The Torture Box: A Critical Look at Flannery O’Connor and Her Disproportionate Retributions

In a word cloud of writing about Flannery O’Connor’s stories, “grotesque” would be central, medium-large. The word is typically applied to the characters in her stories, whose spiritual deformities are often represented—in problematic authorial shorthand—by some kind of physical deformity. Hulga, in “Good Country People,” is archetypal, missing both a leg and the religious faith of her mother. Or Rufus, in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” with a clubfoot (she was big on legs and feet) that represents his essentially twisted nature. But the dictionary definition of grotesque, “comically or repulsively ugly or distorted,” also speaks to an essential quality of O’Connor’s work. Her stories are morally distorted, and the effect is both ugly and comic.

In the denouement of her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit, an escaped convict, has his henchmen systematically march