In December 1950, Flannery O’Connor boarded a train in Connecticut to visit her mother, Regina O’Connor, in Georgia for Christmas. She was twenty-five years old, had left Georgia at age twenty, and was riding a string of successes. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’d received a fellowship awarded to students of exceptional promise and been offered a residency at the prestigious artist’s colony Yaddo. A literary agent was representing her first novel, Wise Blood. O’Connor had also befriended the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, who invited her to move into their garage apartment in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The Flannery O’Connor who stepped onto the train that day had built a rich and fulfilling life independent of her mother.
Sally Fitzgerald, who would later edit The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, saw her friend off at the train station and reported that the young writer departed with a wan smile, “wearing her beret at a jaunty angle.” But when O’Connor got off the train in Georgia, she looked, to the uncle who met her, “like a shriveled old woman.” O’Connor thought she had rheumatoid arthritis, but she was actually suffering from lupus, the autoimmune illness that killed her father when he was forty-five years old. She believed that by January she would be once again working on her novel in the room over the Fitzgeralds’ garage. But by March, she was less optimistic. “I am up and around again now but won’t be well enough to go back to Connecticut for some time,” she wrote to her editor. Eighteen months later, she returned to the Fitzgeralds’ house, but her stay was cut short when she contracted a virus that reactivated the lupus.
In the spring of 1951, Flannery O’Connor moved with her mother to Andalusia, a 550-acre farm just north of Milledgeville, where Flannery wrote short stories and raised peacocks, and Regina annoyed her daughter and raised dairy cows. “From the beginning, relations between these birds and my mother were strained,” O’Connor wrote. Relations were strained, too, between Flannery and Regina, with whom she lived until her death at age thirty-nine in 1964. O’Connor positioned a giant wardrobe in the middle of her bedroom/study, so that someone entering from Regina’s adjoining bedroom would have a blocked view of the writer’s desk. She once wrote to a friend, “My parent took advantage of my absence to clean up my room and installed revolting ruffled curtains.” O’Connor continued, “I can’t put the dust back but I have ultimated that the curtains have to go, lest they ruin my prose.”
Regina O’Connor, like other mothers of gifted daughters—Aurelia Plath comes to mind—is often characterized as a gorgon from whom her daughter sought to escape. Critics have looked to Regina as the inspiration for the appalling mothers in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, and Regina has rewarded this kind of attention. Regina O’Connor was a “crippling influence” on her daughter, wrote Ann E. Reuman, who further argued that “O’Connor’s sense of entrapment, impotence, and frustration in the face of her mother’s . . . infuriating dominance precipitated a fierce and boiling rage.”
Flannery O’Connor’s biographers have been more judicious, but to a surprising extent, Regina slips out of the biographers’ sights. Jean Cash’s chapter entitled “Regina and Flannery” takes a long detour into Flannery O’Connor’s views of the Civil Rights Movement. Brad Gooch seems more interested in Erik Langkjaer, the Danish textbook salesman with whom Flannery O’Connor became briefly besotted, than in the woman with whom Flannery O’Connor lived for all but six years of her life. The documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, too, turn their high beams on Langkjaer. Romance is more interesting than maternal duty. And Regina’s lighting remained dim partly by her own design.
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Two decades after her death in 1995 at age ninety-nine, Regina O’Connor’s archive was transferred to Emory University, and a vast trove of letters and ephemera became available to researchers. I made an appointment to consult the Flannery O’Connor Collection in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library reading room because I had a commission to write a book about Flannery O’Connor as a Gothic writer, a view of O’Connor that nothing I found in the archive would turn out to encourage. O’Connor grumbled about being “slapped into the Southern Gothic School,” and wrote to an admirer, “For my money, there arn’t [sic] any gothic elements in my stories.”
It was cold in the library reading room. I leaned back in my seat to take in the realization that Flannery O’Connor was speaking to me from beyond the grave and saying she didn’t think much of what I was doing. I didn’t think much of what I was doing either. My attention kept wandering to Regina. As I sifted through the mother’s archive, that elusive woman began to snap into focus. I started to view Regina O’Connor as an engine of her daughter’s writing career, rather than as an irritant. I also came to see her as an avatar of the way in which literary mothers get censured and ignored.
The Regina we know best, the one who lived with Flannery O’Connor at Andalusia and who makes cameo appearances in her daughter’s letters, was a capable woman of many interests. She dealt in crop fertilizer and cow husbandry. She talked in depth about pound cake and tailored a coat to accommodate Flannery’s crutches. However, the documents in the Emory archive cast light on a younger Regina too. In a studio photograph of mother and daughter taken when Flannery was a little girl, Regina’s eyes look beyond the smiling child. It’s a portrait of Regina back when she was simply the mother of Mary Flannery O’Connor, a personage of modest—but promising—literary baggage.
In her early letters to her mother, the child O’Connor is self-aware and droll. At age eleven in a postcard, she wrote:
Dear Regina,
How are you? I’m fine. I didn’t have time to write you a letter.
We are going to Aunt [L] for supper. How’s Pop. We are going to the picture show. I got 7 little chickens. How’s Gertrude.
Love,
M.F. O’Connor
She declared herself Flannery, rather than Mary Flannery, in her early twenties, but long before that one can see O’Connor experimenting with her signature. One can also see her lean into the role of raconteur, at age seventeen describing for Regina an altercation with a neighbor over trespassing ducks. “She [the neighbor] said they had been in her fish pond & had eaten all the fish but one.” This contretemps took place on a Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning, tensions had escalated. “Mrs. Wells said she reckoned she would just have to call the police, so Sister said, well go ahead & call them & she went back to bed. In about fifteen minutes the policeman pounded on the back door.” O’Connor went on to write, “She was mad & he was mad & Mrs. Wells was mad & I was asleep.”
In that long, loose sentence, O’Connor telegraphs her future genius. The fallout from the errant ducks spreads outward from O’Connor’s aunt Mary Cline (“Sister”) to the policeman to Mrs. Wells before the sentence ends with the oblivious Mary Flannery slumbering through the entire kerfuffle. The letter contains many of the features of O’Connor’s adult writing:
birds (a lifelong interest)
a self-righteous woman
an attentiveness to the seemingly trivial passions of others a bemused attitude toward others’ rage
Mrs. Wells stands as the progenitor of a line of ridiculously determined and furious women who populate O’Connor’s best stories. “Sister says Mrs. Wells didn’t do it for anything but meanness, cause she thought we killed her cat,” O’Connor wrote. Small-minded and possessive though these women may be, O’Connor was fascinated by their myopic pursuits.
When the adult Flannery O’Connor returned home from Connecticut, Regina initially mishandled the situation, shielding her daughter from bad medical news as if she were still a child. Eventually, Sally Fitzgerald felt compelled to inform Flannery that she had lupus, not arthritis, as she’d been led to believe by her mother in a deception both appalling and fathomable. Regina O’Connor readily coped with her daughter’s physical pain; she ultimately spent twelve years acting as a home health aide. But Regina must have found it difficult to face the emotional pain her daughter would suffer from learning she shared the disease that first debilitated and then killed her father.
In May 1958, at the insistence of Flannery’s cousin Katie Semmes, who bankrolled the trip, Regina and Flannery O’Connor traveled to the French town of Lourdes, the Catholic pilgrimage site famous for miracle cures. “Cousin Katie has a will of iron,” Flannery O’Connor wrote resignedly to the Fitzgeralds. “My will is apparently made out of a feather duster.” In advance of the trip, reservations were made at the Hotel de la Grotte and picture books of Rome were perused. O’Connor predicted she’d be “a beady-eyed specter” by the time she and her mother got to Missouri, where they caught a connecting flight to Europe. She wrote bemusedly of one of her mother’s friends who kept a diary during a trip to Europe. “She also brought back some frightful descriptions of the plumbing, which she delivers orally,” O’Connor wrote.
Perhaps inspired by that friend, Regina, too, maintained a travel diary, one of the most revelatory documents in the Emory collection. The travel diary provides a rare means of accessing Regina directly, rather than through ellipses and editorial disputes (these are excellently aired in Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor). Regina chronicled the miseries of the journey for her daughter, beginning with a rough flight, during which a log board landed on Flannery’s head. Of a group tour, Regina wrote, “M.F. got very tired so we stayed on bus while others visited some of the places.”
The trip was grueling for both mother and daughter. They were accompanied by Sally Fitzgerald, who was living in Italy at the time, and who shared memories of the trip with Rosemary M. Magee. “Her mother had injured her back before leaving Milledgeville,” Fitzgerald recalled, “and I knew they couldn’t handle the suitcases or ask for a porter who could.” The injured mother chaperoned her gravely ill daughter, and the daughter humored her mother’s desire to believe in the healing power of Lourdes. Fitzgerald wrote, “[S]he took the bath, although she was the kind of Catholic who could die for her religion rather than take a bath for it.”
Despite the challenges they faced in their journey, the travel diary depicts Regina enjoying herself in the irrepressible manner of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” that is, through a zeal for unremarkable details. The fictional grandmother writes down car mileage, “because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back.” In her diary, Regina notes a fellow traveler’s purchase of dress material: “It was real silk and cost $5 a yard but she got it for $2.50 because it had a flaw in it. She was pleased to death. She had all this Italian money and had to spend it in Italy, that’s the reason she bought the material.”
Upon her return to Georgia, Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Had I been ten years younger I might have enjoyed it. The pilgrims were all I could have wanted—old ladies made of pure steel.” At the time of the trip, Flannery O’Connor was thirty-three years old, but she had long identified with old women. When still a teenager and visiting Atlanta, she thanked her mother for sending money and other items, writing, “The underskirt hasn’t come yet, but for old ladies like me I don’t imagine it will be very appropriate.” At age twenty-three, she wrote, “Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.” At age thirty-two, O’Connor wrote, “Our front porch is now decked out with the Bell House rockers. It looks like the front of an old ladies rest home.”
Why did Flannery O’Connor identify with old women? Perhaps because old women are released from the kind of societal expectations that lead people to be inordinately interested in young women’s love lives. (What remains of Sally Fitzgerald’s unfinished O’Connor biography are two draft chapters, one of which focuses on Erik Langkjaer.) Or perhaps O’Connor identified with old women because they nurse grudges with dramatic flair. “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation,” wrote O’Connor. Regina, like many mothers, was both irritated and irritating.
However, in a lecture she delivered in 1996, one year after Regina O’Connor’s death, Sally Fitzgerald argued against the tendency “to ascribe repressed rage against her mother as a—if not the—motivating drive in [O’Connor’s] writing life.” Fitzgerald’s experience of motherhood—she had six children with Robert Fitzgerald before he divorced her for a younger woman—may have influenced her perspective on Regina. According to Fitzgerald’s obituarist Elaine Woo, Fitzgerald began work on The Habit of Being while distraught over the dissolution of her marriage. Fitzgerald needed to stay in Regina’s good graces in order to access letters in her possession. But even after Regina’s death, Fitzgerald countered the agonistic view of the mother/daughter relationship. And she never underplayed Regina O’Connor’s impact on her daughter. At one point, Fitzgerald titled her biography-in-progress “Flannery and Regina.”
Flannery O’Connor once said, “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” But, in fact, several biographies of O’Connor were hindered or left unfinished because Regina guarded the chicken yard. Flannery O’Connor’s literary remains are available because Regina O’Connor saved them. But also, because Regina O’Connor is dead. During her lifetime, she denied scholars access to her daughter’s papers and requested changes to what they wrote. One can glimpse Regina indirectly through the servile letters of those who sought to write about her daughter. Addressing Regina’s objection to his description of Flannery’s hospital room, the biographer William Sessions wrote, “You are absolutely right about the word ‘barren’ and over-dramatizing. ” He went on to say, “My idea was to show that all hospital rooms are barren, not just hers. In fact, hers was as pleasant last June as any I remember.”
If Sessions read Flannery O’Connor’s manuscript letters now housed at Emory as he worked on his O’Connor biography (he died in 2016, before it was published), it must have pained him to read her accounts of his visits. She wrote of “Billy” Sessions: “He arrived promptly at 3:30, talking, talked his way across the grass and up the steps and into a chair and continued talking from that position without pause, break, breath, or gulp until 4:50.” O’Connor continued, “If I said six complete sentences all afternoon and evening I don’t know what they were. Two days later, we both got thankyou [sic] letters from him saying he knew he stayed too long but he had enjoyed my conversation so much that he forgot the time. My mother and I howled.” The letter appears in The Habit of Being, but in expurgated form, with this anecdote removed, either at the discretion of Sally Fitzgerald or Regina O’Connor.
What also got omitted from The Habit of Being were instances of racism, an evil O’Connor learned at her mother’s knee, although you wouldn’t know it from Paul Elie’s “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” which barely mentions Regina. It may seem perverse to insist that Regina O’Connor get credit for teaching her daughter how to be a racist; surely other teachers abounded. My point is simply that Regina doesn’t get sufficiently scrutinized in any area. In Elie’s book on writers’ pilgrimages, he devotes more ink to Erik Langkjaer than to Regina, even though Langkjaer never accompanied Flannery on a pilgrimage, and Regina did.
Thanks to Monica Carol Miller’s wonderful Dear Regina: Flannery O’Connor’s Letters from Iowa, we can read in published form O’Connor’s correspondence with her mother during her Iowa apprenticeship. We can also be grateful to Miller for pumping the brakes on the rush to mother judgment. “I believe such characterizations [of mother/daughter animosity] have exaggerated and overemphasized the contentiousness between the two women,” Miller writes. In the Iowa letters, you see Regina as someone Flannery sought to impress. O’Connor bragged to her mother, “I have read four times in Workshop this year. Nobody else more than twice.” At other times she communicated like a sulky adolescent to a clueless parent. Rejecting Regina’s suggestion that she take a summer job at a fuse plant, O’Connor wrote, “[B]elieve me what I’m doing is more important than that. It is the habitual business of writing everyday for a certain length of time at a certain time that gets you anywhere. I have made a success of this year I think, and what I do next year will depend on this summer. You don’t know how much.”
Regina came to know how much, and to protect her daughter’s writing time, warding off visitors and tolerating Flannery’s fictional annexation of their shared experiences. O’Connor described how avidly she listened with her mother to a woman who compared her daughter-in-law to “a hog who wants slop.” “I happened to be present and nearly fell off my chair,” O’Connor wrote, “but my mother didn’t bat an eye until the old woman had gone, then she said, ‘I hope you are not going to use that in one of those stories.’ Of course I am as soon as I can find me a place to.”
Andalusia is so strongly associated with Flannery O’Connor and her life with her mother that it is worth noting Regina stopped living there immediately after her daughter’s death. The move to Andalusia from the family home on Greene Street was specifically aimed at accommodating Flannery O’Connor, both her literary aspirations (a first-floor parlor was turned into her bedroom and writer’s studio) and her enthusiasm for peafowl. The distance of the farm from the town, and of Milledgeville from larger cultural hubs, gave it the ideal qualities of a writer’s colony. Andalusia out-Yaddoed Yaddo, where O’Connor got caught up in the paranoiac Communist-chasing endeavors of Robert Lowell. At Andalusia, O’Connor took breakfast with her mother and uncle and then wrote for two or three hours, unbothered by intrusion. Andalusia was primarily a venue for Flannery’s writing, and only secondarily the setting of Regina’s farming endeavors.
Richard Gilman, in a New York Times review of The Habit of Being, which was published in 1988, described Regina O’Connor as being devoted to her daughter, but as having “no comprehension of her gift.” Gilman couldn’t have been more wrong. Regina stockpiled evidence of her daughter’s gift from earliest childhood. She kept multiple copies of “Mistaken Identity,” a witty tale of a misgendered goose. She preserved “The Priceless Works of M.F. O’Connor,” a collection of poetic juvenilia. She saved blank notebooks on which Flannery inscribed only her name and address. Flannery O’Connor said her mother didn’t think much of her fiction, but added, “[S]he likes the fact that I do it and her tone is greatly softened by the situation of my being her child.” Even if what flowed from Regina was only standard maternal affection, her daughter drew often from that tap.
O’Connor claimed she wrote short stories because her mother dozed when asked to read anything longer. But in the Emory archive, I saw Regina advocate for Wise Blood in a letter to Ruth Stone, a family friend. Stone had written to convey her efforts to track down the novel, detailing her many attempts to acquire it (“I then went to the university library . . . this library had not heard of the book but said some would be ordered at once”), and mentioning that she had heard “conflicting reports” of Wise Blood. “[P]lease tell me what the adverse criticisms are about,” Stone wrote.
“How nice of you to write and congratulate me on Mary Flannery’s success in the Literary world,” Regina insincerely replied, going on to encourage Stone to judge the novel for herself. “It isn’t a book that would appeal to readers who read for pleasure alone, or for the superficial reader,” Regina wrote. “It is a book with depth.” Regina challenged Stone’s account of the novel’s reception (“I think that you would expect some difference of opinion, as it is an unusual book, and as I said before not written for the light reader”), and she dismissed “adverse criticisms” by noting, “The reader capable of comprehending the book would appreciate it.” Then Regina forwarded the letter to Flannery, writing on the back, “This letter from Ruth Stone explains it’s self [sic]. I also enclose my answer to her.”
The epistolary exchange between Regina O’Connor and Ruth Stone is a perfect one-act play of passive aggression, with each woman putting the other in her place by means of pretend good manners. Flannery O’Connor dined off such skirmishes and turned them into stories. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” says Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People.”
Regina O’Connor’s lifelong championing of her brilliant daughter was an important source of Flannery O’Connor’s preternatural self-confidence. A sixteen-year-old O’Connor, submitting stories to Viking Press, wrote, “They stand on their own merit,” and then, in a postscript, added: “I have seen worse published.” The same self-assurance led her to dismiss the criticism of the Rinehart Press editor who had first rights to Wise Blood. O’Connor wrote, “I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention.” Of her mother, Flannery O’Connor wrote, “She is a woman of imperatives. Positive imperatives, negative imperatives, double negative imperatives.” Flannery O’Connor was her mother’s daughter.
Flannery O’Connor died after the surgery she underwent to remove an ovarian tumor caused a flare-up of her lupus. In the months and weeks before her death, O’Connor was in and out of the hospital. She wrote from Milledgeville in May 1964, “[M]y parent is running the Creaking Hill Nursing Home instead of the Andalusia Cow Plantation.” Hospitalized later that month, O’Connor reported that her mother was doing fine, adding, “She’s running a hospital though, and without much in the way of help.” Home again on July 11, O’Connor wrote, “My momma arranged the table so I can get out of the bed right into the electric typewriter.” After O’Connor died at the Baldwin County hospital at Milledgeville, Regina continued running things. She moved back to the house on Greene Street, where she was kept occupied by Flannery O’Connor business. When Caroline Gordon visited her in 1966, Regina “was busy signing contracts with Germans, Japanese and other folk.” Regina outlived her daughter by more than thirty years. I pause here to register the enormity of her loss.
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In a last will and testament dated October 13, 1954, four years after she returned home and ten years before her death, Flannery O’Connor left everything to Regina: “I hereby request that manuscripts unpublished at the time of my death be burned by her unless the manuscript is already in the hands of my agent or publisher or unless the manuscript itself is marked, ‘To be published,’ and this notation signed by me.” Flannery O’Connor’s last will and testament can be found in Box 14, file 2 of the Flannery O’Connor Collection at Emory, along with recipes, speaking tour schedules, and a grade school geography notebook.
Regina O’Connor, as the will specified, became Flannery O’Connor’s literary executor, but she retained her role as Flannery O’Connor’s mother. Regina directed her daughter’s posthumous literary affairs, but she also preserved her childhood mementoes: Flannery O’Connor’s birth certificate, Flannery O’Connor’s baby shoes, Flannery O’Connor’s report cards, Flannery O’Connor’s First Holy Communion photograph. Because Flannery O’Connor got boomeranged back home by illness, Regina O’Connor oversaw Flannery O’Connor’s address books, Flannery O’Connor’s eyeglasses, and Flannery O’Connor’s syringe. As any mother would, Regina saved the Christmas card that Flannery O’Connor mailed home from Iowa, on which her daughter had drawn a pair of socks, a spatula, and a bit of doggerel:
If I were a Ph.D.,
No doubt, you’d get much
More from me.
But Regina also preserved the essay prompts to which Flannery O’Connor responded when she sat for her MFA exam at the University of Iowa (these included “Form and organization in the Jamesian novel and the American novel since James” and “The future of the novel as an art form”).
It’s possible, if one works through the surfeit of documents in the Emory archive—especially if one has strayed from a plan to write about O’Connor the Gothicist—to view some of the objects Regina preserved as trivial flotsam. But then an outwardly bland document grants admittance into a malign past classroom. In the grade school geography notebook, one finds the young M.F. O’Connor venturing an opinion on Native American peoples: “[T]hey moved round a good bit and did not make much good of their land. They were lazy.” This response was elicited by a teacher’s leading question: “What are some of the reasons why the Indians did not form a great country?”
At age eighteen, before she left home, Flannery O’Connor wrote in a journal, “I have such an affection for myself. It is second only to the one I have for Regina.” The journal (which now resides in Box 13 of Emory’s archive) was the secret repository of O’Connor’s most sacrosanct aspirations. She wrote, “If anyone ever reads this while I am still alive, I think that individual will undoubtedly be the lowest, filthiest cheat that ever lived. I want a lock for it & more. It makes me nervous lying around.” The diatribe was surely aimed at Regina, the most likely trespassing reader, but the journal also testifies to O’Connor’s love for her mother, and her assumption that their lives would remain intertwined. “If I could overcome my inertia,” she wrote, “if I could break in—if I could make money—enough for Regina and me to be independent—if I could, then I could devote my life to art, religion and—my inhibitions pull hard—love.”
Interwoven with the statements of writerly ambition are self-mocking accounts of daily life. “I have pushed my morning schedule up 15 minutes whereby I beat Uncle to the kitchen, make the toast, pick out the good pieces for myself and get all the biscuits for Regina.” She wanted Regina to have the biscuits, but she also wanted her journal to be none of Regina’s beeswax. It’s both ironic and awful that Regina became the journal’s keeper.
We count on mothers to preserve childhood juvenilia, and we are disappointed when they shirk this duty. The historian Jill Lepore, recalling how her mother mistakenly tossed a box of baby books, wrote, “She’d thrown away the record of our childhood. She never forgave herself.” But I suspect it is Lepore who can’t forgive her mother. “I’m not so sure it was an accident,” Lepore added. “My mother had been ambivalent about motherhood in a way that I never have been.” As someone whose mother failed to preserve her first-grade poetry attempts, I feel Lepore’s pain. But as I sifted through the Flannery O’Connor Collection, my heart went out to Regina.
When Flannery O’Connor died, Regina preserved florist cards, along with lists of names of those who sent flowers. She kept a record of those who brought food, so we know that Mrs. Frank Evans made Squash Casserole, John Jennings brought Caramel Cake, and Josie Jennings contributed Ambrosia. Most poignantly, Regina preserved a wall calendar, issued by the Merchant and Farmer’s Bank of Milledgeville, that hung in her bedroom during her daughter’s final year. Opening it to the month of August, one finds a recipe for tuna-stuffed eggs and a single notation, written on the square for August 3: “death came to Mary Flannery.” With that literary inscription, the mother held the daughter’s death at a formal distance, as if greeting visitors at a wake.
Was all of Flannery O’Connor worth preserving? That was the question Regina contemplated in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, and apparently settled in the affirmative, although with some ambivalence about who would have access to what was preserved.
In Benjamin B. Alexander’s edition of uncollected O’Connor letters can be found a priest’s story of how he impinged on Regina’s privacy in her final decade. Father James McCown trespassed on the Andalusia property, then pounded on the front door of the Greene Street house. He was ultimately admitted, after being warned that Regina was annoyed by callers “who wanted to write about Flannery, and who so often misquoted her, or tried to make something gothic about her relationship with her famous daughter.”
I will now make something gothic about Regina’s relationship with her famous daughter. Looking through Sally Fitzgerald’s longhand notes in the Emory archive, I came across a startling anecdote. According to Fitzgerald, when meeting with Flannery O’Connor’s mortician, Regina O’Connor insisted that her daughter’s face be fixed in a smile “with the teeth showing.” This was despite the opposition of the undertaker, who “thought the effect she sought would not be gained.” Fitzgerald wrote, “[O’Connor’s] eyes were closed, but the cheeks were raised, with cotton into a broad smile, and the teeth were revealed.” Fitzgerald also recorded that Regina O’Connor bought the cheapest available coffin for her daughter’s burial, probably at Flannery O’Connor’s own suggestion. However, Fitzgerald wrote, “The other idea—that of the smile—can only have been Regina’s own.”
Admirers of O’Connor’s work will recall the frequency with which she deployed dead bodies. “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” ends with a Boy Scout wheeling a Confederate war veteran out of a graduation ceremony: “That crafty scout . . . rolled him at high speed down a flagstone path and was waiting now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.” In O’Connor’s “Judgement Day,” a character’s eyes are trained on someone “like the eyes of an ugly corpse.”
Learning that she forced her dead daughter to smile strained my compassion for Regina, but the corpse anecdote defies easy interpretation. Did Regina make this request of a mortician because she thought Flannery should maintain feminine geniality beyond the grave? Because she wanted her dead daughter to seem happy? Because, even while grief-stricken, Regina focused on flattering appearances? We’ll probably never know. Whatever the reason, the aftermath of Flannery O’Connor’s death proceeded in the grotesque manner of a Flannery O’Connor story.
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Among the more evocative objects in the Emory archive is a photograph of Regina O’Connor with Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. The photo was taken on Flannery O’Connor Day in 1972, eight years after Flannery O’Connor’s death. Regina, wearing a broad-lapeled coat and a pleased expression, poses in a gathering of grandees.
Flannery O’Connor wrote about being roped into such events. A newspaper clipping shows her being fêted at the Celebrity Breakfast of the Atlanta Branch of the National League of American Pen Women. Of a similar gathering, O’Connor grumbled, “When it was over, one lady said to me, ‘That was such a nice dispensation you gave us, honey.’ Another said, ‘What’s wrong with your leg, sugar?’ I will be powerful glad when they leave off sugaring me. The lady who officiates at these things does it in a sweet dying voice as if over the casket of a late beloved. They pray, then eat, then introduce everybody but the waiters and the cat, then get around to the speaker.” It was in this kind of setting, surrounded by women like her mother, that O’Connor collected her best material.
The crooked smile Regina O’Connor wore as her daughter was celebrated on Flannery O’Connor Day—like the smile worn by Flannery O’Connor’s corpse—remains cryptic, but I suspect it was motivated by both pride and ruefulness. Regina O’Connor was happy her daughter was being commended, but she would have been happier if Flannery O’Connor were still alive, and could be hectored into attending the event.
Regina O’Connor is caught up in a larger cultural shrug. When Alison Bechdel explored her relationship with her father in the graphic memoir Fun Home, the work was lavishly praised by reviewers (“a profound and important book,” said The Times of London). When Bechdel focused on her relationship with her mother, the resulting (even better) graphic memoir Are You My Mother? met with tepid reviews (“a bit too much therapy,” wrote The Guardian). Alice Walker, nearly fifty years ago, wrote, “So many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories.” Zora Neale Hurston said she was able to listen to her “inside urges” in her mother’s room. Nonetheless, writers’ mothers tend to get demonized or neglected. Flannery O’Connor’s bond with her father has been described as a wellspring of her creative identity. But O’Connor came into her full literary powers while writing at a desk barricaded against her mother.
Even in the vast Flannery O’Connor Collection in the Emory library, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Regina. Flannery O’Connor, like most daughters, did not preserve the hundreds of letters she received from her mother, or, if she did, Regina dispensed with them. We can’t know with certainty what, if any, other items got destroyed. Regina O’Connor’s travel diary and her letter in defense of Wise Blood may have been preserved because they focused on Flannery’s travel itinerary and literary success more than on Regina. Still, those documents—along with the baby shoes and the syringe and the passport and the report cards—help us better understand Flannery O’Connor’s galvanizing relationship with her mother.
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Author’s note: I am grateful for access to Flannery O’Connor manuscript materials and photographs in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. © Flannery O’ Connor. Reprinted by permission of The Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, via Harold Matson–Ben Camardi, Inc. I thank Caterina Fitzgerald for permission to reprint Sally Fitzgerald manuscript material housed in the Stuart A. Rose Library.
I have also drawn on published compilations of O’Connor’s wonderful letters: Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor; Christine Flanagan, ed., The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon; Monica Carol Miller’s Dear Regina: Flannery O’Connor’s Letters from Iowa; and Benjamin B. Alexander, ed., Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends.