The Violent Grace of Flannery O’Connor

A quick lesson on grace, the grotesque, and Southern Gothic Literature

Can violence image God’s love?

Many are turned off by the stories of Flannery O’Connor, as they see her tales as brutal, grotesque, and unsettling.

And, well, all of that is true.

But O’Connor is a spiritual master—a teacher of the soul—and the brutality in her Southern Gothic fiction is not simply for shock value.

It has a purpose, if you can stomach it.

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The Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor will ruin your week if you let her.

Read “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “The River,” or many of her other short stories, and you may throw the book down and swear you are done with her forever. Honestly, who wants to read about children dying, grandmothers being shot in the chest, or a woman being gored by a bull? Flannery O’Connor writes violent, grotesque short stories set in the American South in the early to mid 1900s. Her stories often include imploded characters that navigate or embody the tensions of urban and rural, educated and simple, northern and southern, white and black, and many other parallels within an unromantic picture of the post-war South.

Flannery O’Connor, however, was a devout Christian.

And this fact surprises many.

The violent and grotesque nature of her stories is not reducible to cheap “shock value.” She is a teacher. The violence is catechetical.

She is offering you a spiritual lesson.

If you will listen.

Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home, Hale County, Alabama.

On Southern Gothic

Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, and left home to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—however, she was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that killed her father, and she returns home to spend her last thirteen years on her mother’s dairy farm. She was a devout Roman Catholic in the Protestant deep South, a place she famously called the “Christ-haunted South.” In other words, she saw the South as a culture in which Jesus was known but rarely encountered. She wrote two novels and two collections of stories before dying at thirty-nine in 1964.

She writes in the Southern Gothic tradition. What does that even mean?

Well, the term “gothic,” in the old English sense, means something horrific, unsettling, perverse, and grotesque. In the old English stories, it was also tied to being “medieval,” as a pejorative, in contrast to modern rationality—as such, it often used Catholicism as a stand-in for gothic themes, i.e., the backward, superstitious ways of medieval man.¹

In O’Connor, “Southern Gothic” is a response to the earlier movement of romanticizing the antebellum south, as in works like Gone with the Wind. As Dr. Joseph Boyne explains, the first wave of Southern Gothic literature is embodied in William Faulkner, and O’Connor is in the second wave. She arguably turns the anti-Catholicism of earlier gothic literature on its head, as her characters are mainly Southern Protestants (with Catholicism serving as an important foil and anomaly, as in “The Enduring Chill”). Catholicism, however, arguably remains something alien, strange, and “medieval” in the minds of her deep South Protestant characters. Overall, the South is no longer the romantic, genteel place of Gone with the Wind but a rough, lurid culture brimming with contradiction and hypocrisy.

But what about the violence?

How is the violence catechetical?

Violence as Sacramental

Flannery O’Connor saw in humanity a spiritual callousness. Man’s heart was hardened to God even in a place like the “Christ-haunted South.” People were spiritually deaf. So, she offered them a “shout,” something that they could hear. In other words, the violence and the grotesque in her stories is supposed to break through to the soul—it unsettles the soul, knocks it out of its place of comfort into a place of reality, as painful and upsetting as that can be.

But if the violence is a medium, a method of communication, what is its purpose?

Flannery O’Connor offered the violence as God’s grace.

That may sound very odd… but you have to understand how she viewed God’s grace at work in the world.

Flannery O’Connor, as a Catholic, believed that Jesus gave his Church seven Sacraments, like Baptism and Holy Communion. The Sacraments are outward signs, instituted by Christ, to give grace. The important parallel here is that the Sacraments are physical conveyances of God’s grace. For example, the waters of Baptism do truly convey the grace of God to the soul. The physical can be a medium of the spiritual.

In the Bible, think of Christ spitting in the dirt and using it to heal the man’s eyes or even St. Peter’s shadow healing the sick. Overall, of course, the greatest example of this is Jesus dying on the Cross, as His Body and Blood were shed for the salvation of the world. A physical act or object can have a profound spiritual effect.

O’Connor uses violence in a sacramental manner.

In other words, the violence breaks open the callous heart. The violence and grotesque character of her work is catechetical, which means it teaches you a spiritual lesson. In fact, the act of violence is often a blessing to the recipient, as without it they would never repent—but it is a painful, heart-wrenching blessing at times. Her characters are imploded, lurid, deformed persons who are spiritually deaf and must receive a “shout” to hear God again. The suffering they endure returns them to a place of tenderness, a place of receptivity and true reality.

The trick is whether you, the reader, can learn these lessons without having to first suffer. Can you turn your heart back to God without having to have the stony crust torn away first?

For O’Connor, the suffering is catechetical—the violence is a pedagogical act.

She is a master of Christian spirituality writing in a broken, perverse world.

Try Reading O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor is worth your time and attention. She merits a close read—for those with the capacity to stomach her. She is not for everyone; however, if you’d like a more tame, calm introduction to her work, we are discussing her story “Enduring Chill” on the podcast this week with Dr. Joseph Boyne. The story lacks her characteristic unsettling act of violence and presents her catechesis in a more subdued, almost comic manner.

Many people are aghast at her violence.

But she is aghast at a heart closed off to God.

And she offers a way to break it back open.

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Dcn. Harrison Garlick is a deacon, husband, father, Chancellor, and attorney. He lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and five children. He is also the host of Ascend: The Great Books Podcast. Follow him on X at Dcn. Garlick or Ascend.

1. Dr. Joseph Boyne does a wonderful job of explaining this theme in his discussion on GK Chesterton’s The Chief Mourner of Marne.