Flannery O' Connor

At the age of twenty-two, Mary Flannery O’ Connor, a famous twentieth century Southern writer, began her career in 1947 making her own distinct path in the ways of her writing. In the short years of O’ Connor’s life, she has completed 31 short stories and two novels, which have turned many heads for their distinct sense of humor and criticism of the “Old South.” With her roots in Georgia, this Roman Catholic uses her own religious background and surroundings for the settings in all of her stories, managing range their content from a “kind of ferocious comedy to a stark and bitter tragedy.” While being a “genius for the humorous and the grotesque,” O’ Connor puts a twist her work to make it like none other. From a few of her pieces, Good Country People, Revelation, and Parker’s Back, Flannery O’ Connor uses several different types of humor that tackle the “Old South”, utilizing Southern dialect, social structures, and settings.

In Good County People, O’ Connor uses several different types of humor including blue humor, exaggeration, and situation humor. These examples occur when Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, seduces Joy-Hulga in the loft of an old country barn, and then leaves her there, running away with her artifici

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This is true because Joy-Hulga is “sensitive about her artificial leg;” “no one has ever touched it but her. ” From this use of humor, readers furthermore understand another one of O’ Connors themes: that there is great depth beneath the surface of mankind. To sum up her humor would be grotesque. The mother’s view of her 32-year-old daughter as a “child” is a form of exaggeration.

O’ Connors also exercises burlesque, understatement, and caricature as other forms of humor in her 1964 published piece, Revelation. As blue humor is based easily on offensive subjects, Joy-Hulga’s artificial leg is not just a wooden attachment “bound in a heavy material like canvas;” it is the definition of how she sees herself, as well as the way her mother and Mrs. Hopewell, Joy-Hulga’s mother “thinks of her still as a child” because of her handicap, while Mrs.

Other types of humor that O’ Connor includes in her work is that of satire and wit in Parker’s Back O. For both himself, and Sarah Ruth, Parker looks for visual satisfaction: primarily “painting” of the body. ” This sudden remark is an example of both wit and satire that O’ Connor uses. This humor takes place in a doctors waiting room where virtually every representative of the South’s class structure is present: the propertied white, the common white, the poor white trash, and the “colored. ” However, this humorous example occurs specifically when the “superior” white trash woman degrades blacks and dirty hogs.

Approximate Word count = 1050
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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