SOURCE: Kahane, Claire. “The Maternal Legacy: The Grotesque Tradition in Flannery O'Connor's Female Gothic.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor, pp. 242-56. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Kahane writes that O'Connor's female characters, using the techniques of gothic fiction, profoundly articulate their sense of helplessness within and revolt against established cultural order.

Gothic fiction has received a good deal of critical attention in the last decade, and much of it from psychoanalytic critics, who find its easy display of fantasy in the service of fear congenial to their analyses. For the most part, these critics employ oedipal interpretive paradigms to account for the affective power of the Gothic genre. Concentrating primarily on the incestuous desires of male protagonists, they typically interpret Gothic fiction “in the light of male psychology,” as at least two unabashedly admit. “The Gothic genre,” write Morton Kaplan and Robert...