‘Flannery’ Documentary Looks At Southern Writer’s Works On Grace and Race

Flannery O’Connor at the home of her adulthood in Milledgeville, Georgia. Creative Commons photo.

(REVIEW) Flannery O’Connor is a Southern staple, combining Gothic fiction with her impressions of Christianity in the Bible Belt at the tip of the Civil Rights era.

I never read O’Connor in 18 years of living in the South and only was exposed to her work after I moved to New York and enrolled in a Christian college. Reading her short stories made me feel more like a Southerner than I ever had. It exposed me to more nuanced views on racism, forgiveness and pride than I’d ever heard or read about before.

“Flannery,” a new documentary directed by Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, memorializes this effect on readers and memorializes O’Connor as a profound, complex writer within the Southern canon. 

Bosco and Coffman have arranged a four-week series of panels on Facebook live every Monday from July 20 to Aug. 10 to discuss additional aspects of the documentary and O’Connor’s life. In the session from July 27 “On Faith,” they were joined by Michael Murphy, Carolyn Medine and Randy Boyagoda. Above all, they emphasized her as someone who was heavily influenced by a Catholic way of thinking. 

The panel discussion hosted by “Flannery” creators “On Faith,” discussing how O’Connor’s Catholic faith influenced her writing.

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia as an Irish Catholic at a time when Catholics weren’t particularly liked by the public. She had parents who loved her and encouraged her toward greatness in different ways. And she had a certain precociousness that can’t be replicated: one of her chickens was filmed by a company in New York because of its ability to walk backwards, and she spent her time trying to raise her other chickens and ducks with other oddities to draw them back. 

As a result, O’Connor was just as bold and eccentric as an adult writer. 

She was a writer and cartoonist through undergraduate studies at Georgia State College for Women, and early on propelled herself into a writing career. She was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and after completing her MFA went to the writers’ retreat at Yaddo in New York. She was surrounded by writers who would join her as the great writers of Southern literature—including authors like Robert Penn Warren in Iowa, and Carson McCullers and Robert Lowell at Yaddo.

And it was in these writers’ programs that some of O’Connor’s greatest works began to take shape. Excerpts from her prayer journal show her pleading with God to be able to write a great novel; she is, essentially, asking for God to give her a story to write. Friends say she never went to the taverns like other students, but attended Mass daily. She asked her priest for advice on writing about race in her works, thoughtful and meticulous from the beginning. 

After leaving Yaddo, O’Connor lived briefly in New York City and in Connecticut with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Sally Fitzgerald became one of O’Connor’s closest friends after that and was prominently featured in “Flannery.” 

After falling ill with lupus—the same disease her father died from when she was a teenager—O’Connor moved back home to Georgia and lived on a farm with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia. 

In the process, she was completing the novels she had prayed so fervently for and writing the short stories she would later become famous for. 

Fitting to her dual talent as a cartoonist, many of these stories—like “Revelation,” “Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—have been illustrated, and various interviewees read passages from each to give a small sample of the depth and power of O’Connor’s prose.

She wrote in the Southern Gothic style, which puts the dark, supernatural and grotesque in a Southern setting. A common feature of these works which O’Connor utilized is the portrayal of “freaks,” who stand apart from society because of some physical deformity or ideological difference.

The difference between O’Connor and other Southern Gothic writers is O’Connor’s Catholicism, which serves both as an advocate of the grotesque and a force of redemption in her stories. She creates a unique, religious Gothic setting when, as writer Richard Rodriguez says in the movie, “the profane meets the sacred.”

“I feel as though the grotesque quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that I am both a Southern and a Catholic writer,” O’Connor is quoted as saying in the movie. 

This included the grotesque and bloody. But it also speaks to the way O’Connor combines lofty theology with down-to-earth situations and flawed human beings. By mixing the heavenly with a strong dose of realism, she was able to give her stories power. 

Her first published novel was “Wise Blood,” the story of a bitter preacher named Hazel Motes who founds the “Church Without Christ” in the Deep South. Motes is a character who’s “Christ-haunted,” a term often used to describe O’Connor’s characters and works—and a term O’Connor used to describe the South itself. 

Christ-haunted most often refers to characters or places where Christianity is a fundamental presence but not a welcome one.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a Catholic author, says in the movie that the way Motes is portrayed reflects O’Connor’s larger view of faith: “He can’t estrange God, and there’s no way you can ever entirely estrange yourself from God. So O’Connor understands this. This is her theology.”

One of the ways her characters remain so “haunted” is their rampant racism, something often tied in with their Southern heritage or their Christian faith. 

“Revelation” is one of the best stories to illustrate this point. Boyagoda, writer and critic, said that it poses “the question of what it means to be saved and then what it means to understand yourself as saved.” But because of her prejudice, a main character, Mrs. Turpin, “screws it up.”

“Revelation” was the first short story of hers that I read, introducing me to Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace and Claude and the “white trash woman,” characters who seemed at once to be fully Southern stereotypes and fully enticing nuances. 

At the end, after wrestling with her pride, racism and hatred hidden behind a veneer of sickly-sweet-Southernness, Mrs. Turpin dreams that she is in line to get into heaven behind everyone she hates. The story is clever (and well-written, of course, but no one is questioning the quality of O’Connor’s prose) and stunned me: this was the first time I’d seen this kind of prejudice so accurately captured and so wholly condemned. 

Another of my favorite short stories of hers is “Everything that Rises Must Converge”—also the name of the collection, which was published posthumously in 1965—which is set just after desegregation policies have been implemented. 

The main character, Julian, is the primary caregiver for his racist mother. His main point of pride in life is that he’s not racist like other white Southerners, and all he can think about is proving this to himself and his mother, who he believes is beneath him and almost inhuman because of her prejudice. He’s so focused on being anti-racist (which he doesn’t even fully succeed at) that he neglects the truth of the world around him and the care of his mother. 

It hits the nail a little too close on the head for Southerners who are just as blinded by their selfish drive for social justice as some Southerners are by racism. 

Boyagoda said in the panel that this story has theological implications, too, as “she implicates us.” Her stories, especially ones like “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” are often so powerful to readers because they force the contemplation of individual action and salvation. 

It also speaks a lot to the inevitable influence of surroundings in influencing things like racism, something that has haunted O’Connor’s works themselves.

Some schools have banned her works because of the use of the N-word, often used by her characters. O’Connor also used such language in personal letters she sent to friends, often to poke fun at them for their own liberal activism. When James Baldwin, an author who openly supported the Civil Rights movement, came to Georgia, O’Connor declined to have him at her home. 

To determine whether O’Connor was racist—and what this would mean about her works, which could be independently racist, and whether or not readers should still read and study them—is an insurmountable task. 

But the interviewees in “Flannery” seem to think she’s not worth “cancelling,” despite her complicated relationship with race. They say that O’Connor was a product of her time and her geographical location, and arguably more than that was a woman with a grotesque sense of humor. 

“I don’t suspect that Flannery was racist so much as she had a knee-jerk reaction to race,” said Hilton Als, a critic for The New Yorker, in the movie. 

And Coffman mentioned briefly in the Facebook panel that a lot of these comments of hers were “taken out of context.” The page for the documentary does, however, condemn the use of racial slurs and other racially-insensitive language, regardless of time or place. 

Complex to be sure, O’Connor is an author who can’t be nailed down by one letter or one short story—and even, maybe, by one documentary. But her legacy has shaped the way Southerners, Christians and everyone else thinks about race, faith and redemption. 

If proof of this point is necessary, look no further than the range of people who sang O’Connor’s praises: old friends like Sally Fitzgerald, Fordham professors like O’Donnell, scholars and writers like Murphy, Medine and Boyagoda, screenwriters like Michael Fitzgerald, actors like Tommy Lee Jones.

Out of all the subjects she’s written about and people she’s influenced, what’s the most important part of O’Connor’s work?

Michael Fitzgerald, who wrote and produced the film adaptation of “Wise Blood,” said this: “This woman had a religious point of view. She saw life as the action of God’s grace. And without understanding that, it’s impossible to know what she was doing and what those stories really mean.”

The “Flannery” documentary is available to stream at any time for $10 and can be found here.

Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.