Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Self-Portrait of Flannery O'Connor

From Full Stop:
It was the summer of 1953, and Flannery O’Connor had been painting.

“I am taking painting again,” she wrote at the time to friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, “but none of my paintings go over very big in this house.”

O’Connor, who was 28 years old that summer, lived in her childhood home with her mother Regina in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was already known among literary circles for her stunning and grotesque short stories, and had established herself as an up-and-coming fiction writer of national significance with the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood in 1952

But around this time, poor health forced O’Connor to return home to Milledgeville. In 1951, she was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the disease that had killed her father when she was 15 years old. Traveling became difficult for O’Connor, and she remained at home, for the most part, until she died of complications from the disease in 1964.

By the time O’Connor painted her self-portrait in 1953, lupus had already begun to take a vicious toll on her body, often leaving her swollen and in pain, and later, crippled. Critics debate the influence of O’Connor’s condition on her fiction, specifically with regards to the physical bodies of her characters, which are often deformed and distorted, if not blind or missing a limb. Physical violence and bodily discomfort permeate her written work. (Read entire post.)
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