SOURCE: Brewer, Nadine. “Christ, Satan, and Southern Protestantism in O'Connor's Fiction.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 14 (1985): 103-11.

In the following essay, Brewer asserts that O'Connor's use of Christ and Satan symbolism in her work proves her thorough understanding of Southern Protestantism.

In her introduction to Sister Kathleen Feeley's book on Flannery O'Connor, Caroline Gordon reports that O'Connor once remarked “she could wait fifty, indeed a hundred, years to have one of her stories read right.” Unfortunately, it is true that she has been widely misread, despite the probability that no other “Southern” writer has ever written of her own country with more perspicacity and scrupulous realism. It seems paradoxical, but it is undoubtedly her acumen and accuracy that has prompted the misreading of her fiction. The tensions, the complexities, the convolutions, indeed, the contradictions in her work form the warp and the woof of the South itself. One cannot read...