Grotesque Visions of Racial Hierarchy and Southern Historicity in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Abstract

This essay examines the ongoing unfinished racial revolution in America. Despite the fact that Flannery O’Connor lived in the American South, many critics have overlooked her view of racial integration. Regardless of social context, regional struggles due to racism seem to be irrelevant to O’Connor’s works since she mainly deals with her characters’ religious realization at the stories’ ends. Nonetheless, beneath the narrative surface, O’Connor’s grotesque depictions revolve around the historical crisis regarding racial conflicts in the South immediately before the Civil Rights movement. O’Connor’s white characters’ attitudes toward their surroundings reveal the collective level of white Southerners’ responses to the racial upheavals in the mid-twentieth century. In this paper, I explore the historicity of heightened tension between whites and African Americans in O’Connor’s “Revelation” (1965) and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965). This article analyzes how the Jim Crow South influences O’Connor’s writings and reversely shows how she responded to racial issues.