SOURCE: Beringer, Cindy. “‘I Have Not Wallowed’: Flannery O'Connor's Working Mothers.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Salle Wolff, pp. 124-41. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Beringer elucidates the mother-child relationship in three O'Connor short stories: “The Enduring Chill,” “Greenleaf,” and “Good Country People.”

The distinctive characters of Flannery O'Connor's stories are drawn masterfully from the red clay of southern agrarian life. The author blends humor, irony, and satire to create characters whose lives are thwarted and misguided. They believe they have progressed along the path of success, yet eventually most come to realize, albeit too late, that their actions have not led to personal fulfillment. The families in her stories exist in a grotesque state of permanent hostility, and any offspring exhibit such a lack of civilizing influence that O'Connor elicits little emotion...