ENGL 4310

I have been thinking about our discussion last class on O’Conner’s letters that mention the KKK(p.904 & 905) and Porter’s anti-Nazi, almost anti-German response in her letter (p. 208). Then I recalled a hint of anti-Semitic sentiment in her letter to Mr. Schwartz, p.547. What she says in her letter is true about how Jews subjugate women (and early Christian Fathers: Tertullian, St. Augustine, etc.) and I am right with her on how she feels about it. Likewise, I am not impressed with Freud’s ideas of penis envy. Where I find perhaps some anti-Semitism is in the link she makes between the two. It is just the allusion she makes that, Freud was a Jew, so it figures? I don’t mean to make a bigger deal out of this than that, and I don’t want to focus on subtle negative attitudes. I just wondered if this helps explain, along with her growing up in “a world that was highly Germanized,” her need to disassociate herself with Germans. Coupled with WWII, that need of disassociation would almost seem imperative.
I am interested as well in O’Conner’s attitude towards the KKK, but we aren’t given it at all. I think we are too far removed from their situations to understand the influence or impact of their racist social atmospheres. Time and distance has afforded us a historical awareness. If we were immersed as they were we might better understand, and not that I believe either one needs an excuse nor would ask for one. I do tend to think that what one is submersed in would show itself, in one degree or another, in one’s writing. This is one of the reasons I’m interested in O’Conner’s attitudes. For example, I’ve noticed in some of her letters that she is concerned with “class,” or levels of people — a thing no doubt she saw and was subject to throughout her life— and I noticed even terminology or associated words used in her stories like Revelation. Check out the letter on p.902 to Sally Fitzgerald: “I never have read Aiken or Henry Miller or that dope that wrote the Jurgen things but from what I have read about them they all sound like steps on the same ladder— with old Aiken the high rung.”
After I went back and read the letter on 904 and 905 discussing the KKK, I understood that O’Conner was only making an observation and I even wonder if any of these people, the P—-s or J——s, are even black, because the L—-’s are clearly not. The L’s, P’s and J’s seem to be people that rent from the O’Conners. They may even be “Displaced Persons” or immigrant workers (Check out the letter on p. 893 to the Fitzgeralds, it’s The Displaced Person real life situation). Initially, in letter 904, O’Conner seems worried because she has just found out that the KKK has burned a cross at the L’s. The KKK was prevalent in Carbon County’s early years, where I grew up. The miners that came there were immigrant workers and the KKK hated all of them, not necessarily just black folks. Anyway, in the letter on 893 O’Conner is anticipating the arrival of who she suspects might be Polish immigrants to rent their property. In letter 905, O’Conner has discovered that the cross burning was just part of an initiation and the L’s were not victims of a threat or crime. We never get any insight into how O’Conner feels about the Klan herself. If anyone finds anything else out, I’d love to hear it.