{"id":170248,"date":"2025-03-25T10:30:44","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T14:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170248"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:20:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:20:20","slug":"happy-hundredth-birthday-flannery-oconnor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/25\/happy-hundredth-birthday-flannery-oconnor\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O’Connor!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Blair Hobbs, Birthday Cake For Flannery<\/em>, 2025, mixed media on canvas board, 30 x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

A painting in Blair Hobbs\u2019s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O\u2019Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She\u2019s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery<\/em>. The number 100 sits atop the frosting, each digit lit with an orange paper flame\u2014marking O\u2019Connor\u2019s hundredth birthday, today, March 25. Glitter and sequins, gold thread and fabric scraps everywhere.<\/p>\n

The image is candy to my eyes. I grew up in a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestant church\u2014think Baptist but with a cappella singing. Violence and grace, sin and redemption, idolatry and judgment: When I read O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories for the first time, in high school, I recognized her religious concerns as my own. Fifteen years later I moved to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where O\u2019Connor\u2019s Southern milieu\u2014backwoods prophets, religious zealots, barely concealed racism and classism\u2014was my literal backyard. I raised chickens in homage to her, then repurposed the coop as my writing studio, where I drafted a collection of stories wrestling with Christianity and sexuality in the American South.<\/p>\n

Hobbs, who lives in Mississippi, has been making collage art since she retired from teaching at the University of Mississippi. Her first show, Radiant Matter<\/em>, was an exploration of the ways her body underwent transformation during treatment for breast cancer. Birthday Cake for Flannery<\/em> is her second series of collage paintings. Last month I drove from my current home in Chattanooga to Atlanta to see the seventeen paintings in the show. They weren\u2019t installed yet, but Spalding Nix, who owns the gallery, and Jamie Bourgeois, the gallery director, hosted me for a preview.<\/p>\n

Jamie unwrapped the paintings one by one. Every canvas\u2014plus one creepy little sculpture wrapped in illuminated wire and encased in a thumbtack-lined shadowbox, meant to evoke the \u201cmummified Jesus\u201d in O\u2019Connor\u2019s novel Wise Blood<\/em>\u2014is an exuberant explosion of color and found materials illustrating O\u2019Connor\u2019s best-known stories: \u201cRevelation,\u201d \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d \u201cThe Displaced Person,\u201d \u201cA Temple Of The Holy Ghost,\u201d \u201cParker\u2019s Back,\u201d and \u201cGood Country People.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

“<\/em><\/span>Give Her Leg Back,\u201d from \u201cGood Country People<\/span><\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/em>,<\/span> 2025, <\/span>mixed media on canvas board, <\/span>20 x 16″.<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Hobbs draws her characters in graphite and ink and fills them in with paint and colored pencil. She cuts them out and glues or sews them onto painted canvas. And then comes the bling. \u201cO\u2019Connor often writes the sun and sky,\u201d Hobbs writes in her artist statement, \u201cso I wanted the pieces in this show to have an extra dose of shine.\u201d The collages shimmer and sparkle as if backlit: broken Christmas ornaments, rhinestones, bronze dust, gold leaf, metallic tape, silver duct tape. Hobbs also uses embroidery thread, mulberry paper, burlap, tacky plastic placemats, even candy wrappers and paper dolls. Handwritten quotations from O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories and letters are glued onto the final images, a nod to the word art integral to Southern \u201coutsider\u201d artists such as Howard Finster, Nellie Mae Rowe, and William Thomas Thompson.<\/p>\n

There is, for the viewer, an I-spy delight of discovery: the better you know O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories, the more you see in each piece. Here\u2019s young O. E. Parker from \u201cParker\u2019s Back,\u201d who was \u201cheavy and earnest, as ordinary as a loaf of bread.\u201d In Hobbs\u2019s rendering, Parker\u2019s head is an actual loaf of bread wrapped in plastic, with the words Yeasty Boy<\/em> pasted above him. A second painting shows the adult Parker with Jesus\u2019s face tattooed on his back, stitched through with gold thread and sequins. The letters G<\/em>, O<\/em>, and D<\/em> surround Jesus’s head.<\/p>\n

\"\"

\u201cYou\u2019re a Walking Panner Rammer,\u201d from \u201cParker\u2019s Back\u201d<\/em>, 2025, mixed media on canvas board, 40 x 30″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Two canvases are based on what is arguably O\u2019Connor\u2019s best-known story, \u201cA Good Man is Hard to Find.\u201d The first depicts the young \u201ccabbage-faced\u201d mother, her head a literal cabbage, thickly veined. Pieces of broken glass, red, surround her body\u2014reminiscent of the family\u2019s car wreck (and the ensuing bloodshed in the woods). A charcoal revolver the size of the mother\u2019s torso is pointed at her head. To her right is her daughter, June Star, a vintage paper doll covered with the words June speaks as the Misfit\u2019s crony leads her into the woods: \u201cI don\u2019t want to hold hands with him, he reminds me of a pig.\u201d In the other \u201cGood Man\u201d painting we see the grandmother\u2019s cat, Pitty Sing; \u201cBailey Boy\u201d in his yellow shirt with blue parrots; the grandmother in her sailor hat with white violets on the brim; and the monkey in the chinaberry tree. Above these characters is the cut-out title The Misfit<\/em>. The criminal himself is absent. This omission produces the same vertiginous dread the reader feels on page one. The Misfit is everywhere and nowhere\u2014until he shows up.<\/p>\n

My favorite image is from the carnival scene in \u201cA Temple of the Holy Ghost,\u201d in which an androgynous human with a mustache lifts their dress to reveal the word IT<\/em> covering the crotch. \u201cIt was a man and woman both,\u201d Susan explains to her younger cousin. Above this figure, an open-mouthed rabbit spews forth six babies, evoking the child\u2019s claim to have seen \u201ca rabbit have rabbits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whimsy, humor, glee: these were the words that came to mind, on first viewing. But the glitz and wit are a ruse, belying the deep suffering and darkness beneath the surface.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Mary Flannery was born on the Feast of the Annunciation, the day marking the angel Gabriel\u2019s announcement that Mary would bear the Christ child. O\u2019Connor\u2019s Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina, bracketed this festal birth by having her baptized on Easter Sunday, three weeks later. Each time I\u2019ve visited O\u2019Connor\u2019s childhood home in Savannah, I\u2019ve been moved by the Kiddie-Koop crib beneath the window in Regina\u2019s bedroom, facing the twin green spires of Saint John the Baptist, the O\u2019Connors\u2019 church. The \u201ccrib\u201d is a rectangular box with screens enclosing the four sides and the top. The cagelike design\u2014a chicken coop for babies, really\u2014was meant to allow mothers to leave children unattended. \u201cDanger or Safety\u2014Which?\u201d one Kiddie-Koop advertisement read.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help picturing O\u2019Connor as a toddler growing up \u201cin the shadow of the church,\u201d literally and figuratively, standing in the Koop and peering through a double scrim of screen and windowpanes. When her eyesight failed, she began wearing thick corrective lenses\u2014another layer of remove. And when she contracted the lupus that killed her father, her body itself became a kind of cage. \u201cThe wolf, I\u2019m afraid, is inside tearing up the place,\u201d she wrote to her friend Sister Mariella Gable one month before her passing at the age of thirty-nine.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no one like O\u2019Connor for writing the body. With Dickensian specificity (\u201cI have a secret desire to rival Charles Dickens upon the stage,\u201d she confided to a friend) she renders her characters visible<\/em>, incarnate both physically and metaphorically. For O\u2019Connor, if we are collectively the body of Christ, every human is implicitly the site of both suffering and transformation.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor also maintained a firm belief in the Eucharist as analogic: a place where the material and immaterial, time and eternity, merged. \u201cIf [the Eucharist is] a symbol, to hell with it,\u201d she famously said. A devout reader of Thomas Aquinas, O\u2019Connor would say that this way of seeing was \u201csacramental\u201d: often in her fiction, signifier and signified become one.<\/p>\n

This sacramental vision infuses Hobbs\u2019s work as well. The mother\u2019s face isn\u2019t just cabbage-like<\/em>, it\u2019s an actual cabbage. Mrs. Turpin in Hobbs\u2019s \u201cRevelation\u201d series isn\u2019t hog-like<\/em> but a warthog with a human face.<\/p>\n

\"\"

\u201cLook Like I Can\u2019t Get Nothing Down Them Two but Co\u2019Cola & Candy,\u201d from \u201cRevelation\u201d<\/span><\/em>, 2025, <\/span>mixed media on canvas board, <\/span>30 x 24″.<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The body as the locus of suffering and transformation was also the driving idea behind Hobbs\u2019s Radiant Matter<\/em> exhibition. \u201cI had nineteen radiation treatments for breast cancer,\u201d she writes. \u201cI researched Marie Curie and her discovery of polonium and radium. I\u2019m interested in nature\u2019s repetition, and I saw that radiant ribcages look like fern leaves.\u201d One painting in Radiant Matter<\/em> features Hobbs as Curie. She\u2019s holding a book where the only legible words are \u201cEven Marie Curie\u2019s cookbooks are under lock and key because of radiation.\u201d A foil halo surrounds her face; the nuclear symbol is emblazoned on her skirt. Her glow-in-the-dark ribs, exposed within her black torso, are iterations of the ferns at her feet.<\/p>\n

Hobbs, a native Alabamian, was introduced to O\u2019Connor her freshman year at Auburn. She initially tried to fit into the culture, playing the good girl, attending church, and even donning the Minnie Mouse dress her sorority required. \u201cEvangelical hypocrisy was afoot and self-loathing bloomed inside me,\u201d she says. She ended up hospitalized for clinical depression. She began to read O\u2019Connor\u2019s fiction and was moved by \u201cRevelation,\u201d in which Mary Grace flings her human development textbook at the racist (and ableist) Mrs. Turpin. \u201cGo back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,\u201d Mary Grace says before she\u2019s carted away, presumably to an asylum. For Hobbs, the revelation was in self-recognition. Like Mary Grace, she was seething with rage, but not because she was sick or insane. She was only exhausted by the hypocrisy all around her.<\/p>\n

This was 1984, and Hobbs had recently purchased R.E.M.\u2019s second album, Reckoning<\/em>. The album cover featured one of Howard Finster\u2019s paintings. Hobbs realized that O\u2019Connor\u2019s and Finster\u2019s work were of a piece. Hobbs would go on to study poetry and spend her career teaching creative writing at the University of Mississippi, retiring after receiving the cancer diagnosis\u2014which marked the beginning of her career as a visual artist.<\/p>\n

\"\"

My Revelation: Reading Flannery O\u2019Connor for the First Time<\/em>, 2025, <\/span>mixed media on canvas board, <\/span>16 x 12″.<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The final piece Jamie Bourgeois unveiled gave me pause. I couldn\u2019t immediately identify its connection to any of O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories. It features the head of a young woman with hearts on her cheeks. The hearts are attached to strings that attempt, unsuccessfully, to tug the corners of the young woman\u2019s mouth into a smile. Monarch butterfly wings emerge from the sides of her face; she wears a crucifix around her neck and a polka-dot Minnie Mouse bow atop her head.<\/p>\n

Around the edges of the canvas, in small print, are the only words in the show not written by O\u2019Connor. They are signed and dated: “Blair Hobbs, 1983.”<\/p>\n

\n

In college I was Joy Hulga dressed as a sorority\u2019s Mini Mouse. Like Flannery I watched Night and Fog<\/em> and saw everyone I met was a confused lunatic rumbling toward heaven but thwarted by gas chambers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jamie Quatro\u00a0<\/span><\/em>is the author of\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Fire Sermon, <\/i>I\u00a0Want to Show You More, and\u00a0<\/i>Two-Step Devil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The glitz and wit are a ruse, belying the deep suffering and darkness beneath the surface.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHappy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O'Connor! by Jamie Quatro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 25, 2025 \u2013 "The glitz and wit are a ruse, belying the deep suffering and darkness beneath the surface."\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/25\/happy-hundredth-birthday-flannery-oconnor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O'Connor! 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