SOURCE: Babinec, Lisa S. “Cyclical Patterns of Domination and Manipulation in Flannery O'Connor's Mother-Daughter Relationships.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 19 (1990): 9-29.

In the following essay, Babinec examines mother-daughter relationships in O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective.

Flannery O'Connor's fiction is witty, grotesque, and entertaining, and, at the same time, complex, ambiguous, and undefinable. Since her death in 1964, many scholars have attempted to analyze O'Connor's fiction in a variety of ways; specifically, they have focused on the representation of Christian values and the issue of grace and redemption, psychological and biographical interpretations, formal textual analysis, and her work's relation to the Southern literary tradition. However, with the exception of Louise Westling's Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, no one has studied issues of mother-daughter relationships from a feminist perspective. Those scholars who do briefly mention mother-child bonds in O'Connor's work usually go no further than to assert that her fictional family ties...