Flannery O'Connor and Jack Hodgin

The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast the attitudes of the main characters in Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" and Jack Hodgins's "The Plague Children" toward their farms, with a view toward identifying how those attitudes intersect with their attitudes toward the world more generally. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in the stories and then to discuss the means by which the characters' relationships to their farms drive the narrative.

In both O'Connor's and Hodgins's stories, the farming characters are put upon by an external force that introduces life-changing experience to them. The engagement is linked to their life on the farm, although it affects them in different ways. What the narratives share, however, is a depiction of mind-sets that are tested in the extreme. How this comes about can be discerned through a recapitulation of the action of the stories, which is deceptively straightforward in both cases.

In "Revelation," which is set in the South, Mrs. Turpin's twisted, vain perception of God's goodness to her leaves her empty when a girl she considers an emotional and social inferior shames her in public, likening her to the hogs she and her husband raise on their farm. It is tempting to dismiss the psychic suffering of Mrs. Turpin on the ground that, as has been observed, she is "an incorrigible bigot" (DiRenzo 215) both before and after the incident. Indeed, Mrs. Turpin is unable to describe black people as anyt

Related Essays

William James on Pragmatism .... Jack London, in his essay "How I Became A Scientist," presents strong evidence .... Flannery O'Connor, in her short story, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," uses two .... (2451 10 )

Selected American Literature .... Jack London's "To Build a Fire" is in its own way also a project of .... who evokes the emotional truth of life in the South, and Flannery O'Connor, who finds a .... (3876 16 )

narrative is the sound of the myriad other voices climbing heavenward, which amplifies her newfound insignificance. "The Plague Children" is set in semirural Vancouver Island, where Dennis Macken and the other farmers of Waterville are beset with counterculture young people who annually invade the area to harvest a seasonal crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms and pretty much take over the surrounding lands and farm facilities in the process, throwing longtime "hobby farmers" into chaos. This year, Dennis Macken strikes back, in a fit of inchoate rage attacking the invaders and injuring a child in the process, and leaving the other hobby farmers to clean up after the mess. The island farmers' attitudes are conveyed directly by the text. All of them "middle aged or older," they simply want to live their quiet lives on their quiet hobby farms and do not want little Waterville "to be anything at all but what it is: a General Store and Post Office, a community hall, and houses you pass on your way to somewhere else" (Hodgins 230). To be left alone is precisely what the plague children (as they are called) who conduct the mass mushroom invasion will not permit. Watching them trespass on his property and "tromp[] on the field he cleared

Category: Literature - F