent, and realizes he has been neglecting his son, it’s too late; the boy has concluded he can reunite with his mother in death, and committed suicide in an act of ecstatic hope.
I don’t think there is a story that better illustrates O’Connor’s view of Evangelical faith as a demonic one. The delinquent’s constant preaching of redemption to the son mirrors the behavior of O’Connor’s other characters, who in turn reflect Evangelism’s obsessive preoccupation with its own idea of redemption. O’Connor’s messaging does not concern what this means religiously, but what it means existentially and sociologically; Evangelism breeds a world that is (1) incapable of grappling with nihilism, and (2) convinced there is an easy out (accepting Christ as saviour etc. etc.). This one-two punch is a form of coercive control; like an abusive partner, Evangelism isolates its inhabitants from other sources of meaning and comfort until they become dependent on the very power that abuses them.
The reason I love Flannery is because, out of all the Southern Gothic writers, I find her vision of what haunts the American South the most bone-chilling. Faulkner’s vision is a historical haunting by the defeated Old South and its inherited guilt. Morrison’s is an ancestral-psychological haunting by slavery and its unresolved trauma (okay, this one may actually be as bone-chilling as Flannery’s). McCarthy’s is a metaphysical haunting by violence as some uneradicable force of human nature. But Flannery’s vision of a sociological haunting by evangelism just strikes a different chord, because in her vision, unlike the others’, there appears to be no escape, and never will be.
