Earlier this year, Loyola University Maryland removed the name of author Flannery O'Connor from a residence hall, making her in effect a displaced person. I mention that because I recently read her story "The Displaced Person" for a literary seminar and will have a couple of things to say about it.
O'Conner, a Catholic who died in 1964 at age 39, repeatedly used the word "nigger" in her stories set in the South because that's how the characters she was writing about often referred to Black people back then. But that is not what purists in the age of Back Lives Matter/Cancel Culture have found to be the subject of concern. Rather, some comments she made to friends in personal correspondence that has become public have been deemed to show that she was a racist.
In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One only need to read the arts pages of the New York Times in the current times to see how that works. To my knowledge, there has been no outcry against O'Connor's published novels, stories and essays. Falling into the now highly unpopular genre of literary fiction, they are not what one would call "page turners" and perhaps are now not widely read.
But on to "The Displaced Person," a story set in the American South in the wake of World War II that was first published in 1955. It centers on two women: Mrs. McIntyre, an older widow who runs a farm, and Mrs. Shortley, who, with her husband, works for Mrs. McIntyre as do two Black men.
The displaced person is a Pole who, with his wife and two children, have been, through the offices of a local Catholic priest, placed with Mrs. McIntyre who has apparently sought to have them on the view the man may be a better worker, and less expensive, than the help she has been able to hire locally. This is cloaked in humanitarian considerations, leaving Mrs. McIntyre somewhat confused about her own sentiments.
But readers are introduced to the situation first and foremost through the eyes of Mrs. Shortley and what she sees corresponds to prevailing currents, and especially since Donald Trump ran for President on an anti-immigrant platform. Although there is some rather nobleness-oblige-type sympathy for those trying to flee horrible circumstances abroad, and some thought that immigrants can be useful (especially in high-tech and agriculture at present), they are "not us" and if not a potential drain on government resources, a threat to the employment and wage levels of existing Americans. They are also viewed as source of cultural and social disruption and even an outright threat of one sort or other -- potential terrorists if they come from certain countries or subscribe to certain religious beliefs, or "rapists," drug dealers, etc, if they arrive from elsewhere.
And sure enough, the displaced Pole, despite or perhaps because of his admirable work ethic, is soon viewed as a threat, even by Mrs. McIntyre. It's a good read.
Flannery O'Conner is generally identified as a member of the "Southern Gothic" school of fiction and one characteristic of that style of storytelling is the employment of grotesque characters or situations to shed light on the human condition by, in effect, amplifying certain of it's characteristics.
In "The Displaced Person," the grotesque appears most notably in the sexuality of the two women mentioned above. This is most explicit with respect to Mrs. Shortley, clearly not a particularly attractive women. "She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything."
What gets Mrs. Shortley's sexual juices flowing?
One day, in the story, she encounters her husband smoking a cigarette in the cow barn, which, she warns him, he shouldn't be doing. "There was about a half an inch of cigarette adhering to the center of his lower lip. ... Mr. Shortley, without appearing to give the feat any consideration, lifted the cigarette butt with the sharp end of his tongue, drew it into his mouth, closed his lips tightly, rose, stepped out, gave his wife a good appreciative stare, and spit the smoldering butt into the grass. ... This trick of Mr. Shortley's was actually has way of making love to her."
This stunt, it turns out, was the manner in which Mr. Shortley had courted his wife. He didn't give her anything pretty, but sat on her porch steps smoking. "When the cigarette got to the proper size, he would turn his eyes to her and open his mouth and draw in the butt and then sit there as if he had swallowed it, looking at her with the most loving look anybody could imagine."
"It nearly drove her wild."
What about Mrs. McIntyre? When she was 30, she married a 75-year-old man after working as his secretary for a few months "because of his money, but there had been another reason she would not admit then, even to herself: she had liked him."
Known as "the Judge," what was he like?
"He was a dirty, snuff-dipping Court House figure ... His teeth and hair were tobacco colored and his face a clay pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks as if he had been unearthed amid fossils. There had been a peculiar odor about him of sweaty folded bills ..."
"The three years that he lived after they had married were the happiest and most prosperous of her life, but when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt." Despite having married him in part for his money and getting left with nothing but a mortgaged house and 50 acres from which the timber had been cut, Mrs. McIntyre had buried the judge on the property and preserved his home office untouched through two subsequent marriages, one to an alcoholic and the other to a man who ended up in a mental institution. She didn't hold it against him. Other considerations had evidently been more important.
While O'Connor provides no details of Mrs. McIntyre's sex life, one can easily imagine that what turned her on was equally grotesque to that of what stimulated Mrs. Shortley and perhaps that is one reason that of all her hired help over the years, Ms. Shortley was the person Mrs. McIntyre got along with best.
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