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  • Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil:A Question of Sympathy
  • John F. Desmond (bio)

The full story of the intellectual relation between Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil has yet to be told. While critics such as Robert Coles, Sarah Gordon, Lee Sturma, and Jane Detweiler have explored their relationship from the standpoint of comparative biography, little had been done by way of examining O'Connor's complex reaction to Weil's thought and how it may have helped shape O'Connor's writing.1 O'Connor would have found much to agree with in Weil's religious views, just as she found much to admire in Weil's courageous life. At the same time, she rejected Weil's hyperintellectualism and the extreme asceticism that led to Weil's premature death, due largely to self-starvation. But more important than O'Connor's response to Weil the person was her interest in Weil as a representative figure in the central debates over religious belief in twentieth-century Western society, especially among writers. As a representative figure, Weil challenged orthodox Christianity and, in so doing, challenged and helped clarify O'Connor's own religious beliefs. The challenge posed by Weil's thought reverberates throughout O'Connor's later fiction, especially in her second novel, [End Page 102] The Violent Bear It Away. Weil was a powerful and contentious shaping spirit in O'Connor's struggles to dramatize the conflicts over faith in a culture that both she and Weil found to be hostile or indifferent to the hard demands of belief.

O'Connor read and heard much about Weil before actually reading her, and she found the Frenchwoman fascinating. Her first direct exposure to Weil came through her friendship with Betty Hester when they began corresponding in July 1955.2 Hester wrote a sympathetic and insightful letter in which she asked O'Connor about her Catholic beliefs and her acceptance of Church dogma and their effects on her writing. In response, O'Connor characterized her general audience as one in which "the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more meat" (Habit,90). Later, she added, "One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience" (Habit,92). Hester was not a Catholic at this time, though she later joined the Church but then subsequently disaffiliated. Her questions to O'Connor about the writer's acceptance of dogma were prompted by Hester's own concerns about intellectual freedom within the Church. O'Connor had no illusions about the Church as a flawed institution and said, "it seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it" (Habit,90). Nevertheless, she maintained that "the individual in the Church is, no matter how worthless himself, a part of the Body of Christ and a participator in the Redemption. There is no blueprint the Church gives for understanding this. It is a matter of faith and the Church can force no one to believe it" (Habit,92). Near the end of this letter, she added, "I am wondering if you have read Simone Weil. I never have and doubt if I would understand her if I did; but from what I have read about her, I think she must have been a very great person" (Habit,93).

O'Connor clearly saw in Hester's intellectual misgivings about [End Page 103] the Church a mirror image of Simone Weil's adamant resistance to institutional Catholicism. In her next letter to Hester, O'Connor remarked, "I have thought of Simone Weil in connection with you almost from the first," and then added a warning: "your effort not to be seduced by the Church moves me greatly. God permits it for some reason though it is the devil's greatest work of hallucination" (Habit,93). What struck O'Connor in Hester's case were the mysteries of both God's will and the...

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