Diyannery O Connor Southern Gothic

The southern gothic genre can be described as a “tradition of storytelling in which engaging, violent, and frequently grotesque characters are often treated with colloquial humor” (DiYanni 181-82). This storytelling tradition is present in the literary works of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor was a writer of short stories who admitted that her southern roots were one of the strongest influences on her writing (DiYanni 182). Though many of O’Connor’s works can be considered southern gothic, this storytelling tradition shines through most notably in her short story Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Everything That Rises Must Converge has a setting typical of southern gothic writing. O’Connor uses this style of writing to “create a moody and

unsettling depiction of life in the American South” (SparkNotes Editors). She places the story in the life of a mother and son, just after the integration of the black community, in a dingy neighborhood in the south. Her dark setting shows the reader a once well to do neighborhood that is now decaying and fading away:
The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.

Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. (DiYanni 209)

The characters that Flannery O’Connor uses in her short story also highlight the southern gothic nature of her writing. Her main characters are a mother and her son, Julian. These characters are used to highlight racial tensions at this time in the south. The mother is living in the past, in the days that her upper class family was well

known:
‘Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.’…‘You remain what you are,’ she said. ‘Your great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves.’ (DiYanni 210)
She seems to miss the days of slavery and thinks that the African American community was better off when they were slaves than they are now that they’ve integrated into the white community (DiYanni 210). Her son, Julian, is nothing but irritated with her talk of the past and slave times and wishes she would see reality and live in the present. Though he tries to be the opposite of his mother and accept African Americans as equals, he’s awkward in his attempts and seems to be more motivated to make his mother uncomfortable than anything else:
He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening…He had tried and moreover, he had never been successful at making any Negro friends. (DiYanni 214)
Though Julian asserts himself to be so much more open-minded than his conservative mother, he continually speaks of the black community as though they are only objects by which he can irritate and shock his mother:
…he approached the ultimate horror. He brought home a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said. There is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman I’ve chosen…His eyes narrowed and through the indignation he had generated, he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her hat. (DiYanni 215)
O’Connor’s characters act in ways meant to make the reader uncomfortable and to confront uncomfortable truths about the American past. Her story “draws upon the tragic history of slavery, the lingering feelings of defeated regional pride after the Civil War, and isolated, often neglected, locales” (SparkNotes Editors).
O’Connor uses a grotesque kind of humor throughout her story, as is the southern gothic tradition.

For example, Julian’s mother places so much stock in appearances. She believes that appearance denotes class. Then a black woman boards the bus in the same hat as her. Though they are matching, she still believes herself to be above this woman because of race. (DiYanni 215). Julian jokes about giving his mother a stroke by inviting Negro friends home with him (DiYanni 214) only to have the actions of a black woman give his mother an apparent stroke at the end of the story (DiYanni 218). To add to the irony of the situation, his mother had good intentions trying to give a young black child a penny, as she always did with children, when the child’s mother became upset and violent at the seemingly condescending gesture (DiYanni 217). His mother wasn’t trying to be condescending she was simply treating this child the same as she treated every child, it is the one moment in the story where his mother is not looking at race at all, and yet that is the moment she is punished

for.
Flannery O’Connor had deep southern roots, having lived the majority of her life in Georgia. Even with those roots she is still able to poke fun at southern stereotypes and call out the uncomfortable truths that lie in past of the American South. She uses her writing as a platform to speak on racism and the racist attitudes still prevalent even in the attitudes of those who believe themselves to be above it. “O’Connor often highlights American cultural challenges, such as random violence, race relations, and class discrimination” (DiYanni 181). Her ability to bring attention to these challenges with the use of satire, strange character choices, and dark and grotesque setting are what her such a prevalent voice in southern gothic literature.