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Klein 1
Michael Klein
Professor Tate
Flannery O’Connor
1 Dec ‘06
Flannery O’Connor: The Uncanny at Work
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare tells us the interim between the proposal of a dreadful
thing and the first steps taken is like a “phantasma or a hideous dream.”1 It is here, in this
phantasmal dream-like world where Flannery O’Connor sets her fiction. The experienced
O’Connor reader and scholar however, can successfully navigate her dense imagery, rich
characterizations and intense moral judgments and find themselves more enlightened about the
life and views of a Catholic in the mid-twentieth century American South. But what of the
inexperienced reader who is left to map a literary path through the hard red clay paths of Georgia
while confronting angry bulls, Bible salesmen, atheist intellectuals and other misfits?
Fortunately, O’Connor enables readers unfamiliar with religious dogma, a working knowledge of
Southern values, culture or even geography to enjoy her work. A reader coming to O’Connor for
the first time will find recognizable aspects of daily life, characters one might even meet on the
street peppered with equally recognizable gothic and grotesque motifs. These may at first seem
out of place, even beyond comprehension, but the steady hand of O’Connor helps us keep our
heads, leaving us to consider the potential of this alternative world. Her early work, at times,
seems to center around the grotesque, while her later work – although still intense – seems to
flesh out her characters more, reducing the grotesque to merely gothic undertones. O’Connor
herself says of her characters “Their fictional qualities lean away from the typical social patterns,
toward mystery and the unexpected” (Mystery and Manners 40). It is this mystery and
unexpected, or perhaps phantasma, that continues to draw new readers who
may have only heard about her gothic or grotesque style, but it leaves them perhaps wanting to
become scholars.
1
Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar – II.i.62-65
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– The Southern Writer
It seems that as a society we are more comfortable when we can easily label things.
Someone from New York is then labeled New Yorker and with that label comes the image of a
rude person who is always in a hurry (even if they do not reside in the metropolitan area),
perhaps they are Jewish and like to throw their money around. Someone from France (at least in
the twenty-first century by someone in America) is French, and with that comes the image of a
sniveling, cheese-eating America hater. A writer from the South then, becomes a Southern
Writer. This writer purely writes about small town life or living on the river, grumbling about
how the South will rise again. These labels are often thrown around to help up us categorize
things and people, whether or not they are accurate portraits. The problem then becomes what to
do when someone or that someone’s work does not fit neatly into the label awaiting attachment.
Flannery O’Connor also seems to have been frustrated with the misconceptions of the
label ‘Southern writer.’ She points out in Mystery and Manners “…no matter for what purpose
peculiar to your special dramatic needs you use the Southern scene, you are still thought by the
general reader to be writing about the South and are judged by the fidelity your fiction has to
typical Southern life” (37-38). The label of course comes not from anyone from the South, but
people who may not have ever been south of the Mason/Dixon line. In her essay “Place in
Fiction” (qtd. in Forkner 548) Eudora Welty discusses what she calls “regional writing” stating:
I think [it] is a careless term, as well as a condescending one because what it
does is fail to differentiate between the localized raw material of life and its
outcome as art. “Regional” is an outsider’s term; it has no meaning for the
insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing
about life.
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Welty also points out that all writers including Austen, Hardy, Cervantes and Turgenev confined
themselves to regions, but asks “Are they regional?” O’Connor would say yes but to her, identity
is not to be found on the surface. “The best American fiction has always been regional...from
New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has
been a shared past, a sense of alikeness” (MM 58). Although O’Connor would agree that it is
unfair to confine the genre to a single theme or style, this “alikeness” is what unites these writers.
As it turns out, it unites readers as well.
When giving an introduction to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” at Hollins College in
1962, O’Connor tells a story of a teacher with whom she spoke about teaching the story. The
teacher presented the Grandmother as evil, or a witch - cat and all, but the teacher’s Southern
students resisted that interpretation because they had grandmothers or great-aunts just like her at
home. They noted that the old lady in the story lacked comprehension, but had a good heart and
O’Connor acknowledges that local understanding “The Southerner is usually tolerant of those
weaknesses that proceed from innocence, and he knows that a taste for self-preservation can be
readily combined with the missionary spirit” (MM 110). O’Connor doesn’t expect all of her
readers to gain some mystical enlightenment from her fiction; she understands that there are
different interpretations and notes that “… you have to let people take their pleasures where they
find them” (ibid). With this in mind, it is then possible to examine the literature separate from it
place or region.
By the time O’Connor was writing, the South had changed, and was still changing. The
period between the World Wars, called the Southern Renaissance, saw the rise of writers like
William Faulkner who brought complicated modern narrative techniques like stream of
consciousness to his writing. Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and others reinvigorated
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the literature by examining the South's conservative culture, rather than the political problems of
Reconstruction. More specifically, how an individual could exist without losing a sense of
identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's
personal and social life. It was because of these writers’ distance from the Civil War and slavery
that they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. That all these writers
happened to be from the South is what created the genre, but the fact remains that the characters
in these works could easily have come from writers in the North who perhaps visited or lived in
the South, not unlike a twenty-first century novelist writing historical fiction that takes place
decades, even centuries in the past. O’Connor was well aware of the presence Faulkner had and
consciously tried to stay well clear of his themes and motifs stating “The presence alone of
Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself
to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring
down” (MM 45). It is this determination to steer far from the long reaching shadow of Faulkner
that has allowed O’Connor to create a fiction that regionally and sometimes thematically falls
within the Southern genre, but as Giroux points out in his introduction to The Complete Stories,
her work is “imaginative, tough, alive… filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard
and compassionate” (vii). What Giroux describes is what draws readers, new and old, to her
writing. The horror of it seems to be just a bonus.
– The Grotesque
In Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, O’Connor discusses her fascination with
chickens. As a young girl she became famous for training a Cochin Bantam to walk backward.
She would later begin to make rather elaborate clothes for them and searched
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long and hard for ones that had three legs, overlong necks or a crooked comb but to her dismay,
none ever turned up. She notes that her quest ended with peacocks. What is perhaps most
interesting about her anecdote is that when her first peacock arrived it was sans beautiful tail, yet
the bird carried itself as though it had its full retinue of feathers and confronted others as if they
should recognize the beauty of the undecorated potential. As beautiful as the birds are, she says,
there is much plainness in them. “…his end wing feathers are the color of clay; his legs are long,
thin, and iron-colored; his feet are big; and he appears to be wearing the short pants now so much
in favor with playboys in the summer” (8). At the other end of the spectrum is the moment when
the bird unfurls his majestic tail feathers and, when it suits him, he turns to face his admirers.
O’Connor notes that moments like this are the ones “that show the inadequacy of human speech”
(10). That the birds draw both positive and negative reactions from observers, ranging from
“King of the Birds” to “Never saw such long ugly legs,” perhaps indicates the value she places
on listening to writers talk, “… it will be in hearing what they can witness … and not what they
can theorize about” (MM 36). With this in mind, it seems possible then to connect her writing to
her experiences not only living in the South, but with these birds; both are at the same time
beautiful and peculiar.
O’Connor notes that “Fiction begins where human knowledge begins – with the senses –
and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium” (MM 42). In stories
like “A Good Man is Hard to Find” she gives us the grandmother who is colorfully clad in a
“navy blue sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim… Her collar and cuffs were white
organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets
containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know
at once that she was a lady” (The Complete Stories 118). Just as the peacocks are two things at
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once, beautiful and strange, so too is the grandmother here and other characters throughout
O’Connor’s other work, like the hermaphrodite in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” who is strange
in appearance but created by God, and therefore beautiful. Di Renzo points out “For the
grotesque, there can be no beauty without the unexpected, the perverse and the incongruous…
the grotesque does not approach the beautiful by eliminating and transcending ugly. Rather, it
redefines the beautiful by whimsically fusing it with the ugly” (139). Throughout “Good Man”
there is unencumbered beauty as well, the blue granite of Stone Mountain, red clay streaked with
purple, green lace-work on the ground and the image of silver-white sunlight sparkling through
the trees (CS 119), pictures worth admiring. Di Renzo notes that O’Connor often combines what
he calls the “satirical and the lyrical …to form… a single, indivisible unit” (141). This unit of
grotesqueness is pleasing as a whole in the “delightful interaction of its mismatched parts” (Di
Renzo 140). This interaction of mismatched parts seems to be most prevalent in O’Connor’s
earlier work.
Stories like “The Artificial Nigger” or “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” feature
cartoonish figures like Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson in one and General Sash and his
granddaughter, Sally, in the other. O’Connor asks of us in the former, although comically, to
consider a decrepit lawn jockey as a crucifix that brings Mr. Head and Nelson together and in the
latter we have the General, a wheelchair bound, practically mummified, relic of the past to
demonstrate how heritage in the South has degenerated. Di Renzo observes “What is horrible in
Faulkner’s fiction, the death of the past and the loss of tradition, becomes hilarious in that of
O’Connor” (175). O’Connor gives us spectacle rather than tragedy. She recognizes that her
work has been called grotesque, but disagrees with this label. When discussing the story “A
Good Man is Hard to Find” she stated “I prefer to call
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it literal. A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. [The child]
doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees
the lines that create motion” (MM 113). For O’Connor, it is the action of grace in the
Grandmother’s soul, and other characters in her work, that we as readers should be examining,
not the dead bodies. And although the grace in her characters is there, the motion that catches
our eye as we read is just that – the dead bodies. In discussing this very issue, Asals concurs
“This is all very high-minded, but it would seem a little difficult for the unprejudiced reader of
[this story] to ignore the dead bodies; and while one may agree with O’Connor that the story is
[more than just about the murdered family] it surely is, most immediately, just that account”
(143). Human nature seems to take over, whether we are driving by an automobile accident or
have just seen someone fall down or walk into a glass door, as humans we observe the action and
not what might have been learned from it. These bodily actions have a long history and have
been catching eyes of observers for centuries. Muller points out that “the tradition of the
grotesque has many antecedents… and is older than its designation” (2). He points to the
presence of the grotesque in the convolutions of early Roman art and found in monasteries and
medieval illuminated manuscripts not discovered until the late fifteenth century.
The Grotesque as a descriptive term comes from the fanciful mural decorations that
depicted human, floral, and animal forms as ornamentation found in ancient Roman buildings
such as the Domus Aurea of Nero that was excavated around 1500. Kemp points out that the
discovery of the interior of the Domus Aurea “exerted an enormous influence and established the
popularity of the species of ornament known as ‘grotesque’ incorporating, vase, candelabrum,
and trailing sinuous lines with naked cherubs and fabulous beasts” (262). Osborne notes that
“the style was distinguished by its
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disintegration of natural forms and the redistribution of the parts in accordance with the fantasy
of the spirit” (516). It seemed that grotesque during that period was simply considered to be the
antithesis of reality. Osborne adds that when the term is applied to other fields of art “the word
came to mean what is intrinsically strange, incongruous with ordinary experience, contrary to the
natural order” (ibid). Of course, O’Connor often uses the grotesque as the natural order. In “A
Good Man is Hard to Find” the Misfit and his minions represent the incongruity spoken of by
Osborne.
The men in the car arrive at the accident and O’Connor describes one of them dressed in
a “red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it,” another “had on khaki pants
a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face,” and the last
“… was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silverrimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look” and of course, two of them have guns (CS
126). A closer examination of the first boy, with his red sweat shirt and silver stallion embossed
on it may conjure the image of a horseman from Revelation 6:8 “And I looked, and behold a pale
horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” And yet, as this
ominous trio approaches the distressed family, the first words uttered from he who will be called
the Misfit are “Good afternoon, I see you all had a little spill” (CS 126). The incongruity lies in
the dark comedy. Asals points out that “…for all the menace in his appearance, The Misfit is
remarkably well-mannered toward his intended victims. He blushes at Bailey’s ‘shocking’
remark to the old woman, consoles her, apologizes for his half-dressed condition… and couches
his murderous orders in a deferential gentility” (145). At the same time however, there is
incongruity in life and O’Connor’s work reflects that, giving it a sense of realism as outrageous
as it may seem. “There is a great deal of compassion in her work, but it is
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always compassion for characters because they are human beings with human limitations, not
because they have limbs missing or have lost their jobs or are otherwise discomfited… The
moral consciousness that runs throughout the stories… can accept evil, but not try to find
excuses for it” (Rubin, qtd. in Friedman, 27). Sometimes the incongruity, or grotesqueness, lies
not in the characters or their actions, but the situation such as in “The Artificial Nigger.”
Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson journey to Atlanta. O’Connor alludes to the Divine
Comedy, positioning Mr. Head as Virgil and Nelson as Dante. Adding to the allusion is the
circular path Mr. Head takes as he tries to keep the train station in view, all the while warning
Nelson of the dangers of the city. It is a maze of a city that becomes disorienting, preventing
them from advancing. Like Dante’s Hell, Muller states “This story is framed in terms of a
journey which takes an old man and a boy on an allegorical quest for human identity and
communion… the purpose… is to develop an awareness of the relationship between man and
God” (72). On their journey, a situation arises in which Mr. Head denies Nelson in front of a
group of people. “The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were so
repulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay
hands on him” (CS 265). O’Connor gives us these two characters that are very different but are
also grandfather and grandson. Di Renzo notes that the passages in this story “are among the
richest in O’Connor’s fiction, lending a key to understanding her grotesque style” (9). It works
by seesawing between opposites: Mr. Head is “an ancient child”, and Nelson is a “miniature old
man”; the statue they come across that ultimately brings them together “in their common defeat”
has a “wild look of misery.” For the grandfather and grandson, the image they find, a broken
down lawn jockey, turns into a religious experience expressed by Mr. Head as a racist joke
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“They ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one (CS 268). It is a
comical scene in which O’Connor asks her readers to consider, for this one minute, that the
statue is a crucifix. Di Renzo notes that “The grotesque presents opposites without trying to
reconcile them… This disjointed counterpoint between opposites is the fundamental
characteristic of the grotesque” (9). She often presents us with twins, or doubles as in “The
Artificial Nigger,” with Mr. Head and Nelson, Tarwater and his great-uncle in her second novel
The Violent Bear it Away and even in “The River” with young Harry who claims his name is
Bevel, after the preacher. Her use of doubling in her work creates a feeling of anxiety for the
reader, a sense perhaps that something is amiss. This anxiety can be identified as “The
Uncanny.” Kahane points out that “traditionally, it is this admixture of the uncanny and the
comic which comprises the grotesque.” She adds “While grotesque has been the word used to
label O’Connor’s world, it has not been used to explain it” (qtd. in Friedman 123). For a more
in-depth explanation, one must go right to the source, Sigmund Freud. In his essay “The
Uncanny,” Freud has provided a key to help readers understand the essential aspect of the
grotesque, the anxiety behind it.
– The Uncanny
First, Freud defines the ‘uncanny’ as an aesthetic, not a theory of beauty but one of
feeling. “It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping
horror… within the boundaries of what is fearful” (122). He later discusses the source of these
fears, relating them back to early childhood. “An uncanny experience occurs either when
repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive
beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (Freud 157). Some of the
elements he adds that compose the uncanny are the castration complex, womb fantasies, the
primitive fear of the dead and the idea of the double. Freud
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notes that the uncanny in literature is a more fertile province for the uncanny than in real life.
“The story-teller has this license among many others, that he can select his world of
representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from
them in what particulars he pleases” (Freud 158). These ‘realities’ or elements, skillfully
integrated into the imagery of O’Connor’s work are responsible for its disturbingly grotesque
quality. Freud elaborates further on the idea of the double, a frequent element in O’Connor’s
stories.
Considered one of the more prominent themes of ‘the uncanny,’ Freud traces the idea of
the double back to infantile sources:
[I]t is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else,
so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for
his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the
self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing - the
repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same
crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations. (141)
Freud points out that the idea of the double springs from the “soil of unbounded self-love…
which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man” (141). Freud adds that
this idea does not necessarily disappear with the passing of youth, but most likely receives fresh
meaning and render the old idea of the double with a new meaning, perhaps even a vision of
terror. A vision O’Connor utilizes but does not seem to fully embrace especially in her later
short stories.
– The New South
Many of the stories in the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge, although still
violent, seem less focused on the violence and more directed at fleshing out the characters within
them. Asals notes “…the stories of A Good Man is Hard to Find were all published rapidly
between 1953 and 1955, one can trace there a gradual
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movement toward those climactic moments of revelation that would emerge fully in Everything
that Rises Must Converge” (209). These moments of revelation do sometimes come violently,
but quickly unlike the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” who first must endure the
murder of her whole family before she has her revelation. Conversely, Mrs. May in “Greenleaf”
has her vision “suddenly restored.” Di Renzo adds “Mrs. May’s abrupt union with the bull, a
union that is mystical and sexual as well as fatal, jolts her into a new awareness of herself and the
world; her body and the landscape experience the Passion of Christ” (95).
The conflict leading up to this “abrupt union” is between Mrs. May, a self-righteous
woman who is worried that a stray bull will contaminate her pedigree cows, and her handyman
Mr. Greenleaf. Mrs. May embodies all the characteristics Americans have traditionally held dear:
she thinks that if she behaves respectably, she is blameless in the sight of God; she thinks that
one’s social standing has something to do with one’s degree of righteousness. Of course,
O’Connor believed quite the opposite; she felt that people like Mrs. May are shut out from a
proper relationship to God, not because she is knowingly evil, but because she is morally smug;
she thinks she has within herself everything she needs to be “good.” She sees herself as a good
person and believes good things should happen to her, whereas those who behave like trash
should reap nothing but misery. This is why she is so mystified by the Greenleaf family.
Mrs. May has raised two well-educated sons, one a professor and the other an insurance
salesman. But they sponge off her by living off of her now that they have grown, they mock and
taunt her and do not like each other “He hated the country and he hated the life he lived…living
with his mother and his idiot brother…But in spite of all he said, he never made any move to
leave” (CS 319). Adding later to his mother “I wouldn't milk a
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cow to save your soul from hell” (CS 321). Mr. Greenleaf, on the other hand, has two fine young
boys who made their way in the Army and now have pensions, went to agriculture school,
married French wives and have three children apiece, and work their farm in harmony. Mrs.
May cannot understand this. Ironically, she worries about the future asking her sons “And in
twenty years… do you know what those people will be? Society” (CS 318). She misses the
point that God does not judge a person by where they came from or where they might be going,
but by where they are. Mrs. May meets her end drastically; Di Renzo notes that O’Connor, in
this story, “makes Christ a bull… [it] wears a prickly crown… and is own by people who are like
the lilies of the field. Its body houses a cosmic power,” and at the end of the story, “Her body
and the landscape experience the Passion of Christ” (95). Nearly all of O’Connor’s work deals
with a non-believer reaching the epiphany that God is there for us, all of us. But in the later
stories O’Connor develops her characters more, we see the tensions that have built up within
them and we as readers are happy when they realize where they have gone wrong, and in the last
minutes of their lives, they have finally seen the light, as unbearable as it may have been, they
have seen it. One story that deals with social upheaval of the time, racial integration, is the title
story of the second collection, “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
Julian, the college graduate son, considers himself victimized by his racist mother who
refuses to ride the newly integrated busses alone. His mother lives in a world of imaginary
antebellum constructions, and Julian must accompany her to her reducing classes at the Y.
When confronted with a large black woman and her young son, Julian is irritated by his mother’s
actions. When they disembark the bus, his mother insists on giving the boy a “shiny new penny”
to which the black woman becomes infuriated and attacks Julian’s mother, initiating a stroke
leading to her death. Julian is suddenly
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confronted with an incomprehensible “world of guilt and sorrow.” Julian is shocked into this
world because until now, he can only be critical of those around him and failing to see his own
shortcomings: his shallowness, contemptuousness, his evil. Muller notes that “The entire
movement of the story is toward convergence – of black and white, or mother and son – but this
convergence is never quite accomplished, although the quest for unity remains an elusive and
tantalizing possibility” (70). O’Connor was witnessing change all around her, such as historic
movements and court cases, Brown v. the Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott and
the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Black Southerners enjoyed some of the benefits of this [new found] prosperity…
but saw much of the region’s new bounty from a distance. [Blacks were] kept
out of high-paying industrial jobs, prevented from participating in politics, and
forced to accept a separate and less-than-equal school system for their
children… The movement for black civil rights built slowly and in the face of
bitter white opposition. (Ayers 435)
The black woman on the bus represents, for O’Connor, all black people. “Don’t think that was
just an uppity Negro woman, that was the whole colored race which will no longer take your
condescending pennies” (CS 419). Kessler notes that the story fails to reach an end because
“Julian is metaphorically ‘nowhere,’ but by being divorced from imposed meaning, he is free to
begin moving toward the meaning that was always there” (125). Kessler’s meaning is that Julian
can now move on and recognize for himself that “… the old world is gone. The old manners are
obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn” (CS 419). O’Connor forces him to move
on in this new world of recognizing equality just as her contemporary Southerners must as well.
– Conclusion
O’Connor’s cannon is not extensive, but it is rich. Her early work is shocking and
grotesque but it is a reflection of the world she saw around her as a Catholic in a Protestant
world. In many ways O’Connor’s earlier stories are like the painting of Hieronymus
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Bosch called Millennium, (also known as The Garden of Earthly Delights). The painting is a
triptych with the left side depicting Paradise, the center panel is Earth and the right is Hell. In
the painting there are strange creatures, unknown birds, flying fish, winged people and other
bizarre collections of animal, vegetable and human. Wolfgang Kayser points out that “Even
Bosh’s contemporaries were puzzled by these pictures and tried to interpret them in the most
different ways. It is now generally assumed that Bosch’s creations are not simply
phantasmagorias but reproduce forms which have a definite historical context” (33). The same
can be said of O’Connor’s work. Critics have different interpretations of every story and novel
she has published. But like Bosch, she is simply adding elements from her own historical
context. She portrays real people along side exaggerated fantasies. Di Renzo adds “The majesty
and terror of her fictional world make their repulsiveness negligible, even endearing… No other
American writer since World War II has more playfully, or reverently, depicted our species’
small place in the vastness of creation” (224). Her work is a study in incongruity. She forces us
to look into a mirror and then places side by side comedy and horror and at the same time,
evokes laughter and fear. In her second collection she begins to look closer at her characters;
there is not simply the blindness toward God in them, there is blindness toward the changing
world around them.
Works Cited
Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: U of Georgia P,
1982.
Ayers, Edward L., and Bradley C. Mittendorf. The Oxford Book of the American South:
Testimony, Memory, and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Bloom, Harold. ed. Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor. New York: Chelsea, 1986.
Di Renzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.
Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway. Eds. A Modern Southern Reader. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1986.
Friedman, Melvin J., and Beverly Lyon Clark. eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919) qtd. in On Creativity and the Unconscious. Ed.
Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper, 1958. 122-161.
Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in Art and Literature. trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Kemp, Martin. ed. The Oxford History of Western Art. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. p. 262.
Kessler, Edward. Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1986.
Muller, Gilbert H. Nightmares and Visions. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1971.
---. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally & Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar,
1970.
Osborne, Harold. ed. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. p. 515.