SOURCE: Snow, Ollye Tine. “The Functional Gothic of Flannery O'Connor.” Southwest Review 50, no. 3 (summer 1965): 286-99.

In the following essay, Snow discusses O'Connor's use of eighteenth-century gothic devices to convey the idea that humans can overcome adversity only if they obey Divine authority.

With the recent posthumous publication of Flannery O'Connor's collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge,¹ readers are impressed again with the “terrible swift sword” that cuts away at man's sin. Again in these stories as in her other collection and in her two novels, the grotesqueries of man's defiant, sometimes stupid disobedience of God carry the theme. These grotesqueries very obviously, sometimes ironically, function on the basis of biblical prototypes and images—for example, the prophecy in “Parker's Back” of Obadiah E. Parker meets as bitter and as stubborn resistance as was Edom's enmity to Israel; the Holy Ghost's descending as a dove, or...