Many critics interpret Flannery O'Connor's grotesque fiction within the Christian context that she espoused, often calling her fiction "sacramental" and "incarnational." They also acknowledge the dark humor in her fiction. But not much scholarship has been done to place O'Connor in a coherent comedic tradition that accounts for this Christian context and dark humor. This lack is remarkable, considering that O'Connor herself calls her fiction comedy---"my kind of comedy," as she states in a December 26, 1959, letter to John Hawkes. This current study, divided into seven chapters which explore medieval exegesis and English medieval drama and place O'Connor's fiction within the Christian comedy of the medieval dramatists, strives to address this lack.
O'Connor's fiction may be considered the modern equivalent of medieval drama. Like this literary form, her fiction follows the three-part pattern of Christian comedy, as outlined by O. B. Hardison: pathos , or suffering; peripety , or reversal; and theophany , or rejoicing. This is the pattern of conversion, the sinner turning back to God, and both medieval drama and O'Connor's fiction follow it. Also, the plots of her fiction follow two main genres of medieval drama: the miracle play and the morality play. The two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away , represent modern miracle, or saint's, plays. Like the medieval miracle plays, O'Connor's novels dramatize the education of a sinner into a saint or prophet. Also, the stories in her three collections, The Geranium , A Good Man Is Hard to Find , and Everything That Rises Must Converge , represent modern moralities. Like the medieval morality plays, O'Connor's short stories dramatize the conversion of a sinful "Everyman." In addition, medieval drama has three kinds of comic heroes as protagonists: non-Christians, lukewarm Christians, and saints. These three comic heroes of medieval drama O'Connor also adapts for her modern versions of medieval drama: secular humanists, modern Pharisees, and harbingers of truth. Moreover, O'Connor shares with medieval dramatists the "anagogical vision," the highest sense, or meaning, of the four-fold senses in medieval exegesis of Scripture and of Creation. Medieval drama defines basic elements within Christian comedy and thus provides a way of clarifying patterns within O'Connor's work, which draws broadly upon this comedic tradition. In understanding medieval drama, read through the lens of medieval exegesis, one can better understand O'Connor.
