O’Connor’s Anti-Pastoral: An Ecocritical Approach

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See for example the essays collected in Zachary Veron’s Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies. See also Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie and Kirby’s Mockingbird Song.

² One strong exception to this is Huntley Hughes’s examination of “The Displaced Person” through a political and economic lens.

³ The phrase “cruel optimism” comes from Lauren Berlant’s formulation of the costs of attachment to objects of desire within a capitalist system. As Berlant argues, problematic objects are those that both animate one’s life and give one hope, yet also threaten one’s ability to live. Our optimistic attachment to deleterious objects of desire might kill us; and yet few can detach from that which gives our lives meaning. Hence the optimism to this attachment is “cruel.” For a discussion of cruel optimism in relation to the landscape, see Simon, “Affect and Cruelty in the Atlantic System.”

⁴ Here I follow Outka’s use of the phrase “plantation pastoral.” With this term, Outka describes “how slavery depended in part on a racialized association of the subject with a degraded and commodified pastoral, particularly with domesticated animals and monoculture agriculture” (8).

⁵ For more on pastoral, see Terry Gifford, “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral.”

⁶ For a material ecocritical reading of this story, one that attends to gender, see Catherine Bowlin, “Marching Across the Water” (collected in this issue).

⁷ See Avila, “The Politics of Historical Memory” and Semuels, “The Role of Highways in American Poverty.”

⁸ For more on violence in O’Connor’s work see the essays collected by Hewitt and Donahoo in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism. I’ve especially been influenced by Jon Lance Bacon’s essay in this collection, “Gory Stories.”

⁹ As Solomon writes in 2019, there used to be one public swimming pool in Baldwin County, but “Now it’s been filled in with dirt, and grass has grown on top of it. If you never saw the pool with your own two eyes, you’d never know there used to be one.” Indeed, plans to find a public swim space only began following the 2018 drowning of a Georgia Military Student at the Oconee River Greenspace (Beimfohr).

¹⁰ I thank Monica Carol Miller, whose provocative question following my presentation of a draft of this paper at the ALA Symposium “Flannery O’Connor Families,” June 18, 2021, prompted this idea.

¹¹ My thinking about the spectacular violence in “A View of the Woods” is influenced by the historiography on lynching. See for example Amy Louise Wood’s article, “The Spectacle of Lynching: Rituals of White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South.” The classic study on lynching remains that of Tolnay and Beck, Festivals of Violence. For a discussion of lynching as a context for the African-American patients admitted to the Georgia Asylum, in Milledgeville, see Segrest (117–31).

¹² I have in mind Derek Walcott’s poem “The Almond Trees:”

There’s nothing here

this early;

cold sand

cold churning ocean, the Atlantic,

no visible history,

except this stand

of twisted, coppery, sea-almond trees[…] (lines 1–7).

¹³ The Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. 134 S.Ct. 2751 (2014) reinforced the legal fiction of the corporation as a person. For more on the implications of this case see Larson. For considerations of the legal fiction idea from an environmental activism perspective see Burdon, Turkewitz and Revkin.

¹⁴ According to Haraway, the plantationocene is a term for “the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor (165f5).” See Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.” See also the collective conversation with Haraway et al. that created the term: “Anthropologists Talk About the Anthropocene.”

¹⁵ The most incisive discussion of capitalism in O’Connor’s work, to my mind, is Huntley Hughes’s piece on “The Displaced Person,” a piece that has influenced my understanding of the text quite a bit. I wish to extend Hughes’s sophisticated socio-economic reading to more overtly consider the ecocritical potential of this story, and the potential of the rural South to contribute to an environmentalism cognizant of the importance of social justice issues.

¹⁶ As an undergraduate at Georgia College, O’Connor was the staff cartoonist at The Colonnade. Her cartoons are collected by Gentry.

¹⁷ It’s hard to imagine that O’Connor knew nothing of the Leo Frank lynching case. Frank, a Marietta, GA citizen, was abducted from the Georgia State Prison Farm, located just outside of Milledgeville, in a highly coordinated action involving lawyers, judges, prison guards, and many prominent citizens. See Segrest (231–34). See also Sawyer, “A Lynching, A List, and Reopened Wounds.”

¹⁸ See Bacon (99) for a different source for this quote, a newsreel O’Connor was familiar with.

¹⁹ Such a partnership is well-described by de las Casas, a priest who accompanied explorers to the Spanish colonies. His 1552 text, The Devastation of the Indies sought to oppose the brutality, genocide, and atrocity he witnessed for over forty years as a religious man working with indigenous peoples at the behest of the Spanish royalty, as part of their colonial project.

²⁰ “The Gray Zone” is Primo Levi’s concept for the extreme moral ambiguity produced in the concentration camps. See his chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. For interviews with Polish citizens who chose to disremember the death camps as they were happening, see Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.