Flannery O'Conner is considered one of the most important American
authors of the 20th century and perhaps the most important Southern
woman in the field. Her work
is standard fare in many colleges. To understand Flannery O'Conner,
the author of "Wise Blood," "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and other
stories, requires a pilgrimage to Georgia. You can visit her
birthplace in Savannah. Thatis an important point in her life naturally. Located at
207 East Charlton Street.
the house museum is a modest, three-story
row house with narrow rooms decorated much as it was during the
first thirteen years of Flannery's life.
However, it was during herwaning years, spend at her family farm near Milledgeville,
that her talent came to full flower. Andalusiawas her mother's
dairy farm at the time
Flannery returned to Milledgeville in 1951. She had been
living in Connecticut
but at that time was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had
killed her father when Flannery was only fifteen.
Before being named Andalusia, her uncle Bernard Cline used it as his
horse farm. He called it
Sorrel Farm. Flannery told
him she had met people while traveling who told her that the
property previously was called Andalusia and she prevailed on him to
call it that again. When Flannery and her mother moved to the
farm, they converted the
parlor to Flannery's bedroom
and study since her health prohibited her climbing stairs. This was
where she would spend the most literarly productive years of her
life until her death of Lupus in 1964 at the age of thirty nine.
Andulusia
When you roam about the house it is much as it was when Flannery
lived there. Most of the furniture is original except the desk,
chair and typewriter, which Regina O'Conner donated to the
University of Georgia. You can see the
Hotpoint refrigerator Flannery
bought when she sold the move
The Hill House is another important part of
Andalusia. Jack and Louise Hill, an African American couple, who ran
the dairy, and later beef farm, for Mrs. O'Conner lived there until
Louise died in 1977. The Hill House is the latest part of the
restoration.
Craig Amason, Director of the Flannery
O'Conner-Andalusia Foundation, points out the importance of
Andalusia. "The landscape is
such an important factor. It is more than a place where an author
penned her fiction. It inspired those stories."
Flannery was a strange person. She had a dark
sense of humor that was often misunderstood as exhibited in one of
her quotes," Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities
stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good
teacher."
One of the present day peacocks at
Andulusia
She fixated on certain things. Two of the most important facets of
her life were her Roman Catholicism and
her birds. She was a lifelong fan of domestic birds. She had ducks
chickens, geese swans, pheasants but her favorite was the peafowl.
She had 40 or 50 of them and they roamed the grounds unpenned.
Religion and birds recur in
her stories.
Her quest for truth rather than beauty and
goodness is also apparent in her stories. He mother often asked her
why she didn't write stories people liked. Her comments on truth
reflect the answer. " The truth does not change according to our
ability to stomach it. ... I preach there are all kinds of truth,
your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only
one truth and that is that there's no truth."
Another interesting comment she made to a
friend, Sally Hester, may reflect on her family life. "I come from a
family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In
some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me
both."
Flannery's room at Andulusia
She was a person of very
inflexible habits and routines. She wrote two to three hours every
morning then she and her mother had breakfast at Sanford House, a
elegant restaurant that is now a house museum.
When she returned, she caught
up on her correspondence
with friends.
Craig
Amason observed the rise in visitation to Andalusia and attributes
it to the fact that, " Flannery O'Conner
is more popular than she has
ever been. My theory is because she writes in the grotesque genera.
Her stories have a great deal of violence. She was very much ahead
of her time writing in the 50s and 60s. ... She had found her
audience: it is the 20 something crowd. They are no longer repelled
by the grotesque or violence: that is precisely what attracts them.
That makes her extremely popular in pop culture. In the
NBC series Hannibal in the
third episode a young F.B.I. agent is reading to an unconscious
patient.She is reading a
Flannery O'Conner story,
A Good Man is Hard to Find."
The Hill House at Andulusia
Another indication of her increased popularity are the rash of
biographies of O'Connor's life Flannery O'Connor: A Biography by Melissa Simons, Flannery O'Conner: A
Life by Jean W. Cash and
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Conner by �Brad Gooch
have all come out in the 21st century.
