A Habit Of Being Great: Learning From Flannery O'Connor

"There she stands, to me, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restore to honor to the word", this is how Sally Fitzgerald described her dear friend Mary Flannery O'Connor. (xii) Not to long ago, I read my first Mary Flannery O'Connor story and I came to view Mary Flannery O'Connor as an artist whose key subject was grace, but what are these stories, these works of art truly about, what is Flannery O' Connor trying to tell the readers. In order to interpret a story though the eyes of an author like Flannery O'Connor you must first look through the eyes of the author. You must see what he/she sees. It would be arrogant to believe that a person can truly understand another by studying them, but I have learned a great deal in trying to do so. Mary Flannery O'Connor wrote about grace and salvation, and has taught me about finding truth; I attribute the lessons she has taught me to, the way she viewed herself, the way others viewed her, her writings, and many other effects.

Mary Flannery O'Connor was confident, modest, and honest. She often criticized herself. She once referred to herself as "prematurely arrogant" in a letter to her friend, Paul Engle. (Fitzgerald 14) "Flannery described herself as a 'pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex.'"(Wikipedia) Even with all of her self-critizism, she was self-confident. She was quite arrogant and lead her to write what I believe is her greatest work, "The Artifical Nigger". "What she often described as proably the best thing she would ever write , 'The Artifical Nigger' -a story that she contains more than she herself ever understood."(Fitzgerald xviii) She was witty and quick to tell you exactly what she thought. In O'Connor's letters she never lied not even to spare the feelings of those she was in correspondence with. She lived a seemly boring life, but was always lively and sharp until the day she died.

Many people adored her and she adored them as well,but the person who knew O'Connor best would have to be Sally Fitzgerald. It is though her eyes that I see who the true Mary Flannery O'Connor was. It is clear that even though O'Connor lived a sheltered life she still was a people. Fitzgerald wrote, "She participated in the lives of friends, interested herself in their work, their children, their health, and their adventures."(xiii) Many people love her senses of humor, and the way anything could make her laugh. It is written, "She could never cease to be amused, even in extremis."(Fitzgerald xiii) She was able to laugh at the world and take it serious at the same time. Linda McGovern wrote:

"Maybe she would have had a good laugh over it. After reading some of her letters to her literary friends and after digesting her fiction, one can see the humorous side she pokes at the world and herself. Her writing, often deep, dark and violent has a flip side, a humorous yet serious commentary on humankind. She remains a powerful voice in literature today." (literarytraveler.com)

Her friends saw her as a person already full of grace unlike the characters she wrote about. The people who saw her knew this a first glance, but others did not.

"Katherine Anne Porter wrote Flannery's Friends, the Gossetts, after they had taken her to lunch with Flannery and her mother at the farm, 'I am always astonished at Flannery's pictures which show nothing of her grace. She was very slender with beautiful, smooth feet and ankles; she had a fine, clear, rosy skin and beautiful eyes. I could I wish I had some record of her as she appeared to me...'" (Fitzgerald xi)

O' Connor was a religious woman, but she was never self-righteous. She enjoyed conversions about theology, and was willing to discuss religion openly. She stayed loyal to her Catholic beliefs. She was open to intelligent discuss of any kind. She loved exchanging of letters. Many of those she held a correspondence with, she consider friends, and treat them as such until the day she died.

The stories of Mary Flannery O'Connor were about grace or rather a moment of grace. In many of O'Connor's stories the main character had a revelation that opened their eyes and returned them to the grace of God. The main character usual came to these conclusions by physical or emotion trauma. Karen Bernardo wrote:

"Thus for O'Connor the most important thing is to shock her smug characters out of their complacency and bring them sharply into an awareness of their inadequacy in the eyes of God. Frequently this happens in a way that seems gratuitously violent, or, as in the case of "Good Country People," emotionally cruel, but to O'Connor that did not matter. Anything that knocked sense into unbelievers' heads was, to Flannery O'Connor, completely justifiable." (storybites.com)

It is clear that O'Connor believed in order to be in the grace of God they must humble themselves. O'Connor's stories present deep insight on the lost of faith in humanity through original sin, but salvation by way of the grace of God. Many of O'Connor's stories are chaotic, and maybe miss construed if you do not take the proper time to step back and look at the big picture. Many elements made up O'Connor's stories. These elements made her stand apart from other writers. Alice Walker wrote:

"I discovered O'Connor when I was in college in the North and took a course in Southern writers and the South. The perfection of her writing was so dazzling I never noticed [at the time] that no black Southern writers were taught. The other writers we studied-Faulkner, McCullers, Welty-seemed obsessed with a racial past that would not let them go. They seemed to beg the question of their characters' humanity on every page. O'Connor's characters-whose humanity if not their sanity is taken for granted, and who are miserable, ugly, narrow-minded, atheistic, and of intense racial smugness and arrogance, with not a graceful, pretty one anywhere who is not, at the same time, a joke-shocked and delighted me." (Walker 10)

Mary Flannery O'Connor also wrote several essays that touched many people and gave readers a better understanding of her beliefs. Her essays also gave readers some insight to the reasons she writes about bizarre characters and grace. She wrote:

"Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant