Journal Article

Racial Scapegoating and White Redemption: Reconsidering Race in Flannery O'Connor

Fowler, Doreen

2019

Overview

[...]she says to the Polish farm worker, Mr. Guizac, \"I say who will come here and who won't\" (223). [...]when she says to Mr. Guizac, \"You'll excite him\" (CS 222), she means that Mr. Guizac's treatment might suggest to Sulk the possibility of self-determination. According to Kahane, while O'Connor, in her early fiction, uses the stereotype of the Negro as \"a passive long-suffering figure\" (184), in her later stories, \". . . the Negro turns into a symbol of rage, yet still a stereotype serving O'Connor's satiric purposes\" (192). While it is true that both the black mother and the black actor are full of anger that moves them to violence, critics have failed, I think, to understand that these African Americans are responding to a violence that is being done to them; that is, the whites threaten them with an assumption, supported by their culture, of innate white superiority.

• Publisher: Georgia College
• Subject: African American literature / African Americans / Allegory / American literature / Authorship / Bodily integrity / Critics / Essays / Fiction / Literary devices / Minority & ethnic groups / Morrison, Toni (1931-2019) / Narrative techniques / O Connor, Flannery (1925-1964) / Race / Racism / Scholars / Short stories / Stereotypes / Walker, Alice (1944- ) / White people / Workers