Honors Theses
Date of Award
2006
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Judson (Jay) Watson
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
For my thesis 1 researched the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor by reading almost all of her fiction - all ten short stories in her collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find; all nine short stories in her later collection. Everything That Rises Must Converge; her short story, “The Partridge Festival;” and her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away - eight non-fiction prose pieces, a collection of about two hundred of her letters, and eleven criticism books. I came to see that O’Connor’s strong Christian faith and her loyalty to the Catholic Church defined her life and her fiction. As a Catholic myself, I am aware of the importance of the seven sacraments within Catholic theology, and I observed a pattern of the presence of sacraments in almost every O’Connor piece of fiction. 1 chose to focus on how and why O’Connor depicts the three sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and marriage in various works. First, I researched Catholic theology regarding these sacraments using the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Then, I compared O’Connor’s portrayal of these sacraments to my theological findings. 1 discovered that O’Connor uses innocent children, tragedy. death, violence, sexuality, grotesquerie, exaggeration, distortion, and devaluation to dramatically convey both the physical and metaphysical aspects surrounding these sacraments. She thereby makes the complex and esoteric, more comprehensible and accessible. In my thesis, I present Catholic doctrines alongside my analysis of her fiction (with critical support) in order to show how O'Connor uniquely converges Catholic orthodoxy with these unorthodox literary techniques. I also argue that O'Connor's reason for combining the orthodox with the unorthodox is in order for the significance of these sacraments to resonate with a secular modern audience whom she believed to be spiritually dead. V
Recommended Citation
Brickey, Karen Elizabeth, "Flannery O'Connor's Depiction of Baptism, The Eucharist, and Marriage: The Convergence of the Orthodox with the Unorthodox" (2006). Honors Theses. 2179.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2179
Accessibility Status
Searchable text