The sudden consciousness of the tree-line on the part of the character foreshadows an impending crisis. Whereas the sun reflects impending light or enlightenment, the treeline suggests a delineation between the known and unknown. A few simple images recur so strikingly that every reader notices them: colorful shirts, suns, treelines. Her themes, as opposed to her language, derive less from her region than religion. In all her writing Flannery O’Connor has certain preoccupations that seem almost obsessional. She confronted life’s mystery with the extraordinary capacity for laughter. She realized that a character makes itself known in extreme situations and used Georgia as the surface to express her mystery. You get the manners from the texture of experience that surrounds you.“ For her, mystery was centered upon the three basic theological doctrines of the Church: Fall, Redemption, Judgment. “There are two qualities that make fiction,“ she was fond of saying: “One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners.
Miss O’Connor defined fiction as “the concrete expression of mystery - mystery that is lived.“ Flannery was a mystery fan, and what she wrote about might be comprehended by the word mystery. Her production has been severely limited in quantity. There she maintained a steady if slow writing pace. From that time on she lived with her mother. Her independent writer’s life ended abruptly at the age of 25 when she suffered the first attack of lupus. A Flannery O’Connor story is always the slowly paced uncovering of a series of unusual people and circumstances. Her stories were easily published, occasionally by popular magazines, but more often by prestigious literary journals. After having enrolled in the graduate writing program at Iowa State University, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree, which was earned in creative writing in 1947 with six stories. In the spare time Miss O’Connor not only wrote for school publications, but also presented linoleum block and woodcut cartoons. With 16 she entered the nearby Georgia State College for Women, majored in social sciences and graduated in 1945. As the only child of orthodox Roman Catholics from prominent Georgia families she attented local schools in Savannah before entering the public Peabody high school in Milledgeville, where the family moved in 1938 after her father developed lupus, an incurable skin tuberculosis that makes clinical treatment necessary. Bibliography Introduction Mary Flannery O’ConnorĬursae vitae : Mary Flannery O’Connor, American short story writer, novelist and essayist, born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, was by birth and faith a Roman Catholic.
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