Tea at Trianon: Self-Portrait of Flannery O'Connor

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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.)