Reading Partus Sequitur Ventrem in Flannery O’Connor

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Notes

¹ General Assembly of Virginia, Act XII: Negro women’s children to serve according to the condition of the mother (1662), in The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, ed. William Waller Hening, vol. 2 (New York: R & W & G Bartow, 1823), 170.

² For an overview of feminist scholarship on O’Connor’s female characters, see Caruso’s introduction in “On the Subject of the Feminist Business.”

³ “The Enduring Chill” has attracted the attention of scholars who connect Asbury’s illness with his “negligent approach to cows, the cattle that his mother was breeding” (Arbeit 49–50). Other ecocritical approaches include that of Mark S. Graybill in “O’Connor’s Deep Ecological Vision.”

⁴ See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement, 1975.

⁵ See Frye, “A ‘silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.’”

⁶ Arbeit, Wood, and I have made similar arguments regarding Randall and Morgan’s complicity with Asbury’s contracting brucellosis. See Arbeit, 49; Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 115; and Frye, “A ‘silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.’”

⁷ For more discussion of this changing landscape, see Matte Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness.

⁸ I am preceded in part by Bandy‘s and Keetley‘s analyses of this story. Both scholars take a literal approach to the grandmother’s final identification of and with The Misfit, thereby offering alternative ways to frame the text.