Richard Giannone
Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+290. $35.00

Cynthia L. Seel
Ritual Performance in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor
Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. Pp. ix+285. $65.00

Katherine Hemple Prown
Revising Flannery O'Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. xii+201. $35.00
Reviewed by Marshall Bruce Gentry

Although Richard Giannone's book is his second on O'Connor, and although his approach is religious, as are most studies of O'Connor's works, his new book is original. Giannone presents here the first thorough investigation of O'Connor's interest in the hermits of fourth-century Christianity, men and women who retreated to deserts to live solitary lives, battle their demons, and seek spiritual purity. The analysis of O'Connor's fondness for the hermits' religious practices, a fondness Giannone sees increasing over the course of her career, provides insights into O'Connor's characters. Some of the concepts of desert spirituality require careful attention, but overall the book is very readable.

Giannone's arguments are probably most believable when he discusses the protagonists of O'Connor's novels, Hazel Motes of Wise Blood (1952) and Tarwater of The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Both go to war with personal demons to achieve their lonely breakthroughs, and both may be considered characters living in the desert. The readings of O'Connor's stories, however, are more controversial and original. Whereas in the stories in O'Connor's first collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), evil wins about half the time, Giannone sees Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), written as O'Connor's commitment to hermit spirituality grew, as almost a series of spiritual success stories. Giannone manages paradoxically upbeat interpretations of "The Comforts of Home," which he relates to a desert tradition of "holy women" (189), and of "The Lame Shall Enter First," which he sees as leading Sheppard toward love. Giannone is less persuasive when he discusses some of O'Connor's most popular stories in A Good Man. The Misfit in the title story, Hulga/Joy Hopewell in "Good Country People," and Mr. Shiftlet in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" deserve to be treated as more complicated. Giannone is too quick to see the demonic in them and therefore cut short his discussions. For that matter, I would like to see Giannone do more with Enoch Emery, the near-protagonist of Wise Blood who lives his own sort of hermit life.

Another major thrust of Giannone's book is that O'Connor herself was a hermit, that her life brought the virtues of desert spirituality to the twentieth century. Giannone writes movingly of the influence on O'Connor of her father's death and of her severe illness. Those of us who love O'Connor will be tempted by Giannone to bestow sainthood on her. And yet I believe Giannone needs to think less about O'Connor's intellect and more about her sometimes turbulent emotions. When he talks about the sorts of devils O'Connor faced in the desert that is rural Georgia, he comes up with the KKK and skunks. Giannone's reading of O'Connor's life would be stronger if he were more concerned with O'Connor's internal demons, the way she sometimes regarded people close to her, including her mother, as if they were her opponents.

Cynthia L. Seel's Ritual Performance in the Works of Flannery O'Connor focuses primarily on half the stories in O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, but what Seel lacks in coverage, she makes up for in depth. Seel emphasizes startlingly various ways in which "A Circle in the Fire," "The Artificial Nigger," "The Lame Shall Enter First" (from the second collection), "The River," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," and "A Stroke of Good Fortune" may be understood through the Eleusinian mysteries and such mythical figures as Demeter, Kore, Hecate, and the divine child. Seel's readings should change O'Connor scholars' perception of all of O'Connor's works. While acknowledging the Catholicism of the stories, sometimes at length, Seel always seems eager to return to larger, older mythic dimensions. Confident that O'Connor admired Jung, Seel treats O'Connor stories as ritual initiations, in which characters learn their interconnectedness, accept death as leading toward rebirth, and rediscover the value of the feminine.

There is food for thought in each of Seel's readings-even where one disagrees. The book's longest chapter treats a story some consider mediocre, "A Circle in the Fire," and Seel masterfully demonstrates how the story's mythic rituals can answer critical doubts. Seel proposes that Sally Virginia and Mrs. Pritchard are "split-off parts of Mrs. Cope's fragmented psyche" (76) and reveals fascinating links between the iron-lung baby and the story's three delinquent boys. While I cannot accept Seel's claims that Mrs. Ashfield in "The River" is perverted and that the hand receiving Harry/Bevel at the end is necessarily female, Seel's analysis reopens the story for me. Seel's other readings regularly surprise, even though they are sometimes too insistent on positive endings. I remain skeptical of a happy end for Ruby Hill of "A Stroke of Good Fortune," even though Seel does prove O'Connor intended one. The reading of "The Lame Shall Enter First" impresses as it emphasizes the dead mother's importance and compares Sheppard and Rufus to Orpheus and Eurydice-although one may doubt that Sheppard reaches the edge of transformation.

Although Seel has a wonderful passage on O'Connor's self-portrait with a pheasant cock, as a treatment of "the artist en rapport ... with a creature" best described as "daimonic" (90), Seel seems troubled that O'Connor's works might do unintended things. Seel repeatedly insists that O'Connor's narrator means characters no harm. Seel does not prove this claim, but her main argument stands without it. Seel considers the O'Connor narrator to be helping characters' initiations, but when Seel inserts a dramatic piece with the narrator of Wise Blood assisting Hazel Motes, Seel creates a weakened protagonist, less responsible for his journey toward feminine wholeness. Even if the O'Connor narrator tries to interfere, Seel shows O'Connor's characters to be capable of changing themselves through mythic ritual. The accomplishment of Seel's study-a major one-is its demonstration of feminine power as a structuring principle in O'Connor's works.

Katherine Hemple Prown's Revising Flannery O'Connor claims that what is most important in O'Connor's works is what she tried to hide. Prown's extremely stimulating study argues that O'Connor was taught, by the Fugitive/Agrarian establishment she was introduced to in graduate school, and more complicatedly by Caroline Gordon, that she must write like a man. Consequently, O'Connor revised extensively to excise femaleness and emphasize masculine attributes. In rewriting Wise Blood, O'Connor learned at the University of Iowa, she must make female sexuality dangerous, not positively transformative, and of course delete any positive treatment of abortion. In rewriting The Violent Bear It Away, O'Connor had to excise much of the satire pointed indirectly at Fugitive/Agrarian racism. For Prown, the innovative form of O'Connor's novels comes from her struggle to retain some subversively feminist impulses. Prown also interestingly links O'Connor's desire for acceptance as a writer to O'Connor's emphasis on her Catholicism. O'Connor sensed it was good for her reputation to be considered a Catholic writer, because a limited amount of feminism could be acceptable under the safe guise of patriarchal religion. Also, O'Connor felt that her femaleness would be less of a threat to her place in Southern letters if she maintained silence about racism.

Sometimes Prown's approach seems based on the questionable assumption that early drafts embody a writer's genuine desires, that revising for publication involves a fall. Prown could say more about how final versions are sometimes more cleverly subversive than O'Connor's drafts. Nevertheless, Prown displays O'Connor's difficulties fascinatingly. Analyses of O'Connor's works regularly highlight O'Connor's rejection of women, notably in "The Crop" and "A Stroke of Good Fortune." Occasionally Prown oversteps, as when, discussing "The Comforts of Home," she mistakenly claims that Thomas shoots Sarah and concludes that O'Connor is here again rejecting femaleness. Prown prefers stories that retain strong traces of the feminine impulse: "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "A Circle in the Fire," and "A View of the Woods"-stories featuring young females.

The best part of Prown's fine study is her careful analysis of the "'dysfunctional' mentoring relationship" (ix) O'Connor had with her primary literary advisor, fiction writer Caroline Gordon. Gordon herself saw O'Connor as limited by femaleness, and an antifemale attitude could undercut Gordon's own authority. The tortured friendship steadily fell apart, and Prown provides a very interesting reading of "Parker's Back" as a story in which O'Connor marks the relationship's end. Prown sees a story of female power, without ever making the claim that seems justified by her evidence: that Gordon is Sarah Ruth Cates and O'Connor is O. E. Parker, that Sarah Ruth's final beating of Parker with a broom comments on the pains the mentoring relationship caused.

One finishes the book unsure how much Prown likes O'Connor and her writing, but Prown clearly raises fresh questions about all of O'Connor's works. As future biographies of O'Connor appear and biographical readings of the fiction multiply, Prown's clear-eyed examination will prove essential.