Maria Concepcion

On reading "Maria Concepcion" a second time, I am struck by the concealment of Maria's emotions. Even at the begining of the story when her thoughts on Givens are revealed, these opinions are almost glossed over. The whole story seems to revolve around everyone else in the story even though she is such a central character and the title is her name. I will put together some questions that deal more closely with questions from my topic, however I did notice Porter's ommision of Maria's inner feelings beyond her breakdown.

Second Glance: The Peacock Continues!

To continue with the discussion of the peacock:

I googled "peacock symbolism" and found it, again, to represent resurrection, but I found it also stands for immortality.

I find the opening scene an extremely interesting display. We are shown a peacock walking directly behind Mrs. Shortley up to the hill where they could see the entire countryside. Mrs. Shortley-- before we have any clue to her personality--is described as in "nature terms." She is mountainous in confidence, her strength comes from her "bulges of granite" that are her legs, and her eyes are compared to "icy blue points of light." Mrs. Shortley's character seems powerful and dominate over the landscape. She seems natural, a part of nature. When the two figures reach the top of the hill, however, it is the peacock who has the ability to see "something in the distance no one else could see." He doesn't have the blazing eyes--symbols of truth-- that Mrs. Shortley has, yet he can see what is unseen, a metaphorical instance of his ability to see the truth.

Funny then, that the peacock follows behind Mrs. Shortley, as if he knows she is incomplete, that her human nature, even her connection to the earth, is not natural, but falls short (oh the names...). The peacock symbolizes resurrection and immortality, two features that remain absence in Mrs. Shortly. In his procession behind her, he seems to mock her in the same way a person who knows of a pothole in the road would mock his enemy who he gave the privilege of being the "line leader."

The peacocks in this story, however, may not be as symbolically immortal as we thought. Mrs. Shortley used to have "twenty or thirty of those things on the place but [she] let them die off." Mrs. Shortley controlled their lives and their deaths.

Additionally, the priest, the very person who reveres the peacock for having so many "spots of sun" on its feathers and compares it to Christ, is described as naiive and almost incompetent. Who would be so ignorant as to leave the displaced person--a person, I still believed to have suffered through the Holocaust--in the hands of a xenophobic, discriminatory, unjust woman? The priest-- in the same way he is bewitched by the peacock-- seems bewitched by the idea that every person must have some kind of hospitality/altruistic ideal in him/her.

Maybe then, the peacock in this story symbolizes our naiive desires/ natural instincts to support the preconcieved notions we have already contrived about the world around us. Maybe the peacock really symbolizes our eagerness to conform to patterns set out for us....

The Displaced Person on the Second Read

Hello again! Oh, how I have missed blogging! I am not sure what we will be discussing in class today, so I'll just go on my own little path. As I am reading these stories for a second time, one thing that I am most interested in is the beginning of the stories. I think that a lot of the time, when I am reading a story for the first time, I am mainly reading for plot, so a lot of the symbolism or intricacies of the first page are lost on me as I am trying to figure out the setting, characters, and the basic plot. On the second read though, I already know the plot and the basic characters, so I am able to look at the structure of the story and some of the symbolism.

I think one of the biggest symbols in this story is the peacock. I am very interested in the symbolism of the peacock in Flannery O'Connor's stories, but I can't remember discussing the peacock in class last time (although that may have been the class I missed). The first copy of "A Good Man is Hard To Find" that I owned was yellow with a picture of a peacock and a woman following behind the peacock (a picture from the beginning of this story?). I did a little google search (I need to stop) and found what Cassie blogged previously, that in Christian art, peacocks represent immortality and its feathers represent omnipotence. Then, I found a website that said, "in the early part of the 20th century in the West, it was considered very bad luck to keep them in the home." Hmmmm.... These two interpretations are in contrast to one another, yet I think that they both work in this story. Is it fair to blame bad luck on a peacock, though?

I also thought it would be interesting to relate this to the idea of xenophobia. The peacock is kind of "the other" on a farm, isn't it? It's not a chicken, you can't eat it, that makes it kind of an odd animal to have. I think the peacock could be related to some of the bigger issues of xenophobia in this story. (And there's a sentence I never thought I would say!)

Okay, so I just reread Cassie's post from last time and I really like her connection between the eyes of the peacock and how Guizac is treated. I think this is a great connection between the symbolism and the xenophobia in the story.

Template for Proposal due Nov 2 by 10pm

Template for Paper Proposal

A proposal is just that, at least in terms of paper writing.: you will state your intention, at this point, to write about a specific topic for your final paper and presentation. In a proposal, you will want to provide an adequate account of what kind of work you have done so far that has led you to choose your topic as well as to present the relevance, i.e., how does it fit in with the critical work that has already been done on your particular author(s). You will also want to put forward questions you have about your topic, areas that you haven’t clarified yet, or any other concerns you may have that you wish to receive comments and direction from me or the class. There are really two purposes for the proposal. One is that you begin formulating your ideas about your paper early on--at least a month before the due date. That helps you in the rereading of the works in question, so that you will be rereading with an eye toward how they fit into your topic. Two, I will need to accept that proposal before you move forward. In doing so, I will give you suggestions about narrowing your topic, and approaches to organizing the paper and presentation, or (unlikely) suggest a different topic or stance. Please present your proposal using the following template:

1. Working Title of Paper (centered) Working thesis, statement, argument --whatever you wish to call the focus of your paper--that statement around which the paper is built. Organization and direction of the paper.
   
2. You are not yet ready to provide an outline, but how do perceive this paper in terms of development of your statement? Your preliminary work in this area will help you to think about the scope of your paper: is it too wide? Have you proposed a book-length topic? Is it too narrow? How quickly will you exhaust what you have to say about your idea?
   
3. Sources: please provide a bibliography with very brief annotations (3 sentences) about the content. Problems/questions: at this point in your project, what do you still need to find out?
   
4. As you have worked your way through your proposal, what issues would you like to talk out with someone so that you can clarify your thinking about your paper?
   
5. Why are you writing about this topic? How does it add to the work already done on the authors and their works? How does it enhance your own understanding about the issues that have come up in class?

Surrealism in KAP's writing

After last class's discussion, I decided I would rather go the "theory" route for the critical paper, so I would like to provide a surrealist interpretation of stories such as Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Maria Concepcion, and Magic.

According to Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, and who founded the literary movement, surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing ld of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."

Surrealism features elements of surprise, odd juxtapositions, non seqitur, dreams, the fantastic, the irrational. I feel like I could definitely make a case for surrealism in PHPH and Magic, especially since she was writing these pieces at the time of the movement. Maria Concecion, however, predates Breton's manifesto, but it does not predate the dadaism movement from which surrealism stemmed in the early 20th century.

My research thus far has been searching jstore for articles on surrealism, of which I've found many. My next goal is funneling down my reasoning for why I believe KAP chose to include surrealist elements within her stories.

Research Resources

My research paper is going to be on the way that morality is depicted in characters of different social classes and ethnicities in both author's works. I logged onto the CU Libraries website and was dissapointed to find that there were not many entries that showed up when I combined "race" with "Katherine Anne Porter" or "Flannery O'Connor" but when I went to the library to collect the books that I had found I was surprised by the incredible amount of critical materials in the Norlin stacks. I believe that my second search was very successful, here are some of the things I found:

Scott, Neil R. Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism. Milledgeville, Georgia: Timberlane Books, 2002
Gretland, Jan Nordby and Karl-Heinz Westarp. Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2006
Machann, Clinton and William Bedford Clark. Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press,1990
Friedman, Melvin J. and Beverly Lyon Clark. Critical Essays on Flannery O'connor. Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall & Co.,1985
Hartley, Lodwick and George Core. Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1969
Hilt, Kathryn and Ruth M. Alvarez. Katherine Anne Porter: An Annotated Bibliography. New York, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990

I think these annotated bibliographies will be a great springboard into finding more critical materials on both writers so I will return them ASAP.

Research Findings

I think I'm going to be looking at religion, specifically the grace moment when "a stranger comes to town" in O'Connor. For this I'll probably be focusing on The Violent Bear It Away, "A Good Man", "The Life You Save", "The River", and "Good Country People". (If anyone can think of a story I've missed that loosely fits that "stranger" criteria, I'd love to be let in on the secret.)

From my raid on the library, I found:

Edward Kessler's Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse (1986)
Ralph C. Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004), containing old favorites like "The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region" and "Demonic Nihilism: The Chief Moral Temptation of Modernity"
Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction (2007), from eds. extraordinaire JH McMullen and JP Peede

And on a preliminary run-through on jstor I recovered Bob Dowell's "The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor" and Thelma J. Shin's "Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace"

Reasearch

Originally I was planning on trying to find papers on O'Connor and how she was influenced by the time period and other writers, but there really isn't much out there. I have changed gears to focus on philosophies/ theologies that emerge in her works. There is a great article "Flannery O'Connor: the Catholic writer as a Baptist." and "Flannery O'Connor's Others: Freud, Lacan and the Unconscious." Both explore her duality and the inherent paradox found in her works.

I might try to synthesize my thesis to point out points where O'Connor's Catholic images support the Protestant society she lives in.

More on the Exotic other

Forgive me, but hopefully I'll have most of this revised by Friday... I've been incredibly sick since last week and I cannot seem to get better! I haven't had a chance to look in Norlin, but I've been tampering around with Jstor. I'm going to try and install the VPN Client on my computer so I can find books I want in Norlin before I even go there (I don't live in Boulder, so it's a pain to run back and forth when you're sick) Also, I'm pretty much going off of the main ideas of Said's book Orientalism. I was planning on using that as a kind of outline for this project. We've done a lot with this in film studies, and I think it's absolutely fascinating!

Some articles I found on Jstor that I'm hoping will get me started:

Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, M. K. FORNATARO-NEIL

Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden. By Thomas F. Walsh

Diego Rivera and Katherine Anne Porter's "The Martyr"
Darlene Harbour Unrue

Katherine Anne Porter's "Flowering Judas" and D.H. Lawrence's "The Plumed Serpent":Contrasting Visions of Women in the Mexican Revolution
Peter G. Christensen


Obviously I haven't gotten around to O'Connor yet because the Mexico stories are sticking out in my mind so much right now.
However, I would very much like any suggestions on how I would go about looking at critical resources, or even historical resources that show "the other's" view on the Porter/O'Connor stories. I think that would be incredibly interesting. Especially getting a perspective from a Southern black person?

More research

I found a great article titled, "Flannery O'Connon's 'Fourth Dimension': The Role of Sexuality in Her Fiction" by D.G. Kehl. Apparently, O'Connor deleted overtly sexual scenes in various short stories. She did this in "The Violent Bear it Away" and in "The Enduring Chill". Kehl argues that she probably did this because they did not serve her aesthetic purpose. I guess the lack of sexuality/sensuality that I noticed in O'Connor's works might be founded.

Sexuality/Sensuality in Porter and O'Connor

I have started researching various critical essays/articles for this week but I still have a lot to do. I am thinking about writing on how sexuality/sensuality is expressed in various stories. I am also interested in how different female characters are sexualized. For example the protagonist in "Flowering Judas," the Maria Rosa in "Maria Concepcion," Hulga in "Good Country People," one of the German daughters in "Holiday", and Amy in "Old Mortality". I am wondering whether or not to do a comparison of these concepts as portrayed by Porter versus O'Connor. I think that Porter takes a much more sensual approach in these stories, while O'Conner seems to distort sexuality. I am interested in the lack of sexuality in most of the short stories. The two authors seem much more interested with violence than they do with senusuality/sexuality, which I find strange because of their experience with different men. I have found two websites that list various criticism on the two authors and I have made a list of some that might relate to my topic. I will need to research if the absense is due to sexuality being a taboo topic at the time. Also, another direction that I might be headed in is the relation of sensuality to individuals that are considered to be the Other (ie: Mexico stories/German daughter/physically handicapped). As I said in class, I need to head to the library to seek out the actual essays and to do more research.

The Portrayal of the Individual

Within the works of both Porter and O'Connor I am very interested in their portrayals of sexuality and personal identity. (I may focus more on identity if sexuality seems to be too much of a stretch). Anyhow, I think I would like to look at the main characters of several of Porter and O'Connor's works by using Freudian and Lacanian theories. It's just an idea at this point, however.

Research Topic

I am really interesting in the way Porter connects family relationships, mainly those between parent and child, with silence. I’m not quite sure which direction I was to take this, but I have noticed that the undefined character is always involved with a story concerning a dysfunctional family. “He” and “Holiday” both contain children who do not have a voice. And both of these children live with a family that doesn’t understand them.

Even though the plots of these two stories center around silent characters, their voices are heard through their actions of listening and doing. Although they are silent, they communicate a lot and we as readers tend to know the silent characters more than the others people in the story.

Research

I think I want to focus on gender within the stories and how the gender roles can be traditional and how many times they are reversed like in "Pale Horse Pale Rider". I'm also very interested in how Porter portrays women in her stories. I always feel like many of her female characters are submissive like in "Magic " and "Theft". I'm interested to find out why Porter has these women letting men and even sometimes women control them.

I'm pretty sure I wanna stick to Porter and her ideas of women specifically how the female charaters tend to lose their narrative voice they become submissive and lose themselves to men and other women's criticism.

Some works I'm interested in pursuing this topic with include:

Magic

Theft

Maria Concepcion

Flowering Judas

The Martyr

Pale Horse

Old Mortality

I also went to the library and checked out some books on Katherine Anne Porter such as:

Katherine Anne Porter/ A life the revised edition

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

Feminie Consciousness in Katherine Anne Porter

and a couple others

In these books I'm looking for reason to why she allows these female characters to become these empty vessels within her work rather than taking the apart and using them as a tool to present postive ideas about women. I also want to look at Katherine Anne Porter as a female writer of the time and how her female characters and her relate whether the Katherine Anne Porter the person, the Katherine Anne Porter the letters and the Katherine Anne Porter in her writings can co-exist. Also the southern influence and if that is the reason for her contradictory lifestyle and writing. I guess I'm just interested in the fact that she seems to be a feminist writer but her female characters do not seem to value feminist ideals.

The Exotic Other

I'm really interested in how Porter and O'Connor write about the other. Porter especially likes to make her other exotic, especially in the Mexico stories. Even though it seems a lot of times that she is elevating them, she really is putting them down by trying to set them apart from every one else. Either way, they are seen as something separate and different from everyone else.

O'Connor kind of does something similar to this, but it is more subtle. Her representation of black characters are usually protagonists, but they are always seen lower than everyone else. The other is generally scary, like the displaced person, or the blacks in the city, in Artificial Nigger.

I want to take a closer look at how writing about the other as an outsider affects the character. Do the authors do them justice or just contributing to separate them? Is this offensive? How do the "other" view these stories?

Research:the body/disability

I think I'd like to focus my paper on the function of the body in both O'Connor and Porter. In particular, I want to talk about the ways in which mental/physical disability is represented in "He" "The Violent Bear it Away" and "The Life you Save May be Your Own." I'm interested in how these stories present disabled persons as communicative blocks between non-disabled characters, as well as focal points for the attention/anxieties of family and community. In O'Connor's work I'm particularly interested in exploring the relationship between disability and sin/innocence, grace, and redemption.

As a balance/contrast I'd also like to examine the function of the "dying" body as presented in "The jilting of Granny weatherall" "The enduring chill" and "pale horse, Pale rider" in relation to the self and the healthy community. I know this is a bit vague but it makes perfect sense in my head... I'm thinking I'll use Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to some extent, as in these stories it seems clear that handicapped persons are manifestations of the abject to their communities. For instance, in "He", the boy is seen as a mark of his families "low" status; his abjection infects those around him and so eventually he is sent away, the abject sent into the sewers. This is of course a repellant worldview to me but I think it exists in these stories. I've also found an article by Nicole Markotic from Disability Studies Quarterly called, "Re/presenting disability and illness: Foucault and Two 20th Century Fictions" that discusses Foucaults theories on institutionalized medicine, illness, and the body in relation to "Good Country People" It discusses the moral/social stigma on Joy/Hulga and her mother, though the argument is broad and easily applicable elsewhere I think.

Research Thoughts

I've decided to explore more on the theme of "betrayal." The text that finalized my choice was Good Country People. Beyond the "Grotesque" aspect, I felt more for Hulga in the sense of betrayal. This has been an ongoing theme throughout our readings, and I would like to look into not only the concept of betrayal, but the reasoning behind it, and the outcome of it. The works that I would like to revisit are, Good Country People, The Artificial Nigger, He, Flowering Judas, and The Life You Save May be Your Own.

What I've noticed throughout the course of our readings is that I, more-often than not, wonder about the characters' lives after the story is over. When the aspect of betrayal is involved, I especially wonder how the characters handle the situations of deception... and beyond that, I wonder how each event may effect their lives beyond the stories' conclusion. We often come to class and begin with an attitude/feeling of "Wow. What can we even say about what we just read?" This reaction has often branched from an act of betrayal from one of the given characters. I'd like to explore not only how the betrayal makes the readers feel, but also how the characters who have been betrayed may have possibly ended up. We are frequently left hanging, and I think it would be interesting to dig deeper into the characters, and figure out/speculate how they would handle the various acts of betrayal/abandonment. In addition, after reading some of Porter's and O'Connor's letters, I am intrigued by how much of their stories actually reflect their own lives. We have seen many reoccurring themes in both of their works, and it is obvious that the given themes/events reflect both authors' lives, but I wonder how much of their material mirrors their own experiences?

Paper direction

I'd like to continue to examine Silence--the writer's technique for creating silence, and the purposes for which silence is employed. Specifically, I will continue to examine the significance of certain types of communication and/or the lack thereof, focusing on Porter's "Holiday."
I used Google Scholar to search under the terms "Katherine Anne Porter" and "Silence," and turned up some interesting material. There is a citation for an article by BW Jorgensen ("The Other Side of Silence")--if you click on "Cited by 3," you'll find yourself linked to an article by Carolyn Harper called "Silent Voices: Modes of Communication in Katherine Anne Porter's 'He' and 'Holiday.'" This article discusses the ways in which the inability to communicate dehumanizes members of the family unit: while the relationship between humans and nature is teased out in both stories, the figures of Him and Ottilie represent real breaks into an animalistic existence forced on them by their families.

I also have to get my hands on the following:

Stout, Janis P. "Strategies of Reticence" (in Jane Austen, KAP, Joan Didion, book)
MK Fornataro-Neil. "Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of KAP"
in 'Twentieth Century Literature,' 1998. (article).

research focus thus far

As of now I am really interested in further researching geography in these stories. I see this as sort of a two-fold topic: geographical setting as agency moving the plot, theme, etc. in a particular direction. Secondly, there is somewhat of a binary opposition positied by both authors concerning place. As we've talked about in class, this is usually structured in terms of the city v. the country, but I think it can also be put as home/the familiar v. foreign land/the Other.

If we're speaking of binaries, which might each author be favoring and why? What might the center of such a structure be? I intend to delve into this and to basically research how geographic place is used by each author and the effects of such settings on the stories overall.

Violence and the Grotesque

I'm leaning toward writing my paper on O'Connor's use of the grotesque in her writing, in particular the use of excessive violence and her discussion of the "dragon" on the side of the road.

I have found some interesting sources on this topic, including the book "Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque" by Gilbert H. Muller. The book may be a little dated, but is interesting nonetheless.

In a chapter on "Violence and the Grotesque," Muller defends O'Connor's use of excessive violence. It is not gratuitous, he writes, or "used to exploit current tastes." It is a "strategy... to show precisely how the destructive impulse brings the horror of man's grotesque state home to him."

The violence within her stories is typically brought on by the behaviors of the characters themselves, he argues, and the violence serves a "revelatory" purpose: "... violence crystalizes the circumstances surrounding their damnation and reveals the extent of their defective natures. The violence inflicted against these travelers forces them to confront the terror of the human condition without God."

As O'Connor is a Christian writer, Muller goes on to tie this into O'Connor's way to force people to confront evil. I would argue that this shows how the violence in her work is not gratuitous, but rather necessary, as it forces the characters, and her readers, spiritual or secular, to face down the dragon.