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 Citation“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” (CitationArbeit 49–50). Other ecocritical approaches include that of Mark S. CitationGraybill in “O’Connor’s Deep Ecological Vision.”
4 See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement, 1975.
5 See CitationFrye, “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 CitationArbeit, 49; Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 115; and CitationFrye, “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 CitationBandy‘s and CitationKeetley‘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.