Flannery O' Connor Stories

The first appearance of Julian's bewilder describes her atrocious hat, which looks "like a cushion with the stuffing out." (485) This similar image, a bursting cushion, is repeated verbatim to describe the (same) hat of the "sullen-looking alter wo hu sliceekind" who functions as a twin to Julian's mother and who has a "bulging imagine," "overflowing" feet, and a "bulging" pocketbook. (495) Apartment buildings ar "rising" (499); the black woman is a "ponderous figure rising" (496); Julian's mother insists that the black population should "rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence." (488) The motion of rising--notice that nothing is ever risen--represents the command of the weak by the strong. This reverses the notion of black disempowerment: here the woman, who at long last exercises the most power in fatally punching Julian's mother, calls attention to the overstate imbalocal area networkce between the powerful (she herself, Julian's mother, social convention) and the powerless (her early boy, Julian, any independent thinker who might want to altercate social convention.)

Julian falsely believes that he is in the prevailing position when he tries to "explain the lesson" of the refused penny. He says again, "I take to this teaches you a lesson" (499), assuming what he thinks is dominance. But he is pre dwarf to the last, since his mother's stroke propels him into "a world of guilt and sorrow" from which he will never escape. Julian's futile attempt t

More disturbing than attempted domination is the curious willingness of the dominated party to be exploited. Why does Pitts continue to pass away in a position in which his father-in-law's mission is to get at and offend him? Ostensibly, it is because his wife is "duty-proud," (527) but surely a man who doesn't mind whipping his child with a belt wouldn't chip at standing up to a wife. Why does bloody shame Fortune continue to deny that her father beats her? O'Connor suggests that it is human nature to lionize. To emphasize this, she creates figures of lionization who are morally, intellectually, and physically unattractive (Pitts and bloody shame Fortune).

Even the object of Fortune's lionization (Anti-environmental Progress, represented by the bestial stretch which eats dirt and spits it out again) is something most contemporary readers would pass judgment an inappropriate object of veneration. Domination is a moral ugliness, the "Fortune," or destiny of a society too crippled to quarrel its assumptions.

O'Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. New York: The Library of America, 1988.

All three efforts to dominate proceed from a sense of vulnerability and weakness. Fortune, a man over sixty years of age, sense that he is in an "uneasy position unless he controls the greater interest." (526) He sees Pitts as an enemy chiefly because he himself feels abandoned and alone: "...the out of date man considered that when [his daughter] married Pitts she showed that she preferred Pitts to home." (526) Pitts' vulnerability is financial; his hit-or-miss beatings of Mary Fortune represent the only way to take the eventuality that he fears the most: "Put me off the protrude and you put her off too. She's mine to whip and I'll whip her either day of the year if it suits me." (531) Mary Fortune's vulnerability proceeds not from fear of physical punishment, but from respect for her father. In self-discipline about her father's abuse, she attempts to dominate her grandfather only because her father's grazing lan
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