Analysis Of Wiseblood By Flannery O Connor

While Flannery O’Connor’s Wiseblood is a story of religion, it is also a story of violence. Self-mutilation, graphic expletives, and emotional violence pepper the novel. When weaving together these two narratives of brutality and belief, a new story emerges, one that explores the relationship between religion’s social power and violence. The social power of Christianity, which can be understood as the ability to exert influence over the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of individuals and society, is widely known and well established. Yet, violence complicates religion. Violence can become a way of demonstrating power that erodes and problematizes church doctrine. Violence undermines the social power of the church by concretizing the intangible

and reversing the power dynamic between the divine and human.
Motes’s violent threat undercuts the social power of the church by rendering the concept of conscience physical. During a sermon, Motes claims that Jesus has done nothing to redeem human beings. In response, a member of the audience claims that the conscience is a “place where Jesus had redeemed you” (O’Connor 166). Moth responds, labelling conscience as both deceptive and nonexistent. He says that if one’s conscience does exist, “you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it,” (O’Connor 166). If “it” is still referring to the conscience, then the clause is nonsensical. After all, it is impossible to be violent towards or to kill a thing that is intangible. Therefore, one can conclude that Motes, in his quest to uncover the fallacies of religion, decided to speak about the conscience in physical terms. By concretizing what people believe the conscience to be, he undermines the power of the church, an institution which uses the power of the unseen to wield authority. Church power rests in an ability to explain miracles, things that cannot be seen or understood. By using the word “it” paired with the active and violent verb “kill”, conscience moves into the realm of the physical and empirical, something experienced with the senses. The “it” cannot be understood as existing physically when read alone as a single word. It is physicalized when placed next to “kill”. When someone says, “I love it”, the “it” can still be abstract and intangible. However, the phrase “kill it” necessitates an “it” that is physical and real. In order to make the conscience destroyable, Motes has to speak about it in physical terms. If conscience, a place of redemption, can be understood somatically, there would be a less of a need for people to rely upon faith and religious understanding of the conscience. Therefore, the necessary act of rendering the intangible tangible in order to threaten violence undermines the social power of the religious truths that the church espouses.
Violence not only undermines the power of a miracle but also the the power dynamic between God and human.

In the statement, which was explained in the previous paragraph, that the conscience is a “place where Jesus had redeemed you” (O’Connor 166), the word “you” is the object, and the conscience is a realm controlled by Christ. These subject and objects differ from those in the counsel given by Motes. He advises the audience member about what to do with an existing conscience, preaching “you had best… kill it” (O’Connor 166). The conscience, which was once a place, is now an object in Motes’s eyes. The word “it” is the object of the verb “kill”. The “you”, the audience member he is addressing, is the subject of the phrase; he is the one that Hazel thinks should be doing the killing. “You” becomes the subject of the second statement phrase rather than the object of the first one. The “you”, the person that Motes is addressing, can actively change the conscience by killing it, rather than having the conscience be a place where Jesus changes the individual through redemption. Now, the“you”, the regular person, decides the fate of their own conscience: death. Killing—violent, active, and definitive—establishes clear-cut roles of powerless victim and powerful perpetrator. The act of killing claims agency and thus control over one’s conscience. The traditional religious relationship, in which a higher power dictates the beliefs and conceptions of the individual, is changed. The suggestion to kill completely disregards any human concern about reverence or redemption. By allowing people to destroy and thus claim control of the place that was thought to be Jesus’s domain, violence diminishes people’s deference towards the divine. Permitting people to wield authority over places that were thought to be divinely controlled challenges the belief that Christ is all-powerful and worthy of admiration. Violence allows for a reversal of power between the divine and human. The

individual claims newfound power and the divine loses the power it once maintained over human belief. Violence undermines the relationship between the divine and humankind by allowing people to claim power over things and places that they believed were once controlled by higher powers.
Violence threatens the social power of Christianity through transformation. Because of violence, the intangible is transformed into something tangible, and the reverent individual is transformed into the powerful human. While it is evident that violence can minimize the social power of the church, violence can create a vacuum in which new people and structures scramble to claim power. In Wiseblood, the reader bears witness to Motes’ journey to become preacher and pedagogue. Throughout the novel, Motes uses violence to attack the traditional church in order to convince people to join the Church Without Christ, which is led and founded by him. In dismantling the social power of one institution, Motes effectively paves the way for his own rise to power. Violence can not only dismantle certain power structures but usher in new ones.