30 pages • 1 hour read
Flannery O'ConnorA Late Encounter with the Enemy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and spent her early childhood in this well-known Southern city. The family moved to Milledgeville in 1938, where, except for the years spent at Iowa State University and a brief period in New York, O’Connor would spend the rest of her life. While O’Connor’s exploration of the South is clearest in her use of Southern Gothic tropes, other aspects of her life re-emerge in her work.
In Savannah, O’Connor’s family home stood opposite the St. John the Baptist Cathedral, where the author received her earliest formal education. She was a devout Roman Catholic throughout her life, and her work often explores themes related to her faith . In many of her stories, characters undergo epiphanies that reveal the error of their ways and prepare them for God’s grace in the afterlife. As André Bleikasten notes, in O’Connor’s fiction, “it is more often than not at the very last moment, at the climax of violence or at the point of death that grace manifests itself” (Bleikasten, André, “The Role of Grace in O’Connor’s Fiction.” In Jennifer A. Hurley (Ed.) Readings on Flannery O’Connor, Greenhaven Press, 2004). General Sash experiences such a moment of grace just before his death, and “the price paid for [his] spiritual rebirth is an immediate death” (Bleikasten, 2004).
In 1951, O’Connor returned to her family home to live with her mother after being diagnosed with lupus, the autoimmune condition that had killed her father 10 years before. Doctors expected her to live no more than seven years beyond the diagnosis. However, she lived for 12 more years, writing in the mornings and spending the rest of the day reading and recuperating. She spent significant time with her mother as they visited friends and ate meals together. The difficulties of similar mother/daughter relationships are themes of stories such as “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953), “A Circle in the Fire” (1954), and “Good Country People” (1955). As in “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” family tensions and antagonisms feature prominently throughout O’Connor’s work.
In addition to her fiction, O’Connor wrote essays and book reviews collected in Mystery and Manners (1969) and The Presence of Grace (1983). Her letters—including correspondence with prominent writers such as Elizabeth Bishop and John Crowe Ransom—were collected and published as The Habit of Being (1979). O’Connor’s own views on faith, art, and life can be found in these works, and they have influenced scholarly discussion of her fiction. In “On Her Own Work,” published in Mystery and Manners, O’Connor reflects that a short story should interrogate the human experience on Earth and the relationship between life and death, two of the main concerns of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy.”
Literary Context: Southern Gothic
The Southern Gothic was a literary movement that emerged from British Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. Well-known works of British Gothic literature include Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Gothic literature responded to the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), using horror and the grotesque to communicate concerns about rapid social progress and alienation from nature. Southern Gothic literature borrows these features and uses them to illustrate the South’s tormented relationship with its past. As white Southerners simultaneously idealize and deny their history, the horrors of slavery and war reemerge in monstrous form. These features are evident in “A Late Encounter With the Enemy.” The General’s loss of memory and his physical incapacitation create a suffocating, terrifying atmosphere as he is transformed from a human being into an object—a symbol of a past he himself cannot access.
While featuring established elements of the Gothic genre, Southern Gothic literature is also firmly connected to its American context. Distinctly Southern features include the region’s idyllic, rural landscape being juxtaposed with its history as a stronghold of racist and patriarchal views; the South is also depicted as “ill” through the recurrence of characters with physical or mental disabilities. The General cannot remember his experiences in the war, and thus he does not object to having those real experiences supplanted by an artificial, Hollywood version. The people from California transform him into the idealized avatar of an idealized Southern past, complete with a cartoonish new name, “General Tennessee Flintrock Sash.” It makes no difference to him, so long as he is admired. His granddaughter, in her own way, does the same—parading him onto the graduation stage as a symbol of her own connection to a noble past, evidence of her superiority to all the “upstarts” who look down on her. Aged almost beyond the limits of nature, he is the perfect anchor for Sally’s fraught relationship with Modernity and the Fetishization of the Past—the living embodiment of a past that refuses to die. His refusal to look at his own past makes him an empty vessel, a container for other people’s nostalgia and self-aggrandizement.
While becoming prominently associated with the genre, O’Connor was a relative latecomer to Southern Gothicism. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is often cited as the forefather of the genre’s themes and features, although his work did not include a prominent Southern setting. A more convincing forerunner is William Faulkner, who set all but three of his novels in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. A Gothic sense of uncertainty and a failed familial dynasty are prominent in both “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” and Faulkner’s most famous work, The Sound and the Fury (1929). These concerns also position Faulkner and O’Connor as precursors to subsequent examples of the Southern Gothic—Toni Morrison, for example, employs linguistic instability and depicts family destruction in Beloved (1987), a Southern Gothic novel that explores the tragic experiences of enslaved people in Southern states.
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