Patriarchal Sugaring

his description of how ideology functions,³¹ is the very demon of the conversation that triggered O’Connor’s resentment. However, instead of directly stating her dislike, O’Connor made a joke on herself and had a sarcastic laugh. Through her humorous rejoinder, O’Connor showed her resentment of being treated like a “child,” of being confined and restrained by Southern expectations of female propriety. This is the kind of sarcastic humor that O’Connor presented in her letters, lectures, writings, and fictions.

It is this same kind of “hailing” that the narrator in the grotesque garden scene in

“Greenleaf” tries to reinforce in the reader. Mrs. May at last receives the precious gift of

“love” from the Greenleaf bull, the representative of the patriarchal god, in the form of a punishment. According to the narrator, Mrs. May, i.e., a woman, should not and cannot reject the hailing of patriarchal expectations, nor the hailing of love. Nevertheless, O’Connor the writer/trickster humorously but bitterly hid within her secret taunting a negation of the narrator’s directive, hence creating a narrative conflict.

In O’Connor’s stories, indeed, the “sugaring” scenes usually imply such a rebellious intent that questions and laughs at the domineering power and its fear of woman’s independence. But instead of directly addressing the issue and challenging the dominant power, O’Connor chose to hide rebellious thoughts behind the willful characters. She arranged another kind of laughter behind that of the cruel narrator, who punishes the defiant (female) protagonist mercilessly and justifies himself with the righteousness of patriarchal rules.

Critics often associated this incongruence or conflict between what the narrator represents and what the narrative actually reveals to the reader in O’Connor’s stories with the grotesque narrative strategy that O’Connor adopted to depict her fictional world. The characteristic “freakishness” of the grotesque narrative thus becomes merely a stylistic feature that contributes to O’Connor’s reputation as a Southern grotesque writer. Such a conclusion yet ignores the possible roles the writer might play. As a trickster, O’Connor complicated and enriched her narrative with a voice that frequently questions and mocks. This present paper re-examines this kind of O’Connorian narrative conflict. To me, this kind of narrative conflict indicates O’Connor’s dexterous application of the traditional narrative grotesque. I will prove that through this narrative technique, O’Connor stealthily brought into her narratives a forbidden feminine voice, while at the same time adding a grain of wry and/or bitter humor to the text.

II. Patriarchal Sugaring

Everyday hailing, as part of a greeting language system, is full of cultural significance and ideological implication. Through hailing, ideology “recruits”

individuals into an identity formation process. With this understanding, the “sugaring”

words in O’Connor’s stories should not be treated merely as hailing. Rather, they bear a mocking tone which O’Connor as the writer and the trickster secretly emphasizes.

31 According to Althusser, ideology functions not by teaching but through a certain kind of hailing:

I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits”

subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” (48)

For Althusser, it is always in the hailing that the individual becomes a subject and this kind of recognition is done and completed with the hailed individual “believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e., recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing”; briefly, “[t]he existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing” (49).

These words can reveal significant meanings when incongruities and conflicts in the narratives and the “freakish” style of the characters’ performance are under scrutiny. By re-examining these “sugaring” scenes, the hidden voices may eventually emerge to challenge the explicit voice of narrators.

In “Greenleaf,” a “sugaring” scene occurs when Mrs. May’s son Wesley expresses his hatred toward his mother for her dominance over the household and his life. He lashes out at her: “You ought to start praying, Sweetheart” (319). Having nowhere to vent his frustration, Wesley uses this “sugaring” to reclaim his status and dignity in a family controlled by his mother, the matriarch of the family. Yet instead of giving in to taunts or teasing, Mrs. May keeps reminding her two sons of the sufferings and hardship she has been through, thus keeping the sons in a subordinate place subordinate to hers:

“I am the only adult on this place,” she said [...]. “Do you see how it’s going to be when I die and you boys have to handle him [Mr. Greenleaf]?”

she began. “Do you see why he didn’t know whose bull that was? Because it was theirs. Do you see what I have to put up with? Do you see that if I hadn’t kept my foot on his neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o’clock?” (320-21)

Her insistence on the importance of herself challenges the narrator’s and her two sons’

understanding of the social codes; she does not change anything, though. What she receives in return is repeated “sugaring” from her two adult sons, who try to recruit her into the Southern female community—“You ought to start praying, Sweetheart.” The narrator also reminds us that “justice” will be done eventually, as Mrs. May finally succumbs to the hailing of the patriarchal and thus “returns” to the “embrace” of the Greenleaf bull at the end of the story.

While laughing together with O’Connor at the concept of the “sweet,” “sugaring”

things that are in fact the constructing elements of her real-life experiences and her narrative, we witness the concurrence of two pairs of incongruities: the first between the freakish and the reality, and the second between the “sugaring” of someone and the violent power of “hailing.” Through the depiction of the freakish iron hand of Mrs. May alongside the cartoon-like comparison of her “dangling blue-veined little hand” to the head of a broken lily, we experience anxiety and suspense. Because of her love for the grotesque and for mocking humor, O’Connor left her reader a great abundance of grotesque narratives full of comic incongruities³²—“the hallmark of O’Connor’s work.”³³ However, although critics credit O’Connor with unique narrative power in

32 In An Anatomy of Humor, while analyzing why people laugh, Arthur Asa Berger points out that compared to other explanations, the most important and widely accepted explanation of humor is probably “the incongruity theory of humor.” According to Berger,

all humor involves some kind of a difference between what one expects and what one gets.

The term “incongruity” has many different meanings—inconsistent, not harmonious, lacking propriety and not conforming, so there are a number of possibilities hidden in the term. Incongruity theories involve the intellect, though they may not seem to at first sight—for we have to recognize an incongruity before we can laugh at one (though this recognition process takes place very quickly and is probably done subconsciously). (3)

33 When surveying and evaluating the possible different critical approaches to O’Connor’s narratives in the literary tradition, Ragen concludes with a lament that critical approaches do not pay much attention to how the sense of humor, as a major narrative characteristic, functions in O’Connor’s works:

The great body of criticism that has appeared since O’Connor’s death affirms the variety of lights in which her works must be viewed [...]. Her works demand philosophical, theological, and psychological analysis, as well as purely literary study. They require this level of critical response [...] because a great mind has carefully ordered the disparate elements in her work for the reader to find. Finally, and unfortunately, her critics find little to say about the comedy in O’Connor’s works. Humor is even harder to write about than

writing grotesque scenes, most leave no space for the feminine laughter, the rebellious sign by which O’Connor differentiates herself from the narrators in her stories.

Those critics unable to detect O’Connor’s trickery and the possible intention behind it might attribute the reservation and sense of humor in her narrative incongruities and freakish grotesquery to her religious background.³⁴ O’Connor has long been understood as a religious enthusiast in the guise of a writer. Critics might further justify their interpretation by referring back to O’Connor’s “authentic”

explanation about the very significance of her narratives with respect to the religious

“moments of grace” (see, for example, Johansen, Asals, and Holman³⁵). However, I would like to point out that this sense of humor that lingers everywhere in O’Connor’s works is never a pure product of religious beliefs.

O’Connor’s sense of humor, which is traditionally taken as characteristic of grotesque writing, is an indication of the feminine³⁶ ruse, a trick that O’Connor the

are the motions of grace, but humor, as much as the anagogical dimension, is the hallmark of O’Connor’s work. (397)

34 O’Connor interpreted her works with respect to her religious beliefs, in particular pointing out

“moments of grace” as the critical turning point for her characters in suffering (Mystery and Manners 112). Her remarks are frequently alluded to by critics in their affirmation of the religious significance of O’Connor’s grotesque narratives. For instance, Asals observes:

The form of tension we have been exploring—between comic perception and melodramatic plotting, ironic voice and violent action, the release of laughter and the constraint of fear—seems to return us inescapably to that center of the incongruous, the grotesque. It is little wonder that O’Connor happily accepted that term as descriptive of her fiction, for the grotesque is precisely that mode that achieves its effect not by reconciling conflicting forms and responses, but by holding them in insoluble suspension: its very nature is to be not simply comic or frightening, but both simultaneously, at once ludicrous and terrifying. (140-41)

As Ragen correctly points out, Asals, just like some critics, “sees the idea of tension at the core of the religious dimension of O’Connor’s work, as well” (388).

35 From various perspectives, critics endeavor to solve the mysteries underlying O’Connor’s grotesque narratives. C. Hugh Holman interprets the distanced narrator and the cruel deprivations of the characters as the representation of O’Connor’s religious disposition: “She was a Catholic writer in a Protestant world, and she saw the writing of fiction as a Christian vocation,” and therefore, “What gives distance and comic perspective to her view of the world is fundamentally a religious distancing, resulting from her confidence of her own salvation in a world of those futilely seeking surety.” (Holman 98) Frederick Asals in Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, following Eric Bentley’s interpretation, believes that the laughter of the narrator and the devastating drama of the action, which belongs to the destructive force of “scornful comedy,” account for O’Connor’s “pervasive use of that highly ironic narrative voice”

(Asals 134). Ruthann Knechel Johansen in The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter notes that O’Connor’s narrative secret lies in, as O’Connor explains, the embodiment of

“mystery through manners”: “Throughout O’Connor’s narratives, we note that the language of the trickster, both in word and gesture, is irony.” (152) Frederick Asals emphasizes the ironic tones of the narrative; however, unlike Johansen, he does not include O’Connor’s stance into his analysis of the conflict between the understanding of the character and that of the narrator.

36 The grotesque narrative thus serves as a space for O’Connor to perform her writer/trickster’s practice of resistance. Just as the Certeaurian tactic operates in the space of the other, the “feminine” poaching of the writer/trickster is taking place in the narrative—the narrator’s place—occasionally and opportunely when the grotesque makes its appearance. I am here appropriating Julia Kriesteva’s concept about the semiotic

writer/trickster plays with her narrator. O’Connor’s resistance to “sugaring,” the

“hailing” of the patriarchal, disguised as sarcastic humor in the narrative, is an example.

It refers to a predicament that O’Connor, as a writer and Southern woman whose poor health prevented her from traveling far from home, might have faced. The very experience of being a woman confined physically and spiritually in the patriarchal South inspired O’Connor to depict the grotesque, and gave her mocking, feminine laughter the force that empowers most of her stories. The grotesqueries O’Connor attached to her female characters and their trapped situations finally become a channel that connects the incongruities and serves as a sign of the influence of patriarchal repression and of the strong rebellious female volition.

The mocking laughter typical of O’Connor’s stories is the sign of the writer/trickster’s critique of patriarchy. What is unspoken and unnamable is now insidiously recorded within the grotesque scenes. It is now described in disguise; it is secretly inscribed as the mystic code in the narrative. Instead of dabbing sparsely the traces of her feminine inquiries, O’Connor lavishly wove her demanding questions into the narrative plot—so her female characters pursue their interests and act out their wills.

But when the time comes, they gradually step down the road of punishment and the raging narrator assures us of their inescapable downfall. While the raging, relentless narrator punishes and the willful female characters suffer, the writer/trickster hides her mocking laughter, waiting for an appropriate chance of revelation to the reader.

While all these implicit layers of significance lie hidden in the subversive comic traits of the grotesque, O’Connor’s craftiness gradually reveals its power. By creating narrative conflict between the female characters’ protest at the fatal stroke of life, and the narrator’s merciless interpretation of a justification fulfilled through the intervention of God Almighty, the writer/trickster reminds the reader of the sly, evasive strategy necessary in this situation. Like a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, she employs subversive methods to imply different messages while pretending to obey (in the writer/trickster’s case—to “witness”) the dominant, patriarchal viewpoint of the narrator. The narrator is contented with the final judgment and punishment of the defiant women/daughters; however, the writer/trickster’s laughter is never on the same level.

The writer/trickster might seem to stand together with the narrator. Through the narrative conflict, the seed of discontent and subversion is nonetheless insidiously cultivated in the text. The writer/trickster reaps bitter laughter at the misleading interpretation of the dominant, powerful narrator, while at the same time mourning for the suffering of the female characters. This feminine laughter becomes the indicator of internal rebellion. The unnamable, which can neither be fully expressed nor completely exhausted of its implications, is now given a new form, and so are the mystic codes.

This “something” beyond verbal expression, this concept without form, now can be traced in the form of feminine laughter hidden behind the grotesque and the narrative conflict. This is how the grotesque as a strategy functions in O’Connor’s narratives—they are signifiers referring to the incomplete and the unexhausted, the ever-churning volition of the restless inquiries that mocks and rebels against the slashing voice of the narrator. Where language stops, the grotesque moves on:

sign flow, and her distinction between the feminine sign flow and the space of masculine regulation.

According to Julia Kristeva, the semiotic sign flow belongs to the category of the feminine, while the symbolic, the rigid regulations of a place or a society, is the domain of the masculine. By intruding into the area of regulation and narrative conventions, this tactical strategy, this wandering and flowing power of the feminine, brings in ambiguity, challenges the role of the narrator, and insinuates the possibility of laughter derived from a quite contradictory understanding of the narrative.

Grotesques have no consistent properties other than their own grotesqueness, and that they do not manifest predicable behavior. The word designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language. It accommodates the things left over when the categories of language are exhausted; it is a defense against silence when other words have failed. (Harpham 3-4)

What is not said cannot be said directly, for it is beyond language, so it disguises itself under the veil of the laughter that mocks at itself. Using the grotesque as a shield, O’Connor laughs at the unspoken and brings in the humor. She even provides comic scenes in stories full of violence. Besides laughing at the behavior and concepts of her characters, she embarks upon a second layer of laugher—the laughter of her reader throughout the narrative. Her laughter demands the reader’s attention and participation.

Consequently, O’Connor finds the best form of expression for her narrative in the grotesque. In the following section, I will argue that O’Connor uses the narrative technique of the grotesque to offer a feminine reading/critique of the broader socio-cultural context that interferes in and/or threatens the willful female characters’

success.