Screaming Into The System: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Flannery O’Connor, Violence, And The Criminal Law

Abstract

This year marks the 100^th birthday of one of America’s most influential writers in history – Flannery O’Connor.  Much has been written about the violence in Flannery O’Connor’s work, but relatively little about the criminal and legal aspects of the violence.  This is rather surprising given the author’s documented influence from actual crimes in stories such as A Good Man is Hard to Find and The Partridge Festival.  It is also surprising given her use of crimes (including homicide, fraud, human trafficking) in her work, as well as her particular focus on the marginalized and vulnerable.  O’Connor herself noted that she often used violence to capture her audience’s attention in an effort to ultimately bring them to her point.  This paper explores that influence on her work through original research at the Flannery O’Connor Archives.

However, as these original documents demonstrate,  with all things that involve Flannery O’Connor, there is much more to this examination than simply how she was influenced by criminal events.  With many of these criminal events, the law played a critical role in the violence, often acting as its catalyst.  Furthermore, as with many criminal events, the poor and vulnerable suffered at the hands of an uncaring society.  O’Connor saw this and utilized the criminal law to comment upon this societal reality.  This law played a critical role in her literature not simply as a historical fact or inspiration, but as a silent character.  More to the point, this silent character’s frequent failure to protect the vulnerable is a repeated theme in O’Connor’s fiction. 

This symbiotic relationship between the criminal law, violence, and O’Connor’s fiction is not only one where O’Connor was influenced by and utilized actual crime and violence in her writing.  But it is also one where she can be a profound inspiration and influence on the modern criminal justice system’s advocates.

O’Connor’s vocational approach to her writing has much to offer the modern justice system’s advocates.  Drafts of her talks in the O’Connor Archives demonstrate that she was challenged to write for an audience whose values and modern sensibilities were hostile to her messages of what she called the “prophetic vision” of truth, judgment, grace, and mercy.  The modern criminal justice advocate finds herself similarly challenged.  Tasked with protecting the most vulnerable – often the unseen or undervalued in society – she must convince a jury to see and value such people and to understand the truth of what has occurred enough to do something unpopular in today’s culture: render a judgment.  Presented with unspeakable violence, this advocate must convey it to her audience, the jury, who often is resistant to believing it occurred.  O’Connor frequently wrote about the writer’s “sense of frustration [being] great because [the writer] has to force by whatever means he can this vision on a resisting or a blank audience.” (Catholic Writer in the Protestant South – draft talk for Southern Literary Festival, April 20, 1962) How O’Connor navigated that vocation to bring an audience to a place of understanding people and truth can operate as a significant influence on those today forged with that task.

This paper examines the synergistic relationship between Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, crime, violence, and the criminal law and what it can offer the modern criminal justice system – a system characterized by a search for truth and justice.  It will also suggest that O'Connor offers an inspirational framework for those who participate in the system as advocates for the vulnerable.