Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Twelve)
Posted on March 2nd, 2010
Making the Abject Body Count(s):
An Autobiographical Reading of
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
– Part Twelve: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All (Continued) –
(Note: Previously posted installments of this series have included bibliographies in the form of endnotes for the text’s parenthetical citations; however, hence forth, the bibliographies will be omitted (to save space and time) but are nevertheless available to any reader who requests the complete bibliography for this series.)
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Now, a brief look at the relationship that exists between parent and child as a central concern in O’Connor’s works.
Wise Blood, like many of O’Connor’s short stories (with “The Enduring Chill” being notable among them for this discussion), creates what Sue Walker views as an ironic version of Kristeva’s view of the abject and the mother-child dyad; with O’Connor we encounter the death-bearing mother whose excessive control leads to death; discussing O’Connor in “The Being of Illness: The Language of Being Ill,” Walker notes that for Kristeva, “abjection shows up as a struggle on the part of the child to separate from the mother. Having been at one with her body, the body, upon separation, becomes abject—just as the mother must be made abject if there is to be separation from her” (Walker 46). This, of course, points back to Kristeva’s understanding of abjection within the Freudian model of the Oedipus complex. The death-bearing mother in O’Connor’s fiction, however, does not go away; the separation between mother and child remains incomplete, and the “enduring chill of the mother’s overbearing presence” continues to invade the sanctity of the subject (Walker 47). In Wise Blood, not even death can silence the death-bearing mother. But more of that later.
As a foil to the maternal figure, O’Connor’s use of the paternal figure also demands attention. Turning to O’Connor’s personal correspondence for further insight about her family, especially her father, there is the obvious fact that she seldom mentions her father, still, her strong attachment to him is revealed in a latter she wrote to “A” on July 18, 1956: “I am never likely to romanticize him because I carry around most of his faults as well as his tastes. I even have the same constitution: I have the same disease. This is something called lupus” (O’Connor Habit 168). And while O’Connor writes very little about her father’s role in her life, no account of her father’s actual death (when she was a young teenager) is included among her letters (Walker 38). In a 1958 letter to Maryat Lee, however, O’Connor says, “You didn’t know I had a DREAD DISEASE didja? Well I got one. My father died of the same stuff at age 44” (O’Connor Habit 266). Here, outside of her fiction, O’Connor, masking it with blithe humor, enters into a conversation about the abject territory of disease. She acknowledges abjection and death. Within her fiction, her fascination with death seems to metastasize exponentially from these infrequently mentioned cells of personal experience.
TO BE CONTINUED
Tags: Abjection, Bibliographies, Body Count, Central Concern, Dyad, Endnotes, Excessive Control, Flannery O Connor, Freudian Model, Installments, Maternal Figure, Mother And Child, Mother Child, Oedipus Complex, Parenthetical Citations, Personal Correspondence, Sanctity, Space And Time, Sue Walker, Wise Blood
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