ENGL 4310

There seems to be a trend with the mothers of O’Connor’s stories. Her mothers seem to long for older times and seem very stuck in their ways. They also seem to display a sort of ambivalence, towards things that outside their bubble. All that really seems to concern them is manners and their children’s well-being. Their children regard them as stifling and rather ignorant. The children are often people who have gone away for their education and because of poor health or lack of success they needed to return to the world that they were eager to leave in the first place.
The other day in class we read a passage in O’Connor’s letters when her mother told her that her room already looked like the hen-house (I do not remember the page number, sorry) and we had commented on how O’Connor seems possibly reflect herself into her characters. While reading I came across this passage today:

My mamma asked me the other day if I knew Shakespeare was an Irishman. I said no I didn’t. She said well its right there in the Savannah paper; and sure enough some gent from the University of Chicago had made a speech somewhere saying Shakespeare was an Irishman. I said well it’s just him that says it, you better not go around saying it and she said listen SHE didn’t care whether he was an Irishman or a Chinaman. She was getting ready to build herself a pond for the cows to lie down in and cool off in the summer time. The government says it hast to go down two feet straight to keep from breeding mosquitos but she don’t want it that way for fear the cows will break their legs getting in.

Something about that echoed back to the mother’s in O’Connor’s stories. From the few letters I have read that talk about her mother, O’Connor’s mom seems simple but headstrong, like the mother’s of O’Connor’s stories. I can picture any of the mother characters digging their pool how they want it, despite what anyone says to the contrary. I can also hear echoes of the children characters when O’Connor writes, “I said well it’s just him that says it, you better not go around saying it” since it feels like the children of her stories are constantly trying to educate their mothers, but the mothers, to the frustration of their offspring, just sort of dismiss it. I also can’t help but wonder if O’Connor channels some of her frustrations about her mother’s quirks into her stories because O’Connor seems quite similar to the children in them. Like I already said, her characters are well-educated, have seen outside their world, but then returned because they are either unhealthy or failed writers. Though O’Connor is of course not a failed writer, it does not mean that she did not feel discouraged at times, but as far as being well-educated and unhealthy there is a definite parallel.