In her short stories
"Greenleaf," "Good Country People," and
"Revelation," Flannery O'Connor uses carnivalization, or the
grotesque, mocking inversion of sacred values involving fantastical elements,
to effectively challenge these same values. By placing these values, which are
staples of the Southern monologue, alongside her "secondary"
inversions of those values, O'Connor can be seen identifying and dethroning the
false authority figures in Southern culture, thus preparing her readers for the
ascension of God, the being she considers to be the true authority. Therefore,
the reader may interpret O'Connor's grotesque carnivalization of Southern values
within her stories as a means of forming a fresh dialogue between the human and
the divine before the moment of revelation rather than a condemnation of Southern
culture.
The tradition of carnival has
developed as a way of challenging authority through mockery. Lauren Langman
writes that Carnival has origins in Dionysian cults and became part of Western
culture in the medieval centuries. It was traditionally celebrated by peasants
before Lent (53), generally involving a great deal of mockery at the expense of
the upper class. Langman continues:
[The
endless] revelry and transgression [express] resistance against the elites and
the dominant system. During Carnival the prevailing morals and values [are]
flaunted, inverted, and reversed. The traditional deference the peasants [have
given] to the authority of the elites [is] transformed into various kinds of
parody, lampoon, and ridicule. It [is] a moment in which the morality of the
elites [is] challenged by flagrant and blatant ribald transgressions. Elite
standards of beauty [are] challenged by valorization of the grotesque and the
elites themselves [are] mocked and lampooned. (53)
In
much the same way carnival tradition uses laughter to challenge elite
domination, O'Connor's mockery often exposes the idiosyncrasies of the Southern
authority figures in her works. In many of her short stories, the "parent"
or "teacher" character ends up dead, dying, or the victim of some
severe humiliation. In "Greenleaf," prideful Mrs. May is gored by the
same bull she's been chasing off her property (333). In "Good Country
People," her protagonist Joy is left outsmarted and immobile in a hay loft
while the supposedly simple Bible salesman flees with her wooden leg. Pudgy, class-conscious Mrs. Turpin from
O'Connor's "Revelation" is throttled by a college girl, the same girl
who later calls her a "wart hog from hell" (500). So we see that the
most prideful of O'Connor's characters are served the greatest humiliations.
O'Connor uses grotesque reversal of
her most prideful characters' circumstances to challenge their authority and
deflate their egos. But by humiliating them, she is arguing that not only are
her characters ridiculous but so are their values and social judgments, values
and social judgments traditionally claimed by the American South. Therefore, her
authority characters can be interpreted as personifications of the Southern
monologue. Mrs. May personifies the South's contempt for northern wealth and
progress, a prime example being her reaction to the Greenleaf boys' milking
parlor, a "spotless white concrete room . . . filled with sunlight that [comes]
from a row of windows head-high along both walls" ("Greenleaf" 325).
Quickly overcoming her initial awe, she dismisses the parlor as an unjust boon
for two men who, she would argue, are much less hardworking than herself. Demonstrating
pride to rival that of Mrs. May, Hulga assumes that the Bible salesman, because
he seems less educated than herself and apparently belongs to "good
country people," is a "perfect Christian" (290), and will thus
be easy to take advantage of; she combines corrupted Southern ideals of rural
simplicity with the foolish pride of academia, which leads to her supreme
embarrassment. The protagonist of "Revelation," Mrs. Turpin, especially
personifies the Southern values O'Connor hated most as she is a racist, an elitist,
and a snob. Because these characters embody the Southern monologue as O'Connor
sees it, with all its values and social reckonings, O'Connor's decision to
humiliate them represents a challenge of the Southern system itself.
As carnival-goers challenge traditional
understandings of elite behavior through grotesque exaggeration and mockery,
O'Connor challenges the Southern monologue by introducing a second voice meant
to parody the first, rendering Southern values comic. Bakhtin argues that
"laughter" leads to the "removal of an object from the distant
plane," bringing even the loftiest ideals to bleed beneath the satirist's
scalpel, enabling readers to address the monologue directly (58). In a similar
vein, Denise Askin notes O'Connor's use of laughter and observes that Flannery
O'Connor is, as a fiction writer, "free to import discourses from other
contexts and genres . . . and thereby activate a dialogue across social and
ideological boundaries" (559). The reader can see that O'Connor does
import the irreverent discourse of the carnival, inverting sacred values and
turning the Southern monologue on its head by having Mrs. May killed, Hulga
robbed, and Mrs. Turpin throttled. Askin argues that this importation of
Carnival language "uncrowns and debases the sacred language" that O’Connor’s
characters use to talk about their elite class, their race, and their
intellectual superiority (561), allowing O'Connor to challenge the fool king
(or fool values) other Southerners worship.
But the challenge itself does not effect
change. In fact, Jerome Braun contends that Carnival tradition is
"responsible for [the] seemingly unchangeable nature and the remarkable
stability of [medieval] class structure over time" (75). Carnival, a celebratory
season in which the peasantry are allowed to criticize and laugh at aristocrats,
serves to strengthen rather than eliminate the conditions which merit the
resistance. In other words, though peasants are laughing at aristocrats during
Carnival, they are not actually changing the system in which aristocrats have
power and peasants do not. The elite are safe in knowing that after the
peasants enjoy a brief period of fun and ridicule at their expense, elite
values will remain in force at the end of party. No amount of parody alone can
alter reality, and this parody often reinforces the reality its also ridiculing
(Askin 77).
Similarly, O'Connor's humorous
deflation of her characters' egos―as an isolated element of her work―does
nothing other than provide satire. She uses Mrs. May to show the hypocrisy at
work in the mind of a woman who criticizes Mr. Greenleaf's successful boys for
not having enough pride while her boys (the detestable Scofield and Wesley) are
still immature, unmarried, and living at home, and she uses similar satire with
her protagonists Hulga and Mrs. Turpin. By themselves, these examples are
comic, as the ironic and exposure of human folly usually are. But other than
providing the reader with an excuse to chuckle, these ironic exposures accomplish
nothing so long as the second, mocking voice fails to fundamentally alter the
first monologue consisting of antebellum Southern values. Carnivalization
provides a medium for making fun of the values society holds sacred, including
authority, religion, and class structures. But the ridicule alone has no
lasting effect.
Lasting effects occur when the
second, ridiculing voice of the satirist forces the reader to see the freak in
himself so that he begins to make internal adjustments. Dorothy Walters observes
that when "O'Connor makes us laugh at a character's stubborn and foolish
pride, we are involved" (qtd. in Steed 176). J.P. Steed notes that
"[this] laughter is turned inward, so that we are not merely deriding that
pride, alienating it as something outside and away from ourselves; rather, we
are shifting in our seats, making internal adjustments that, in effect, are
assimilating" (176). An exaggerated, carnival representation of all that
is grotesque in the Southern monologue forces us to question the things
previously held sacred, to reevaluate the relationship between what is fallen
and what is divine. If the monologue has been previously believed to articulate
holy elements that aren't to be questioned, but rather remain pearly,
untouchable abstractions, then the presence of the second voice results in a
sort of spiritual "fall." Society's tenets, previously held sacred,
are corrupted by the questioning influence of carnival ribaldry, forcing the
reader to consider whether or not the values touted by the first voice are, in
fact, sacred.
Through exaggeration, O'Connor's secondary
voice mocks her protagnonist Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation" by demonstrating
how little her elitism amount to in an grotesque, carnival-esque epiphany in
which the lower classes burn together with the upper class. But the vision
doesn't affect Mrs. Turpin or the reader until after the self is seen. At
first Mrs. Turpin views "battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and
clapping and leaping like frogs," and then she witnesses "people . .
. like herself and Claud" marching behind them ("Revelation"
508). After watching herself having "even [her] virtues" burned away,
she returns to the house slowly, perhaps evidence of mental turmoil resulting
from recognition that she is in the vision; not, however, as the omnipotent god
figure of her dreams, but as a frail and faulty creature being burned along
with everyone else (508). This abrupt recognition of her true state is startling,
but effective because it forces contact between the first voice of Southern
values, personified by those like herself and Claud, and the second voice,
personified by the "lunatics" ("Revelation" 509). By seeing
herself as equal to or lesser than "companies of white-trash" and
"black niggers in white robes," Mrs. Turpin begins to understand a
relationship between those she has perceived as fallen and those she has perceived
as faultless (508). The secondary voice, a jumping, celebratory parade of those
she previously despised, makes a connection with the first monologue, which she
has always accepted unthinkingly. In other words, the freak makes contact with
the sacred in true carnival fashion, and in so doing reveals the corruption of
the sacred. As Di Renzo explains of O'Connor's works, the "dialectic in
her fiction between satire and sanctity is the source of its grotesque humor
and offbeat beauty" because the realization of twoness creates a sense of
unity (101). The formation of this
dialogue reveals that the first monologue is not the true authority, or that
Mrs. Turpins's values amount to nothing. In much the same way fool kings were
crowned at carnival to reassert the true ordination of the real king, the
secondary, mocking voice establishes that not only is the first monologue
corrupt, but so is the second voice of the satirist.
As David Eggenschwiler writes, O'Connor
"[senses] that man's various problems [are] interconnected, that a serious
distortion in one dimension of man's spiritual, psychological, and social
nature [will] cause distortions in the other dimensions" (140). The
exaggerated, carnival mockery will reveal distortions in the first monologue
and the second, questioning voices of the blasphemous. Eggenschwiler goes on to
say that "as a devout Christian, [O'Connor believes] that the fundamental
causes of these distortions [are] religious, centering on man's proper relation
to God. She [can] therefore sustain an integral view of human life and describe
the human comedy without despair or cynical amusement" (140). O'Connor
does not fault the first or second monologue for being corrupt. From her
religious perspective, they are the monologues of a fallen people. Her motive
in humiliating her authoritative characters is not to embarrass them. Rather,
it is to demonstrate their lack of authority. She is combining this
"satirical tough-mindedness . . . with compassion, [and] concern for
transcendence tempered by delight in human gestures," so that the false
king is exposed and overthrown, but only to make way for the real king
(Eggenschwiler 140).
The real king is, of course,
representative of Christ, who enters these characters' lives, pitching them off
their thrones with a forceful administration of grace through the carnival
freak. Thus the first and second voices, one fraudulently authoritative and the
other freakishly satirical, are both at fault, but unify to show the protagonists
their true, fallen state, thus preparing the reader for the ascension of
Christ, who is O’Connor’s true king.
Works Cited
Askin, Denise T. "Carnival in the 'Temple': Flannery
O'Connor's Dialogic Parable of Artistic Vocation."
Christianity and Literature. 56.4
(2007): 555-570. Web. 26 July 2016.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, US: University of Texas Press, 1981. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 27 July 2016.
Braun, Jerome, and Langman, Lauren, eds. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought: Alienation and the Carnivalization of
Society. Florence, US: Routledge, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 27 July 2016.
Di Renzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery
O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).
Web. 26 July 2016.
Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972. Print.
"Fools, Feast Of." Funk
& Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. 1st
ed. 2016. Web.
O'Connor,
Flannery. "Greenleaf." The
Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 311-334. Print.
---.
"Good Country People." The
Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 271-291. Print.
---.
"Revelation." The Complete
Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 488-509. Print.
Steed,
J.P. "Through Our Laughter We Are Involved." Critical Insights: Flannery O'Connor.
Ed.
Charles E. May. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2012. 175-189. Print.
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