Flannery O’Connor’s affinity for peacocks is very interesting to me. In flipping through the O’Connor book I came across “The King of the Birds” and decided to read it. I suggest you read it as a “treat” as it gives some very interesting insights into O’Connor’s feathered muses.
On the one hand O’Connor seems both amused and miffed at her peacocks. She writes, “If I appear with food, they condescend, when no other way can be found, to eat it from my hand; if I appear without food, I am just another object. If I refer to them as “my” peafowl, the pronoun is legal, nothing more. I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants my service” (p. 834). I have cats so I can sympathize with O’Connor’s feelings of being subservient to animals.
Other people share an even more irreverent attitude towards the peacocks. O’Connor says, “Many people, I have found, are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is “good for”—a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none” (p.836). She then precedes to relate an anecdote about a telephone company lineman who witnessed one of her peacocks spreading it’s tail. When asked what he thought of the stunning display of the peacock’s tail the lineman merely replied, “Never saw such ugly legs.”
Despite O’Connor’s satirical view of the pride of her peacocks she does write of the wonder that she feels towards their beauty. She writes, “When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent” (p.835-36). In describing the peacock’s feathers as a “galaxy” she stretches the bird beyond the earthly plane and into the celestial. She also says that upon seeing the peacock’s tail many people say, “Amen!” or “similar remarks at this moment that show the inadequacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent” (p.836). Just as people use the word “amen” to describe the glory of God, they use it to remark on the bird’s plumage, the awe inspired by both being beyond description.
Echoes of these stories about her peacocks are found in “The Displaced Person.” Just like the lineman who only saw the peacock’s “ugly legs” and the people who asked Flannery O’Connor what peacocks were “good for” there are certain characters who do not appreciate the peacock’s beauty. Mrs. Shortley dismisses the peacock of the story as “nothing but a peachicken,” just as Mrs. McIntyre claims that is just “another mouth to feed.” Furthermore, Mrs. McIntyre “kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in his grave” (p. 309). Though it is said that Mrs. McIntyre’s husband the Judge adored his peacocks because “he said they made him feel rich” there is something interesting in the fact that the two main people who appreciate the peacock’s beauty in “The Displaced Person” are the Judge and the priest. There is something noteworthy in the moral and spiritual leaders of the story, even if one is a ghost character, being the characters that are able to recognize the peacock’s true beauty. Indeed, in both O’Connor’s personal stories of people who quietly, reverently, said “amen” to her peacocks, and the priest’s vision of the peacock’s “Transfiguration” in “The Displaced Person, peacocks are compared to God. Thus, in “The Displaced Person” the characters who cannot or do not wish to appreciate the spectacle of the peacocks also cannot connect with Christ, as evidenced when Mrs. McIntyre dismisses her bird as “just another mouth to feed,” and her blasphemous claim that, “Christ was just another D.P.”