| dc.description.abstract | Literature from classical antiquity to the end of the
eighteenth century was predominantly mimetic; that is, the
general function of literature was to present a heightened
imitation of reality, and, in particular those aspects of
reality which are most crucial to understanding the meaning
of human destiny.
Although Flannery O'Connor does not use the term
"imitation," her carefully formulated aesthetics bear
witness to this basic orientation. More than her comments
on the art of fiction, her literary achievement,
specifically her second novel. The Violent Bear It Away
(1960), reveals a mind that has a firm sense of the demands
of mimesis, and is intuitively close to the principles and
values of this tradition.
Through a detailed analysis of The Violent Bear It
Away. I show how it is mimetic— how it represents an
imitation of reality in the sense theoretically outlined by
Aristotle. My thesis attempts to discover a plausible
critical basis upon which O'Connor's fiction can be
understood and evaluated. I believe that as one of her
mature works. The violent Bear It Away is representative of
her fictional approach: most of her fiction tends to fall
within a closely circumscribed thematic, social, and
emotional range. If this is true,then perhaps my approach
to the novel can be applied to other individual works.
When viewed "reflexively," The Violent Bear It Away
appears to comment upon O'Connor's fictional art, and as
this thesis demonstrates, the attitudes in the novel
correspond to the classical ideals surrounding mimesis. For
example, Aristotle's theory of katharsis was connected to
his belief in the formative effect of art on the mind.
Katharsis operates by stimulating our ability to convert
insight into feeling, while at the same time controlling and
directing that feeling according to a dramatically rendered
and symbolically ordered form. But The Violent Bear It Away
suggests that humanity's redemption by Jesus Christ is a
process of "dark and disruptive" grace which carries with it
its own terrifying katharsis. O'Connor suggests that God
uses evil (as her novel uses negative emotions and violence)
as a kind of therapeutic instrument to purify and instruct
the protagonist of the story, Francis Marion Tarwater. | |
