First and foremost, I gotta say regardless of how unorthodox or inappropriate someone may read this... after reading this piece by Flannery O'Connor, I was laughing my ass off and wrote in big pink bold highlighter, "FUCK YEAH!". This piece resonated with me a great deal, mainly because of the immediate connection I discovered with "Julian" the son. There's a lot of racists in my family and me being caucasian and asking an african american girl to marry me didn't go over to well with them last christmas. I'm babbling, but for those of you who read and wrote about this piece you will most undoubtedly see why I liked Julian.
Now, all of this pretense aside, I guess the only option that makes sense now out of our "guidelines for posting reading responses to the blog" is conversation. My first question, and I don't really know if there is an answer is this, what does it mean on pg 440 of the handout when Julian's mother states, "with that hat, you won't meet yourself coming or going"? Now, I know what it means to not know if one's self is coming or going... I'm pretty sure it means you've lost your mind, gone crazy. Therefore, why would Julian's mother, a staunch christian conservative from her dialogue and demeanor; why would this women buy this outrageous hat if the woman who suggested it to her said it looked crazy on her or made her look crazy? The obvious irony comes out later when the "Negro" woman on the bus is wearing the same hat... once again I'm stating the obvious.
Another question that I always ask myself when reading short stories like this is, how much truth is in this story? Not just metaphorical truth, but did Flannery O'Connor go through something like this with her mother? There seem to be a lot of one liners from "Julian's mother" that seem to have been pilfered from actual experience. Lines like, "Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other." It's often hard for me to separate the writer from the story, the dance from the dance, the pen from the paper. I don't know if the question is worth asking here, but whatever... moving on.
The reason I find this story so frackin' awesome is because of the ending. Not only is it a great ending, with a great moral, but the description of Julian's mother having a stroke because she (perhaps) sees there really is no difference between her and the "Negro" woman with the little boy on the bus. It was also pretty awesome to visualize the "Negro" woman punching this older white southern aristocrat in the face for trying to give her little boy a penny.
Now, I'd like to think, or hope, only because I'm pretty sick with cynicism; I'd like to think that every racist who had a realization like Julian's mother did at the end of the story... I can't help it, I'd like to see them have a stroke or a heart attack. I guess that this is because I bigot racists... the irony. But then again, the last lines of story, "The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow." This last line seems to suggest that Flannery O'Connor is telling Julian that he'll be sorry and feel guilty for the rest of his life because he was so hard on his mom. But, was Julian really responsible for his mother's death. Of course there's only two options: yes or no. I tend to swing towards the no end of the answer spectrum because I believe it was Julian's mother herself, her reaction to realizing how stupid and powerless and awful she was inside; this is what I think caused her stroke. She caused her blood pressure to rise, it was her mind that caused her mind to crack. It was the way she digested the experience. Whereas she could have reacted to the experience in a positive way, she decided it was too much for her to handle. She turned a medicine into a poison.
All in all, great read. I'll be looking for more to read by Flannery O'Connor.
laters-
matt phibbs.
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I agree with what you deduced about the last line, and the cause of Julian's mother's death. The realization/epiphany was just too much in the end.
ReplyDeleteTo try and answer your first question, I don't know if my interpretation is right or wrong, but I took "with that hat, you won't meet yourself coming or going" to mean it is an original hat that not many people will wear or can pull off. So the chance of meeting someone else wearing the same hat isn't very likely (which makes it interesting when Julian's mother does meet someone she is similar to, wearing the same hat).
ReplyDeleteWhen you mentioned how you wondered if this was related to O'Connor's life or not, I also wonder how close every story is to a writer's real life, and how much is their imagination.
I also agree with what you said about the end, that it is more the mother's fault than Julian's, but I can still understand how Julian felt some guilt, especially about how rudely he treated her. I don't like racism any more than the next person, but it is a little sad and interesting how Julian wasn't anywhere near as racist as his mother, yet he had much more contempt for her than she had for him, even though they both didn't see eye to eye on many things (I felt like it created a lot of juxtaposition). Also, I feel like racism is often passed down from one generation to the next, and while Julian did not take in his mother's racism, I think it's important to understand that his mother grew up in a different time than he did (which I'm not saying makes it okay to be racist, just that it's important in understanding her character).
I think that maybe what she was trying to communicate at the end is the idea that people who hate racists consequently have quite a bit in common with them, as they are making judgments of the exterior world, when, if they want to be critical, should perhaps look inward first. Remember: she is a strict, penitent catholic, and it is possible that, to her, the road to grace necessarily leads through the "world of guilt and sorrow."
ReplyDeleteI will share my thoughts on your first question. I think she is saying that she is lucky she won't have to see herself in that hideous hat. If she continuously had to see herself coming and going out into public wearing it she might realize how hideous it really is.
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