Evil as the Defective Use of Good: A Study of the Demonic in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away

• Main Authors: TSAN, YA-CHUN, 詹雅鈞
• Other Authors: Joseph C. Murphy
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/27034020326330450051

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系碩士班 === 104 === The discussion of the devil and that of the problem of evil remain at the center of my thesis on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away. A devout Catholic living in the Bible-belt South, O’Connor witnessed the gradual crumbling of Christianity as the unifying force in twentieth-century America and never flinched from expressing her concern for a generation that has neither “a very sharp eye for the imperceptible intrusions of grace,” nor the “feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them” (MM 112). In a 1955 letter to Elizabeth Hester (often nicknamed as “A”), O’Connor labels the modern generation as one of “wingless chickens” primarily because its moral sense has been eviscerated (CW 942). Disbelief in God and the devil has marked the disintegration of traditional values that breeds a vanity which knows no limits. In a godless world, men are left to their own devices and hence set their own standards for good and evil. It is this inward nihilism which O’Connor condemned as the root of the outward carnage worldwide. The devil, as Charles Baudelaire famously predicted, has indeed triumphed in deceiving the modern world that he does not exist at all. Apart from being an “objective” reality as O’Connor claims him to be in a 1969 letter to John Hawkes, the devil in The Violent Bear It Away appears to be, from time to time, equally subjective, allowing the characters to create him and thus becoming what they make him to be－a false liberator upholding individual autonomy, a cynical intellectual justifying unbelief on grounds of innocent suffering and, finally, the ostensibly Protestant merchant obsessed only with personal gain and success. O’Connor’s devil, at the very least, speaks three distinct types of demonic rhetoric that are corruptions of Christian virtues such as freedom, love and work ethic. This project is aimed at analyzing how these different forms of demonic rhetoric attempt to seduce the would-be prophet Francis Tarwater but ultimately, and paradoxically, assist in his path toward redemption.