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About This Document: The operative word here is strangely, and scholars have found very strange, even inexplicable, the redemptive properties of murder, rape, and mutilation.1 Claire Katz writes that O'Connor unleashes a whirlwind of destructive forces more profound than her Christian theme would seem to justify (55); and Preston Browning observes that O'Connor's enigmatic fiction calls for interpretations that go beyond religious orthodoxy: If it was Christian orthodoxy to which she subscribed, her work is manifest proof that it was orthodoxy with a difference. According to Freud, entry into a cultural order organized by polarities begins with a fear of castration, and, for Lacan, "symbolic castration" introduces socialization.2 Seizing on this notion of symbolic castration, these critics have cited figurative castrations in O'Connor's stories, like the sodomizing of Tarwater, the theft of Joy/Hulga's prosthetic leg, or the goring of Mrs. May by a bull, and have suggested that violence functions in O'Connor's texts according to a Freudian Oedipal formula; that is, it works to stabilize social hierarchy and positions of dominance.

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Categories: DocStore > Periodicals > Humanities
Tags: The Arizona Quarterly, Summer 2011, Flannery O'Connor's Productive Violence, Fowler, Doreen, Feature, Violence, Feminism, Religious orthodoxy, Convergence

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Flannery O'Connor's Productive

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