Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

A constant complaint registered against the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, even by those who acknowledge her literary talent, is that it is marred by her seeking a Christian meaning. The Time (June 6, 1955) review of O’Connor’s collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, is an example of such a literary viewpoint. The reviewer applauded the “witheringly sarcastic stories” that came from the “talented Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike.” He also approved her instruments in slashing through the buckthorn hedges to make the South simper, storm, and snivel, namely, “brutal irony, a slam-bang humor and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence.”[1] The reviewer believed, however, that O’Connor exhibited a signature flaw in groping for higher meaning in “The Displaced Person.”

Only in her longest story, “The Displaced Person,” does Ferocious Flannery weaken her wallop by groping about for a symbolic second-story meaning—in this case, something about salvation. But despite such arty fumbling, which also marred Author O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (Time, June 9, 1952), this is still a powerful and moving tale of an innocent Pole who stumbles against the South’s color bar.[2]

Robert Fitzgerald took offense to the notion expressed in the Time review that “The Displaced Person” represented an example of authoritorial groping on O’Connor’s part.[3] Fitzgerald surmised that the reviewer was aware of a meaning that eluded him, and perhaps because it eluded him he had hard words for it, “‘symbolic,” “second-story,” and “something about salvation.” Fitzgerald gathered from the context that the “arty fumbling” the review had in mind was the Age of Criticism lament of fiction writers giving to the dramatis personae of their stories representative weight as “symbols” or “archetypes.” Fitzgerald agreed that such writing can be distracting and referred to Henry James in an O’Connor-like way. “The first, last, and best criterion for the worth of a work of fiction is probably James’s: the amount of felt life it contains. On the other hand, there is no denying representative value to figures in a story if in fact they have it, if they come by it honestly.”[4]

Fitzgerald believed that “The Displaced Person” was not only well-achieved in coming to its meaning honestly, but also that the reviewer had misidentified its protagonist. The protagonist is not Mr. Guizac, the Pole, but the giant wife of the countryside, first personified by Mrs. Shortley, but more fully personified by Mrs. McIntyre. Trying to preserve life in the South, Mrs. McIntyre practices countryside religion, which has no regard for the unseen, “true country,” and consequently, little or no regard for others.

Five years before Fitzgerald’s defense, O’Connor explained her literary usage of “country” and “true country” in response to an editorial in Life magazine about post-war American fiction writers. The editorial argued that the United States as a post-war nation enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity. A nearly classless society had emerged, and yet novelists were not representing the country fairly as the redeeming quality of spiritual purpose in American life was missing in fiction.

O’Connor stated that from the standpoint of a fiction writer with Christian concerns, she had an interest at least equal to that of Life editors in “the redeeming quality of spiritual purpose.” The question to her was what a writer was going to take his “country” to be? The word “country” suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to the peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, on to and through and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute.[5] She added that in any other form of writing but fiction one would perhaps write “countries” in laying out the contrast of this world with the world to come, but the peculiar burden of the fiction writer is to write concretely about life in his region. Such observation demands that the writer who emphasizes spiritual values not cover up sin and its consequences. For O’Connor, the reality that the United States was the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world did not matter in any positive sense. “The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.” [6]

The Peacock

The story opens (and closes) with the peacock. Instead of being an incidental detail of farm life, the peacock signals the story’s perspective, the contrast between that which is seen and temporal and that which is unseen and eternal.

The peacock was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other, they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything. She ignored the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder and cast her gaze down the red clay road that turned off from the highway. . . . The peacock stopped just behind her, his tail—glittering green-gold and blue in the sunlight—lifted just enough so that it would not touch the ground. It flowed out on either side like a floating train and his head on the long blue reed-like neck was drawn back as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one else could see.[7]

The sun, as it is in almost every O’Connor story, is an anagogical signal of God and his divine transcendence that oversees the creation. The sun-basking peacock, his regal blue neck and head drawn back “as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one else could see,” represents the reality of the unseen heavenly realm intruding into the present life. Mrs. Shortley is not heavenly minded. Her purpose is standing on the earth. She plants her feet and ignores “the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder.”[8]

Mrs. Shortley

From her high place, Mrs. Shortley is watching for the arrival of the Guizacs. The first thing that struck Mrs. Shortley about these WWII European refugees as peculiar, almost sinister, was that they looked like other people. Mrs. McIntyre, the owner of the farm, held out her hand to greet Mr. Guizac, and to Mrs. Shortley’s horror, he kissed it. The act shocks Mrs. Shortley, who “jerked her own hand up toward her mouth and then after a second brought it down and rubbed it vigorously on her seat.”[9]

In the days leading up the Guizacs’s arrival, Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre together nicknamed them the Gooblehooks. What becomes apparent in the story is that Mr. Guizac and his family have swallowed the hook of the gospel.[10] Even though Mrs. Shortley’s son was in Bible school and planned to start a church—“he had a sweet voice for hymns and could sell anything”—she believed that “religion was essential for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it. For people like herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing the opportunity to sing.”[11]

The priest who drove the Guizacs to the farm notices the peacock. “The peacock stood still as if he had just come down from some sun-drenched height to be a vision for them all. The priest’s homely red face hung over him, growing with pleasure.”[12] Mrs. McIntyre raised her eyebrows and exchanged a look with Mrs. Shortley that silently communicated that the priest was in his second childhood. The two women consider the peacock nothing more than a peafowl or peachicken, another mouth to feed.

After the priest leaves, Mrs. Shortley approaches elderly Astor and young Sulk, who together had been secretly watching. She tells them these people were Displaced Persons, that there was no place for them to go. She also warns the two Negros that she heard Mrs. McIntyre say that this was going to put the fear of the Lord in them.

O’Connor then resets the contrast between Mrs. Shortley and the peacock by showing them together again. The peacock had jumped in a tree in front of Mrs. Shortley. His tail, gold in one second’s light and salmon colored in the next, might have been a map of the universe, but Mrs. Shortley does not notice it any more than she does the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree. The reason why Mrs. Shortley does not notice is that she was having an inner vision. In her vision, displaced people, ten million billion, were pushing their way into the land. She was God’s appointed messenger to those already on the land that they would need to find another place.

Mrs. McIntyre, however, sees Mr. Guizac differently. After his being on the farm a short time, she tells Mrs. Shortley, “At last I’m saved!” She gushed, “That man there,” and she pointed to where the Displaced Person had disappeared, “—he has to work! He wants to work! . . . That man is my salvation![13]

Mrs. Shortley looked straight ahead as if her vision penetrated the cane and the hill and pierced through to the other side and said slowly, “I would suspicion salvation got from the devil.”[14] Mr. Guizac represents a place that she cannot comprehend, Europe, that realm of the “devil’s experimental station,” where the bodies of dead naked people are piled in a heap.

In order to stop the Pole’s evil plans, Mrs. Shortley starts reading the Bible. “She saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she had a special part in the plan because she was strong.”[15] She also grows weary of the priest’s visits, annoyed with his foolish obsession with the peacock and outraged at “his planting the Displaced Person, the Whore of Babylon, in the midst of the righteous!”[16]

Mrs. Shortley was in the pasture when she had her vision. A voice said to her, “Prophesy!”[17] When she opened her eyes, “the sky was full of white fish carried lazily on their sides by some invisible current and pieces of the sun, submerged some distance beyond them, appeared from time to time as if they were being washed in the opposite direction.”[18]

Spying on Mrs. McIntyre and the priest, she overhears Mrs. McIntyre saying that she plans to give Mr. Shortley notice so that she can give Mr. Guizac the raise he deserves. Mrs. Shortley plops down on an open sack of feed so hard that dust clouds up around her. She stomps away with a volcanic red face and tells her husband, “You ain’t waiting to be fired!”[19]

A dark yellow sun was beginning to rise as the car loaded with the Shortleys and their possessions moved away like an overfreighted leaking ark.[20] Her daughters ask, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” Mrs. Shortley’s heated face makes it appear as if she was preparing for a final assault, but she suffers a fatal heart attack. Her daughters are unaware of what has happened and continue to ask, “Where we goin, Ma?” Mrs. Shortley’s eyes, closed in her visions, are now opened and “seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country.”[21]

Mrs. McIntyre

After Mrs. Shortley’s death, Mrs. McIntyre emerges as a new prophet of the countryside. Property, possessions, and money, along with what others think about her, define Mrs. McIntyre’s religion.[22] Mrs. McIntyre believes that through Mr. Guizac’s work she finally was going to have the profit margin she deserved, which turns her thoughts back to her first husband, the Judge.

Wearing her broad-brimmed, black straw hat that blocked out the sun, she repeats the Judge’s cliché, “Money is the root of all evil,” to Astor. Astor, standing half in the sunlight and half out, prophetically recalls another cliché, “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don’t.”[23]

The three years that they were married were her happiest, even though when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt. “It was as if as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take everything with him.”[24] She had buried him on the farm so that he would always be at home, the grinning deity of the countryside.

Pinching herself about the miracle of the Displaced Person (D.P.), she sees Sulk and Mr. Guizac looking together at something. She intercepts Sulk and has him turn over the picture of a blond-haired young girl. Mr. Guizac had promised Sulk his cousin’s hand in marriage if Sulk paid half the cost to transport her from a refugee camp to America.

In Mrs. McIntyre’s countryside-religionist eyes, Mr. Guizac could not have done anything worse, he does not understand the outrage. “From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die. She wait in camp.” Mrs. McIntyre does not care about the girl’s plight. “I can’t understand how a man who calls himself a Christian,” she said, “could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that.” The D.P. wants what is best for his cousin and for Sulk, but Mrs. McIntyre will have nothing of it. She declares, “This is my place . . . I am not responsible for the world’s misery.”[25]

At night, Mrs. McIntyre climbs to the top of the slope and stands with her arms folded as she looks over the land as Mrs. Shortley previously had done. She narrows her gaze around Mr. Guizac on the tractor, as if she had been watching him through a gunsight. She watches him mow everything until there remained in the center, raised like a little island, the graveyard where the Judge lay grinning.

During the priest’s next visit, Mrs. McIntyre informs him that the Pole does not fit in and needs to go. The priest replies that if she casts him out, he has nowhere to go. She refuses to change her mind, but the priest’s attention had turned to the tiers of small pregnant suns that floated in a green-gold haze over the peacock’s head. “‘Christ will come like that!’ he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there gaping.”[26] Mrs. McIntyre's face reddened. Mention of Christ in conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “The priest didn’t seem to notice her. His attention was on the peacock in all its glory. ‘The Transfiguration,’ he murmured. Mrs. McIntyre has no idea what he was muttering about.” [27] She was talking about that which was practical, that she had to release Mr. Guizac. The priest, smiling absently, said, “He came to redeem us,” shook her hand and left.[28]

Mr. Shortley returns to the farm and tells Mrs. McIntyre that Mrs. Shortley has died, but not before expressing her belief that Mr. Guizac was the devil. Mrs. McIntyre proceeds to hire Mr. Shortley back, but O’Connor makes clear that Mrs. McIntyre should be able to recognize who the devil is. When Mrs. McIntyre is looking for Mr. Guizac in the barn, she notices Mr. Shortley with his “long beak-nosed shadow glide like a snake halfway up the sunlit open door” and stop.[29] Mr. Shortley, for his part, knows “there was nothing for him to do now but wait on the hand of God to strike, but he knew one thing: he was not going to wait with his mouth shut.” Every person that he encountered, black or white, would hear his complaint about what was happening on Mrs. McIntyre’s farm.

Still, Mrs. McIntyre struggles with firing the D.P. She desires the priest’s blessing to do so, but when they would sit on the porch, his choice of topic was Jesus. “For,” he was saying, as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday in town, “when God sent his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord”—he slightly bowed his head—"as a Redeemer to mankind, He . . .”. Mrs. McIntyre cut him off in mid-sentence and barked, “I want to talk to you about something serious!” She glared at him fiercely and announced that as far as she was concerned, “Christ was just another D.P.”[30]

The next morning the countryside seemed to be receding from what was happening around the shed where Mr. Guizac was lying under a small tractor, with Sulk standing by with some tools to hand to him. Mrs. McIntyre, wearing a black hat to keep the sun out of her eyes, looks at Mr. Guizac but says nothing. “Of all the things she resented about him, she resented most that he hadn’t left of his own accord.”[31]

At the same time, Mr. Shortley backs the large tractor out of the shed, brakes the tractor on the incline, and jumps off. Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and Sulk hear the break slip. Frozen in collusion, the three sets of eyes come together. They do nothing and say nothing as the tractor wheel rolls over Mr. Guizac and breaks his back.

The tractor crushing Mr. Guizac is the cross-like event by which Mrs. McIntyre realizes her culpability. She faints when it happens, and when she awakes, she sees Mr. Guizac’s body and others around him. “She was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.”[32]

Mr. Shortley leaves that evening without giving his notice. Sulk leaves also as he wanted to see more of the world. Astor also departs as he felt that he was too old to continue on the farm on his own.[33] Mute and infirmed, Mrs. McIntyre loses the farm, but every week Father Flynn visited. “He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of the bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.”[34]

O’Connor’s Commentary

O’Connor stated, regarding the ending, that “the displaced person did accomplish a kind of redemption in that he destroyed the place, which was evil, and set Mrs. McIntyre on the road to a new kind of suffering.”[35] If Mrs. McIntyre, now helpless to herself, is to be displaced to the true country, it must be through that which she previously rejected, the priest as God’s mouthpiece.

O’Connor also elaborated on the importance of the peacock. “As to the peacock, he was there because peacocks might be found properly on such a place but you can’t have a peacock anywhere without having a map of the universe.”[1] “The priest,” she continued, “sees the peacock as standing for the Transfiguration, for which it certainly is a most beautiful symbol. It also stands in medieval symbology for the Church—the eyes are the eyes of the Church.”[36]

Fitzgerald’s Conclusion

Robert Fitzgerald maintained that although there was much that the Time reviewer did not see in the story, the reviewer especially did not see the significance of O’Connor’s handling of the peacock. Fitzgerald asked, “I wonder if the handling of the peacock can justly be called arty. An unpredictable splendor, a map of the universe, doted on by the priest, barely seen by everyone else: this is a metaphor, surely, for God’s order and grace. Is it arbitrary and imposed?”[37]

Fitzgerald agreed with the reviewer that the story is a powerful and moving tale, but its message is that the people of the South are displaced, not just the Pole. It is a religious condition common to all. The fantasy in the story belonged to the self-sufficient pragmatism of Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre, the two giants of the countryside. Mrs. Shortley only saw the frontiers of the true country at her death, but Mrs. McIntyre, clearheaded and hard beset, is the worthy protagonist of the tragic action. “Being what she is, she must reject not only the salvation offered, in terms of farm work, by the Pole, but that other salvation that she finds so exasperating to hear of from the priest.” Fitzgerald concluded, “It is an ambitious and responsible work of fiction, and there is no fumbling about it.”[38]

Endnotes

[1] “Such Nice People,” review of Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories, Time (June 6, 1955): 114.

[2] “Such Nice People,” 114.

[3] Robert Fitzgerald, “The Countryside and the True Country,” Sewanee Review, vol. 70, no. 3 (Summer, 1962).

[4] Fitzgerald, “The Countryside and the True Country,” 380.

[5] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 27.

[6] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 26.

[7] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday Press, 1995), 194.

[8] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 194 (Emphasis added).

[9] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 195.

[10] Damien Ference, Understanding the Hillybilly Thomist (Word on Fire, 2023), 226.

[11] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 203.

[12] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 198. The allusion is to the shining face of Moses after his Mount Sinai encounter with God in Exodus 34.

[13] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 203.

[14] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 203.

[15] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 209.

[16] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 209.

[17] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 210.

[18] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 210.

[19] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 212.

[20] See, Ference, Hillbilly Thomist, 230. The overloaded car—“They tied two iron beds to the top of the car and the two rocking chairs inside the beds and rolled the two mattresses up between the rocking chairs. On top of this they tied a crate of chickens”—shows their prioritizing of material possessions and their lack of attention to spiritual ones.

[21] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 214.

[22] Carter W. Martin, The True Country (Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 32.

[23] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 217.

[24] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 218.

[25] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 224.

[26] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 226.

[27] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 226.

[28] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 226.

[29] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 231.

[30] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 229.

[31] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 234.

[32] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 235.

[33] Martin, True Country, 93–95. Carter Martin observes that Astor is the one character not linked with the guilt of Mr. Guizac’s death. Two instances of symbolism indicate Astor’s significance to the religious theme of the story. First, Astor occasionally spoke with the peacock, and the peacock in turn “would follow him around the place, his steady eye on the ear of corn that stuck up from the old man’s back pocket or he would sit near him and pick himself” (217). Second, in the barn when he is with Mrs. McIntyre, “Bars of sunlight fell from the cracked ceiling across his back and cut him into three distinct parts” (234).

[34] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 235.

[35] O’Connor to “A,” November 25, 1955, Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 118.

[36] O’Connor to “A,” November 25, 1955, Habit of Being, 118.

[37] Fitzgerald, “The Countryside and True Country,” 388.

[38] Fitzgerald, “The Countryside and True Country,” 394.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, October, 2025.