I’ve been binging on Flannery O’Connor’s journals of late, poring over pages she likely never meant others to read. Last month, Image published, for the first time, a brief college journal written by O’Connor when she just was eighteen years old. (Note to self: burn all your teenaged journals immediately.) At the same time, I’ve been slowly digesting O’Connor’s prayer journal, from a similar period in her life, when she was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Karen Swallow Prior, writing for The Atlantic, sees in this newly released journal a young Mary O’Connor who is crippled with self-doubt. She concludes that O’Connor’s apparent unease about her writing is a classic case of authorship anxiety, a malady that plagues all women writers, according to the conventions of feminist literary criticism. O’Connor’s apparent lack of confidence in herself and her writing, then, can be chalked up to a struggle to assert her authority as a female writer.
I can’t help but notice, however, that Prior’s piece does not provide any compelling evidence from O’Connor herself to support such a reading. Instead, Prior invokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and claims that Woolf’s account of women’s literary history “goes a long way toward explaining the near-paralyzing insecurities of a budding female writer like O’Connor.”
But is this familiar feminist reading the best way to understand the young Flannery O’Connor? Based on what I’ve read, especially in her prayer journal, I would argue that it’s not. The college journal reveals a teenaged O’Connor who is wry, self-aware, and professes to have a robust sense of “affection” for herself, second only to her affection for her mother. Although she is preoccupied with how others perceive her, like most teenagers, and struggles with self-motivation, she hardly seems “paralyzed” by insecurities. And even her writing woes are regarded with consummate dry wit:
My greatest trouble in marketing a manuscript comes in the fact that I never send it off. I have it accepted, live through a glorious period of congratulation and money-making and excellent offers—all before I have typed the manuscript.
It is in the prayer journal, not the college journal, that O’Connor’s agitation about her work becomes more pronounced. But this writerly angst seems far less related to her sex than to her soul.
In the first entry of her prayer journal, written when she was just twenty, O’Connor expresses a desire to be successful, but also a concern that this desire will occlude her love for God:
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
Her prayer journal, as a whole, is a heartfelt attempt to ensure God remains in her work, that divine concerns animate and guide it. There seems to be one central prayer throughout the journal, clothed in varying words – a single underlying plea: that her writing would reveal the things of God.
Much of O’Connor’s inner struggle comes from a desire to belong wholly to a Christian worldview. An appeal from the college journal – “Oh dear God, please don’t let me be taken in by this vast nonchalance with which the socially scientific world looks at eternity!” – reveals this to be an ongoing concern, one that is heightened in the later journal. This question of worldview is not separate from her ambitions as a writer, but integral. O’Connor is well aware that “to maintain any thread in the novel there must be a view of the world behind it,” and she is praying her way more deeply into a Catholic cosmos even as external forces attempt to lead her elsewhere.
While at Iowa, O’Connor finds herself confronted with the rigorous secularism of academe and pervasive Freudian accounts of religion as mere human projection. She refers intermittently and sardonically to “the psychologists” as a way to invoke and reject the Freudian lens, to expose its poverty and pray herself beyond it:
Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost. The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural.” Help me to get what is more than natural into my work—help me to love & bear with my work on that account.
The desire and turmoil that O’Connor expresses in these pages seems the inverse of the “authorship anxiety” thesis of feminist literary criticism. She does not express too little faith in her own authority, but is wary of having too much. She is not afraid of being overshadowed; she is afraid of overshadowing. Confining the spiritual throes of her interior life to a “natural” explanation of the female ego struggling to assert itself overlooks the explicitly supernatural focus of her work. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural.”
O’Connor’s writing, both her fiction and her journals, comes alive under a Catholic lens, rather than a feminist one. In the pages of her journals, she exhibits little concern with her identity as a woman vis-à-vis men, remaining far more preoccupied with her identity as a creature before her Creator. “Let Christian principles permeate my writing,” she prays. “Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.” Any careful reader of O’Connor can see that this prayer was answered in abundance.
You should have read Lorraine Murray’s the Abbess of Andalusia, wich focused entirely on O’Conner’s prayer journal. Of course you’ll get a feminist perspective if you read a feminist. How should it have been otherwise?
Thanks for the recommendation. Looks like a good read.
Thanks for writing so well about what bothered me in that Atlantic author’s application of feminist angst to Flannery O’Connor, who as you write, was “far more preoccupied with her identity as a creature before her Creator” than with “her identity as a woman vis-à-vis men.” By the way, I read Abbess of Andalusia and I thought that abbess is such a wrong word for O’Connor that I wrote a whole Amazon review about why it caused me to doubt the author’s grasp of language. “The misuse of the word abbess in the title might help explain why this book doesn’t totally sit right with me. This definition of abbess from Wikipedia is as good as any: ‘An abbess (Latin abbatissa, feminine form of abbas, abbot) is the female superior, or mother superior, of a community of nuns, often an abbey.’ Obviously, from this definition of the word, Flannery O’Connor was not even metaphorically an abbess. Perhaps the title was suggested by the book’s editor or by the publisher. Accepting such a title, or worse yet, choosing it, indicates to me that that the author might have a bit of a tin ear when it comes to word definitions.
Anchorite might be a better word. “[S]omeone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic, and–circumstances permitting–Eucharist-focused life. As a result, anchorites are usually considered to be a type of religious hermit.”
But then, Flannery did not abandon the world, her illness wrested her away from it. After having some success as a writer, she had been living among the fast-living intelligentsia of her era, and perhaps she would have been influenced in the wrong direction had she stayed with them. Circumstances that forced her to return home to live with her mother in an out-of-the-way Georgia farmhouse as an invalid were perhaps her salvation. If she had a dark night of the soul as a result, she was too tough to mention it. She was a reluctant anchorite, maybe. Stolidly resigned anchorite, more likely. But that wouldn’t look as good as a book title: ‘Resigned Anchorite–Flannery O’Conor’s Spiritual Journey.’
A product of the assimilationist world of Catholic believers in which I was raised in the 1950s, I have always been astounded at O’Connor’s deep conviction about the truth of the doctrines of the Catholic Church and her passion to communicate these truths through her fiction and her letters. What also amazes me is that she had these strong convictions as a resident of the mostly Protestant South. How about this as a possible title? ‘The Odd Catholic in Georgia: Flannery O’Connor’s Spiritual Journey.’ I think it was Baudelaire who said that he wrote in meter because restrictions free a writer. That thought could be seen as applying to O’Connor’s life too. Constrained with the limits of her life, she created an impressive body of spiritually charged work that ranks high in American and world literature.’
Abigail, I loved this post. I agree with you that Flannery wasn’t nearly as fussed about her femininity as, ironically, some later writers have been. I think at least some of her writing’s power lies in the fact of its sheer excellence making the author’s gender all but irrelevant: a feat few writers, male or female, can pull off.
I think she also had the spectacular and enviable advantage of being born after the first (freeing) wave, but before the second (distorting) wave, of feminism. I’m having trouble articulating exactly why this is, but I have the sense that there was a certain mode of intellectual life as a woman that she embodied par excellence, which was culturally possible then but doesn’t really have an analogue now. Not that I’m trying to paint her as a sort of Athena in hornrims, which I think would have horrified her nearly as much as being called a saint. As Roseanne points out, “anchoress” might have been accepted by her with only moderate unease. 🙂
Sorry, this was meant to be on the main post, and now it won’t let me edit: I made the same point, though, in my 2010 review of the book: https://dappledthings.org/4752/book-review-the-abbess-of-andalusia/
Abigail, I loved this post. I agree with you that Flannery wasn’t nearly as fussed about her femininity as, ironically, some later writers have been. I think at least some of her writing’s power lies in the fact of its sheer excellence making the author’s gender all but irrelevant: a feat few writers, male or female, can pull off.
I think she also had the spectacular and enviable advantage of being born after the first (freeing) wave, but before the second (distorting) wave, of feminism. I’m having trouble articulating exactly why this is, but I have the sense that there was a certain mode of intellectual life as a woman that she embodied par excellence, which was culturally possible then but doesn’t really have an analogue now. Not that I’m trying to paint her as a sort of Athena in hornrims, which I think would have horrified her nearly as much as being called a saint. As Roseanne points out, “anchoress” might have been accepted by her with only moderate unease. 🙂