Flannery O'Connor: The "crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson"

It's nice to know I have people who read my blog, but even better is to know they are smart folks thinking through complex ideas even when not commenting here. One reader alerts me to the recent New York Times travel piece where reporter Lawrence Downes visits Flannery O'Connor's Georgia and compares it to the gothic and captivating South or her short stories and novels. Here's the link to the NYT article, which itself links to both a brief slide show of O'Connor's farm near Milledgeville, GA, and an excerpt from her short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." And because NYT links sometimes frustrate or fail as they age, here's another source for the same article.

From the article:

Her output was slender: two novels, a couple dozen short stories, a pile of letters, essays and criticism. But her reputation has grown steadily since she died. Her “Complete Stories” won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971. Her collected letters, “The Habit of Being,” banished the misperception that she was some sort of crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson. They revealed instead a gregarious, engaged thinker who corresponded widely and eagerly, and who might have ranged far had illness not forced her to stay home and write.

From my reader, in an e-mail:

She WAS a crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson, and there ain't a damn thing wrong with that. It's as if [Downes] has to assure himself she is "more" than that, or he can't deal with his own admiration. The idea that a crippled hillbilly knows more than he does about sin and redemption, the meaning of life, the horrors of deception, etc. ... well, that just can't happen. So, he elevates her, supercrip style, yet even ultimately denies her that full status.

In fact, though he fails to make the connection between O'Connor's lupus, her use of crutches to get around and the frequent disability of her fictional characters, Downes does list several memorable ones:

O'Connor's characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There's Hazel Motes, the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching "the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don't see, the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way." Hulga Hopewell, the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin, whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: "Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings."

Then he says, emphatically: "These people can't be real." Much like O'Connor herself, who -- thank God -- is not the "crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson" he was afraid she might be.