Examples Of Grotesque In Southern Literature

Repressed Grotesques in Southern Literature In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” American writer, Flannery O’Connor, creates a piece that brings attention to a very tense relationship, due to major differences between two generations. This story takes place in the South, around the 1960s and is centered around a guy named Julian and his mother, but it is not one of the typical happy-go-lucky, Southern type of stories. Instead, it brings about an element that is defined as an ugly or comically distorted figure, creature or image, known as “grotesque.” Producing pieces that are grotesque, a style that is normally repressed in Southern literature, may result in backlash, but O’Connor believes that properly understanding a situation essentially

Instead, she creates in such a way that makes the reader open their eyes and feel what’s not traditionally felt when reading a piece by a Southern writer. Christopher Wachal, writer of “Tremendous Frontiers -- Flannery O'Connor and The Catholic Writer's ‘True Country’” states, “What precisely it means to be a Southerner…is a central concern of writers like O’Connor who seek to represent their region in their fiction without caricaturing the Southern experience in the eyes of non-Southern readers” (Tremendous Frontiers). When thinking of the South, southern hospitality may be one aspect that would “satisfy the tired reader,” but this story demonstrates the complete opposite by openly showing the grotesque events between people in the

She provides a couple of examples that displays these grotesque interactions, but the most uneasy one would have to be the situation between an African-American woman, her African-American son, and Julian’s mother on and off a bus. Julian’s mother seems to have no an issue with African-American kids because she thinks of all kids the same. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” O’Connor writes, “His mother lumped all children, black and white, into the common category, ‘cute,’ and she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little white children” (261). That line, along with its word choice, instantly set a bitter tone for what was yet to come. As the bus stopped and they were exiting, Julian’s mother offered the African-American boy a penny and that set the mother of the child off, which caused her to hit Julian’s mother with her purse. Even after all of that, O’Connor chose to end the story on a dark, guilty, and despairing note, simply so that her readers look past its exterior and realize the significance and importance of situations in the