The Southern Misfit and the Dream of Escape in the Fiction of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor
Publication Date
12-1990
Advisor(s) - Committee Chair
Charmaine Mosby, Nancy Davis, James Flynn
Degree Program
Department of English
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Abstract
The misfit and the dream of escape are popular motifs in American literature, particularly in the literature of the South. Critical studies of works employing these themes have largely ignored the connection between the two. The Southern misfit – the Southerner who fails to or refuses to conform to his society’s strict standards – often dreams of escaping the restrictions of the South for some Northern “promised land.” In the works of two Georgia writers, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the related themes receive different treatments. Carson McCullers’s misfits in the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding are adolescent girls who fail to meet their society’s expectations to be ladylike and free of personal ambitions, and McCullers seems sympathetic to her misfits’ longing to escape. In Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, her misfits are often intellectuals who feel unappreciated and alienated in their “culturally stagnant” hometowns, but O’Connor usually demonstrates that the real problem of these intellectuals is not the restrictions of the South but the characters’ own lack of self-awareness.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America
Recommended Citation
Oberhausen, Tammy, "The Southern Misfit and the Dream of Escape in the Fiction of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor" (1990). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 1791.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1791