Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters

Westling, Louise

doi:10.2307/441199

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Several critics, notably Margaret D. Bauer (2004), Linda Naranjo-Huebl (2010), and Louise Westling (1978), have read the story in a feminist light and suggest that O'Connor employed a sort of accidental feminism in "A Stroke." 7 In so, Flannery O'Connor has made a vivid protest against sentimental stereotypes of motherhood, by presenting Ruby's horrified sense of the physical cost of reproduction and her awful realization that she has been tricked into paying it."…”

Section: A Failure Of a Story?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Southern Mother, Lethal Fetus; Or, How Birth Control Makes a Modernist Out of Flannery O'connor

Wilson¹

2014

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This essay argues that the presence of birth control in a narrative interrupts generic conventions by conditioning modernist subjectivities. The symbolic possibilities of birth control carry the promise and threat of rupture. In the case of Flannery O'Connor's short story “A Stroke of Good Fortune” (1955), these possibilities disrupt both a character's identity and what we might call the identity of an O'Connor text. Critics generally read the story as a failed attempt to portray the Catholic plea against, as O'Connor put it, the “rejection of life at the source.” Recognizing the story's contraceptive disruptions allows us to see it as a modernist text rather than a narrative failure. Reading the story in this light situates modernist aesthetics within larger cultural debates about reproductive rights and civil liberties at the same time that it reveals a surprising statement about contraception. This is not to say that the story rejects contraception as a practice, as might be expected from the pen of the devoutly Catholic O'Connor. Rather, the story derides the claim that birth control is a panacea. “A Stroke” shows that birth control can be used to create oppressive, even Gothic, situations if women do not wield the control denoted by the name.

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Section: A Failure Of a Story?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Southern Mother, Lethal Fetus; Or, How Birth Control Makes a Modernist Out of Flannery O'connor

Wilson¹

2014

Genre

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several critics, notably Margaret D. Bauer (2004), Louise Westling (1978), and Linda Naranjo-Huebl (2010), have read the story in a feminist light and suggest that O'Connor employed a sort of accidental feminism in "A Stroke." 8 In so doing, these critics offer a way to move beyond traditional interpretations of O'Connor as anti-feminist or pro-patriarchy.…”

Section: A Failure Of a Story?mentioning

confidence: 99%