Sacrificing Female Bodies for Redemption In Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood




There is a tendency among avid novel readers to find a cozy corner and allow themselves the indulgence to savor every moment as the imaginary world in the long fictive work magically comes to life, creeping upon their senses like a gentle breeze. One of the most notable features of any novel that would satisfy such a tendency is its description of women, who are often seductively beautiful and their mysterious presence in the novel is associated in the readers’ mind with an aura of gracefulness accompanied by a trail of sweet aroma which most likely oozes from their long pitch-black or golden hair and supple, sensuous bodies. Wise Blood, however, is not your typical novel. From the moment we board a train with Hazel Motes and observe the ostensibly unnecessary contempt with which he treats a woman (Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock), who, though rather intrusive, seems to be of a motherly disposition, a disposition that ought to extract some tenderness out of any orphaned young man away from home but fails to do so, we realize that we can hardly expect an atmosphere of mild pleasure and instructive sorrow in the violently rough journey which leads to a full nothingness at the end of the novel, where the body, male or female, is no longer an impediment for being redeemed by Jesus. Accordingly, O’Conner’s portrayal of women in Wise Blood is marked by a vehemence of tone and a ferocious impatience for worldly temptations connected with the commercialized female body. She is after blood and she does not hesitate to sacrifice elements of popular novel, including the attraction of female bodies, to achieve her transcendent ideals.



Like her protagonist, Flannery O’Conner treats her characters, females included, in the most unflattering manner. We are obliged to read through her gruesome descriptions of characters who are constantly ignored, humiliated, glared at, run over and killed in the course of the novel. She manages to set the readers’ nerves on edge and leave them on pins and needles throughout her awkward narrative particularly by her noteworthy portrayal of female characters in the following manner: bizarre combinations of various animals (the parrot-like women in the dining car of the train who make noises though their noses like pigs, have “game-hen” expressions, and articulate their indifference to any spiritual concern with “poisonous” voices as if they are snakes with venomous tongues); rotting packs of meat with fungi growing on their bodies (Mrs. Hitchcock, described as “something heavy and pink” with “knobs around her head” that “framed her face like dark toadstools” when Haze bumps into her at night on the train); greasy bundles of flesh (the prostitute, Mrs. Watts, whose disgusting corporeality is emphasized by her act of cutting “toenails” on the first night we meet her); dirty, ugly, dim-witted, and clingy young girls (Sabbath Hawks whose character is sketched out by O’Conner with a kind of averse pity); monstrous beasts (the woman at the pool whose creepy emergence out of water is delineated in these intensely brutal words: “First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands until a large foot and leg came up from behind her and another on the other side and she was out, squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself, and stamped in the water dripping off her”); skinned animals, “squirming” like worms inside boxes that resemble coffins (the “casket” woman at the fair who performed shows for the pleasure of adult men in a tent); and materialist, money-grasping, inquisitive women (Mrs. Flood, the landlady, who is lucky enough to be represented with some degree of leniency on the part of the wrathful O’Conner. Although Mrs. Flood is portrayed as a greedy opportunist, guilty – for the most part - of Hazel’s tragic and lonesome death, she is also the only person to notice that “pin point of light” Hazel turns into at the end of his journey).

It appears that the main concern in Wise Blood is finding a way out of the material world that keeps imposing itself on the flesh-bound people, towards a path that leads to a particularly abstract state referred to repeatedly in the novel as “redemption”. To redeem oneself, i.e. to save one’s soul from sins and evil forces, one needs to actually “see” how abject and foul all corporeal temptations are. The novel does not care to concern itself with the secular values of the modern world such as feminism or equality since it is deeply engaged in heavenly, immaterial ideals. No matter how abusive she sounds in the examples above when it comes to creating scenes with female characters, O’Conner does not mean to be a misogynist. What she is against, as evidenced by the revulsion in her jagged tone and her odd word choice in her representation of women in Wise Blood, is any form of excessive corporeality and materialism which is usually associated with women. Hence, the novel is not a diatribe against women in general, but a relentless attack upon any mindset, culture, or society that commercializes female bodies as sources of sinful temptation for the economic gain of a few at the expense of the loss of redemption for all those who fail to see the repulsive nature of those seemingly glamorous feminine bodies. O’Conner takes it upon herself to show those bodies for the putrid noxious heaps of flesh that they are in the insightful eyes of the redeemed. When Hazel Motes blinds himself towards the end of the novel, he prepares himself for a true vision of redemption by closing his bodily eyes against all sorts of worldly temptations exemplified by the threat of sinful, corruptive allurement posed by female bodies in the way they have been advertised through the ages as tantalizers of male desire.

O’Conner is willing to tear apart her characters and sacrifice their body parts limb by limb if necessary to achieve the ideal state of redemption by Jesus. Still, she is not particularly after feminine blood to perform her sacrificial rituals in this particular work of fiction. To illustrate this point, it is important to note the way two special female characters, Sabbath and Mrs. Flood, have been represented in the novel. For all her ridiculous stupidity, Sabbath Hawks is the first and only one to “love” Hazel’s eyes for “(t)hey don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking.” She senses that what Hazel Motes is seeking is not the mundane world surrounding them, but something transcendent, something beyond the earthly physicality. Mrs. Flood, too, has enough grace in her to be drawn to the blind Hazel and recognize “the whole black world in his head and his head bigger than the world, his head big enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was or had been or would be.” Ever an object-oriented, grasping materialist, she often confuses her sense of ownership over the young man with her devotion to him, but she eventually manages to shut her carnal eyes, start “staring” with her spiritual eye “into his eyes,” and feel “as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn't begin,” tracking the redeemed soul of Hazel Motes “into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.”

Flannery O’Conner’s dismissive and crude attitude toward corporeality as well as her eagerness to sacrifice physical attractions - particularly the kind associated with the tempting female body - for otherworldly affairs might be reminiscent of the barbarous acts of burning ‘sinful’ people at the stake in medieval times. Nevertheless, her readiness to resist creating female characters according to the standards of their commercialization as alluring baits to titillate readers’ desires in one way or another, while managing to create a compelling narrative worthy of contemplation, cannot help but be praised as an honorable achievement.

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