Family Ties in TVBIA

Brad makes an apt point: "The rational schoolteacher constantly has to fight against falling into madness, which would make him no different than the old uncle." The schoolteacher feels that there is an affliction in the family, and that "[t]he old man had been ruled by it. He, at the cost of a full life, staved it off." (402) Here I would differ with the schoolteacher. The old man has handed down the baptism of Bishop to Tarwater. "'Either [Tarwater] or me [the old man] is going to baptize that child. If not me in my day, him in his.'" (351) So the schoolteacher removes himself from his uncle by not baptizing his child, and so fends off the madness that he fears he has inherited.

To get an idea of what a Tarwater family baptism entails, we can look at the schoolteacher's experience at the hands of his uncle, in the stream where "his head had been thrust by his uncle into the water and brought up again into a new life." (409) There's a parallel between this scene and the schoolteacher's attempted drowning of Bishop, where Rayber forces Bishop "below the surface on his back and held him there, not looking down at what he was doing but up, at an imperturbable witnessing sky" (418). It's strange that Rayber tries to drown his child in a way that he can see his face, and the position speaks to Bevel's baptism, when he too is dipped on his back. And Rayber looks up, as if for guidance or at least approval from God, and add into the mix the word witness, which one usually bears in a religious right -- all of this makes me think that the calling didn't skip a generation after all: Rayber has done the Tarwaters' work for them. Bishop has been baptised.

The cyclical relationship that we discussed in class, of inter-generational kidnappings, and especially the family tree, put me in a mind to look at Tarwater the elder, Rayber, and Tarwater the younger as all victims to that kind of Greek "sins of the fathers" fate - for what Pelops did, isn't just everyone on down to Orestes punished for it. Every - uncle? nephew? - with Tarwater blood has the same work cut out for him: propheteering. What makes Francis Marion so special is that he is the end of the line - he has no sister to have children to be uncle to. Whatever work God has in mind for the Tarwaters ends with the youngest one. The line ends with him.

And as long as I'm talking about family, I wanted to bring up the veritable absence of fathers in O'Connor's work. We know that O'Connor's father died young, of the same disease that she suffers from. We know that she dedicated The Violent Bear It Away to her father, Edward Francis O'Connor, who shares his middle name with the main character who refuses to be called by it. Also in this novel, we have one of the few major father characters in any work of hers we've read - Rayber. (And Rayber is a terrible father; he tries to kill his son and in attempting to act as a father figure Tarwater, the boy is horrified and outraged (397).) Beyond Old Dudley/Tanner and Bevel's shell of a dad, I can't think of any. Mr. Head was Nelson's maternal grandfather, Mr. Turpin had no children, the Lucynells were haunted by their husband/father's car, and I can't remember if Hulga's father is ever mentioned. I'm probably missing out on a few, but I think it's interesting to tell a story of bloodlines so indirectly, - from uncle to nephew/uncle to nephew - especially when fathers are so absent.

It probably isn't a good idea for me to try to psychoanalyze Flannery O'Connor, but when she's always talking about a father in heaven, I figure it bears some thought.