Grotesque Gendering and the Southern Womanhood in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”
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The grotesqueness in Southern writing tends to only involve spiritual degradations while it veils historical interactions in the American South. The grotesquerie of O’Connor’s freaks has been interpreted as low level spirituality in the region. However, in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” O’Connor’s hermaphrodite disrupts conventional values. The cultural tensions between the New Woman and the Southern Lady display the regional dynamics of conventional gendering. Overall, O’Connor’s deviant women are charged with devalued white purity and degraded Southern spirituality. Within religious backgrounds, being a “temple” seems to reflect religious-centered society upon all Southerners. However, religious obedience is only imposed upon women. I argue that the grotesque bodies, as opposed to idealized religiousness, reveal suppressed aspects of Southern womanhood and gendered social domains. The idealized womanhood defines white women as dependent and even detached from female relations with wage-earning labors. In reality, they were still part of farm labor and exploited by the regional codes. In this paper I will examine the regional dynamics of the deified status of women in the South by focusing on “othered” bodies in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” to show that O’Connor challenged the conventional Southern expectations of women.
Abstract
The grotesqueness in Southern writing tends to only involve spiritual degradations while it veils historical interactions in the American South. The grotesquerie of O’Connor’s freaks has been interpreted as low level spirituality in the region. However, in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” O’Connor’s hermaphrodite disrupts conventional values. The cultural tensions between the New Woman and the Southern Lady display the regional dynamics of conventional gendering. Overall, O’Connor’s deviant women are charged with devalued white purity and degraded Southern spirituality. Within religious backgrounds, being a “temple” seems to reflect religious-centered society upon all Southerners. However, religious obedience is only imposed upon women. I argue that the grotesque bodies, as opposed to idealized religiousness, reveal suppressed aspects of Southern womanhood and gendered social domains. The idealized womanhood defines white women as dependent and even detached from female relations with wage-earning labors. In reality, they were still part of farm labor and exploited by the regional codes. In this paper I will examine the regional dynamics of the deified status of women in the South by focusing on “othered” bodies in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” to show that O’Connor challenged the conventional Southern expectations of women.
참고문헌 (24)
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