In 1950, at age twenty-five, the increasing physical limitations brought on by lupus erythematosus forced Flannery O’Connor to return permanently to her mother’s home town in rural Georgia. What she had feared would be the end of her creativity proved to be the most fruitful period of her life as a writer. With no more than her immediate milieu from which to draw her inspiration she managed to write what is now considered to be some of her best fiction.
One of the most recurring themes of her short stories is the family, and more specifically, the portrayal of the relationship between mothers and daughters.
This paper discusses the parallelism that exists between O’Connor’s fictional families and her own, the way her personal circumstances are reflected through her fiction and the discrepancies one can find between her resentful fictional daughters and her own role in southern society as a dutiful, subdued daughter. O’Connor’s unique portrayal of the mother/daughter dyad is evaluated within the framework of her immediate context so as to reach a better understanding of her fiction.
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