Normality, the Insane Asylum, and Grotesque Religiousness in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction

Abstract

In Flannery O’Connor’s works, madness has been emphasized to understand the features of her grotesque Southern writing. As O’Connor seems to focus on religious aspects in her stories, many critics have also highlighted her spiritual view of the world. Nonetheless, O’Connor’s own perception of grotesqueness with regard to confinement can be seen through the history of the mental asylum in her town. Milledgeville hosted arguably the largest asylum in the world from 1842 until 2010. In the peak time of her writing career, around the mid-twentieth century, the mental hospital housed more than 12,000 patients in the institution, including various kinds of patients and even the criminally insane. I attempt to read her stories by juxtaposing real horror in the town and O’Connor’s awareness of the atrocity toward the patients in her neighborhood. Particularly, in Wise Blood (1952), the protagonist, Hazel Motes suffers from PTSD after returning from the war. Due to his deviance, he must be confined in the Milledgeville asylum, but in the novel, he is not. The definition of ordinariness in society, through O’Connor’s depiction of the protagonist, seems to be arbitrary. Historical facts surrounding O’Connor’s region reveal that the possibility of taking ordinary people from the street to the asylum existed to reinforce the power of the hospital. It acquired personal, familial, and political purpose. Herein, I suggest that O’Connor criticizes the social system for treating the insane irrationally, and that the community itself was lunatic.