SOURCE: Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 33, no. 1 (fall 2000): 1-26.

In the following essay, Schaum examines the archetype of the trickster in O'Connor's short fiction and argues that she provides, through this archetype, a multi-faceted caricature of Lucifer.

“A dimension taken away is one thing; a dimension added is another.”

—Flannery O'Connor,“The Fiction Writer and His Country”

“The origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures,” writes cultural historian Lewis Hyde, “require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that culture is based on” (9). In his excellent study Trickster Makes This World (1998), Hyde joins a long and distinguished line of critics examining the archetypal trickster-figure in world mythologies: a figure of mischievous disruption characterized by rule-breaking, lies, theft, shape-shifting, and wordplay; a citizen of contingencies and thresholds who, while subverting and...