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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