“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Flannery O’Connor: An Ugly Route to Goodness” is the title of Molly Tompkins’ March 2025 article in Plough. I’ve thought a lot about this title and have begun to wonder if there may be any route to goodness that isn’t inherently ugly. That is, as flawed and fallen humans, more often than not, we tend to claw our way to goodness, one ugly, hard-fought grab at a time. American writer Flannery O’Connor understood the “price of restoration,” the cost of the “redemptive act.”
In her article, as Tompkins reflects upon O’Connor’s works and reviews Ethan Hawke’s 2023 film about O’Connor, Wildcat, she asks us to “confront and contemplate the nature of goodness”:
Her [O’Connor’s] short stories and novels, ever shocking by design, still ignite confrontations and conversations about what is good. She stirs a stagnant world. O’Connor’s stories unmask hypocrites and puncture the self-righteousness. The splinters in her characters’ eyes reveal the planks in our own. By swelling the familiar to spectacular and grotesque proportions, we may recognize the monstrosities in O’Connor’s stories for what they are: a mirror in which we see ourselves.
A student once accosted me before a college class, accusing me of requiring students to read an O’Connor short story that wasn’t “very nice.” I had to smile because that was an understatement, to be sure. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as Tompkins claims, begin by exposing the “splinters in her characters’ eyes” and end by convicting us of the “planks in our own.” Not very nice, indeed. To read O’Connor well—and as she intended—is a kind of self-flagellation, a necessary and salvific humiliation. The “monstrosities” we encounter in her fiction become painfully familiar as we confront ourselves through the mirror of her characters. Those characters who find a route to goodness only do so after experiencing genuine “ugliness.” Some suffer physically through illness, disability, and even death, and some suffer intellectually through humiliation and confrontation with pride and ego. All suffer spiritually, brought to their knees and called to repentance.
Take for example, the protagonist, Ruby Turpin, in O’Connor’s story, “Revelation.” Ruby is a pig farmer’s wife, a Christian woman who’s proud of her devotion and decency. As she sits in a doctor’s waiting room with her husband, Claude, she scrutinizes the others there and considers who she might’ve been if God had made her a different woman. She imagines what she might’ve said if Jesus stood before her and offered her only two options: “You can either be a nigger or white-trash.” (Though we bristle at such language today, O’Connor, a realist writing in the 1940s-60s, used the word “nigger”—spoken and written openly by her fellow Southerners—throughout her fiction.) At first, she imagines bargaining with Jesus, asking if she might wait until another choice was available. She thinks about how she would’ve struggled, pleading with Jesus until she was ultimately forced to concede that if these were the only two choices, she would’ve said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” In her imagined encounter with Jesus, Ruby is certain that he would’ve made her a “neat, clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”
Ruby’s route to goodness in this story is characteristic of O’Connor’s protagonists. As she looks condescendingly (but charitably, she convinces herself) upon those in the waiting room, she is buoyed by her gratitude that of all the things Jesus might’ve made her—“nigger or white-trash or ugly”— he “had made her herself and given her a little of everything.” Privately, she rejoices and thinks, “When I think of all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’” Just as this wave of gratitude washes over her, she’s struck in the head. A young woman from Wellesley College, Mary Grace, had been listening to Ruby prattle on about “how there’s a heap of things worse than niggers.” Insensed, she throws her book at her and strikes Ruby with such force that it knocks her out of her chair. Before she can even get up, Mary Grace is upon her, seething, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
Like other O’Connor characters, Ruby Turpin suffers her “come to Jesus” moment. Later, as she considers the encounter with the young woman in the waiting room, she wrestles with God, the Savior she’d previously thanked for her many blessings. When she stands alone in her pig lot, enraged by God’s apparent dismissal of her hard work and service to the church, she shakes her fist at him, shouting, “Who do you think you are?” Just as the sun begins to set, her answer comes in the form of a vision: a “horde of souls” making their way toward heaven, “whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” And bringing up the rear is a group of people Ruby instantly recognizes, for they’re people who, “like herself and Claude, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” Yet, even as these folk march onward, keeping up the rear respectably and in perfect time, she can see “by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
Like Tompkins, I’ve been convicted and burned by O’Connor’s fiction. Just when I’ve found myself sitting in smug judgment of characters like Ruby, whose hypocrisy and self-righteousness are unmasked, often by violent means, I’ve come to realize that I’m confronting myself. In her fiction, correspondence, and life, O’Connor, too, confronts herself, unwilling to ignore her own sins. While studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1946, the twenty-one-year-old O’Connor kept a prayer journal published decades later by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In entries like this one, she confesses her pride and ambition, the self-love that often separates her from God:
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon . . . I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
She admits that “[i]t does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming. I see my ridiculous self by degrees.” She laments that “[m]ediocrity, if that is my scourge, is something I’ll have to submit to.” And in her final entry, she confesses her shame in failing, once again, to be worthy of God’s love:
My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a shame. I don’t want an of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.
This is a woman whose route to goodness was fettered with the ugliness of disease, ambition, and sin. Stricken at 25 years with debilitating lupus, she moved into her mother’s home in Millidgeville, Georgia, when she could no longer care sufficiently for herself. There, she lived a life dependent upon her mother, far from the literary world she dreamt of inhabiting. As a devout Catholic, she wrestled with her own ambition, admitting that “I want so to love God all the way. At the same time, I want all the things that seem opposed to it—I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even.” For O’Connor, this suffering was redemptive. She came to see that she was both Ruby Turpin and Mary Grace. And she came to understand that her route to goodness, to God, was through grace alone.
I think about Flannery O’Connor often, remembering the characters who reflected some of the ugliest things about human nature, about myself. And recently, I often find myself repeating the final words from perhaps O’Connor’s most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. After having killed the Grandmother’s family, the Misfit, a criminal, ultimately shoots her, too. Like Ruby Turpin, the Grandmother is a self-righteous hypocrite. Having lost patience with her hypocrisy and pleas for her life, the criminal resorts to killing her. She dies, but not before she has a moment of clarity during which she sees the truth of the faith she’s proclaimed her entire life and her failure to live up to it. In the seconds before her death, she is repentant, recognizing the Misfit as a child of God, no less deserving of God’s grace than she is. In the aftermath of her murder, the Misfit turns to his partner and says, “She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
I think about these words each day as I open my newsfeed. Wouldn’t we all be better people if someone were there to shoot us every minute of our lives? I remember these words as I audibly sigh, confronted with ever-alarming headlines. I find myself thinking about what Flannery O’Connor would write if she were still alive today. I’m confident that she’d set her stories in new environments—intellectually, spiritually, and politically fraught environments—but that she’d populate them with the same character types. They’d come from the right and the left, from the faithful and the faithless, from the rich and the poor, from the educated and the uneducated, from the native and the alien, from the able and the disabled. Their route to goodness would be as hard-fought and ugly today as it ever was, and their reckoning would redeem those willing to receive it.
Sometimes, I take solace in this notion that the route to goodness is often ugly, but more often, I’m disheartened by what I read and hear. I find myself dreaming of a world in which people don’t have to hold guns to our heads to bring us to repentance, of a route to goodness traveled by those who’ve already seen and plucked the planks from their own eyes, of a road less ugly. But when I’m whisked from my reverie, I’m reminded of a line from O’Connor’s collected letters: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us, and the change is painful.” Despite her own physical, artistic, and spiritual challenges, O’Connor held fast to the redemptive power of grace—even, and especially, for the respectable folk bringing up the rear. Folks like her. Folks like us.
