“A Wooden Part of Her Soul”: Disability in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories

Indianapolis, IN

This essay analyzes Flannery O’Connor’s use of characters whose bodies depart from cultural rules and definitions of “normal” through the lens of disability studies. While disability studies provides a needed critique of O’Connor’s metaphorical uses of disability, an analysis of two of her short stories—“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “The Lame Shall Enter First”—and her narrative style shows that O’Connor depicts the body qua body and takes issue with the very society that oppresses and marginalizes those considered disabled. After summarizing the theory of disability studies, the article outlines O’Connor’s complex motives for using the grotesque in her fiction and observes why anomalous bodies in her fiction are often interpreted symbolically. The analysis of the two stories, however, reveals the reductive nature of these interpretations. The characters in these stories—namely, Tom Shiftlet and Rufus Johnson—challenge rather than affirm cultural views of embodiment. But because these characters are symbolic on one level, the argument is not a simple one; for example, Tom Shiftlet criticizes the medical model of disability, but there still seems to be a clear link between his lack of morality and his lack of bodily wholeness. To continue with the argument that O’Connor challenges cultural views of embodiment, the essay compares O’Connor’s narrative style with modern artists whose works defamiliarize the human body. While O’Connor, a devout Catholic, has motives differing from most modern artists, she joins them by portraying the human body as various and unpredictable, thus challenging traditional aesthetic standards.