Grotesque Characterization

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the work of three modern, Southern Gothic writers. The paper reviews Eudora Welty's "The Petrified Man", Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" and William Faulkner's "Barn Burning". According to the paper, these writers deploy grotesque characters in their respective short stories as a means of conveying a message to the reader.

From the Paper:

"When a charlatan preacher named Manly Pointer takes advantage of Hulga's susceptibility towards flattery, he steals her leg and thus symbolically steals Hulga's sense of her great intellectual gifts--and her atheism, in contrast to her mother's piety. The preacher is shown to be wrong, he is not a good country person, only a thief--he says he collects artificial body parts. But even if Manly is not the man that Mrs. Freeman believed him to be, but Hulga's worldview is equally impoverished as her mother's, hence Hulga's grotesque character symbolizes something about her worldview that rejects religion. The reader is unlikely to see him or herself in Manly, or in Hulga, the way he or she might see him or herself in the excesses of love illustrated in the Welty story, but the imbalanced life led by Hulga, for all of her grotesqueness, proves instructive much like a Biblical parable. The lack of identification, though, creates more of a sense of judgment in the mind of the reader--the reader is more likely to see Hulga as lacking, or Manly as cruel, rather than to feel warmly towards and sympathize with the more human characters of "The Petrified Man." (O'Connor, 1971) "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." 1938. [2 May 2006] http://www.nku.edu/~peers/barnburning.htm
• O'Connor, Flannery. "Good Country People." A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956, reprint 1971
• Welty, Eudora. "The Petrified Man." The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: Harvest Books, first published 1941, reprint 1982.

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