But part of what is so fascinating about Flannery O’Connor, the Georgian “lady writer” who died of lupus before reaching 40, is that she achieved fame for stories which upon first glance appear folksy but are in reality murderous peregrinations across the American South.įor most of her life, Flannery O’Connor lived in Milledgeville, a town of less than 20,000 people in Baldwin County, Georgia, home to Georgia Military College and Georgia State College for Women, where O’Connor studied Social Science. The lengths that the boy goes to first to avoid, and then carry out his uncle’s requests result in an unusually grim ending even by O’Connor’s standards, whose fiction often feature committed Christians and would-be do-gooders coming to untimely ends. The boy’s uncle has two wishes before his own death - that Francis give him a Christian burial, and that Francis baptize his young, mentally disabled cousin. In O’Connor’s 1960 novel, Francis is kidnapped by his mentally ill uncle Mason Tarwater, who raises the child to believe they are both Christian prophets. “You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission,” a disembodied voice says to fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, shortly before the boy drowns his young cousin.
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