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Shiftlet’s Choice: O'Connor's Fordist Love Story
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Shiftlet’s Choice: O’Connor’s Fordist Love Story Doug Davis In the opening pages of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953), the tramp Tom T. Shiftlet arrives at the hardscrabble farm of Lucynell Crater and her daughter of the same name, a “large girl” with “pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.” Entering the Craters’ yard, Shiftlet pauses for a moment to admire the sunset. Turning to approach the two ladies, his gaze passes over a pump and some chickens before settling on a shed in which he can make out “the square rusted back of an automobile.” It is love at first sight. Tom T. Shiftlet can not keep his eyes off of that car. “You ladies drive?” he asks, and in the conversation that follows he makes his proper introduction—not to the Craters but to the car that has kept his gaze and which he addresses modestly with downcast eyes: “That car ain’t run in fifteen year,” the old woman said. “The day my husband died, it quit running.” “Nothing is like it used to be, lady,” he said. “The world is almost rotten.” “That’s right,” the old woman said. “You from around here?” “Name Tom T. Shiftlet,” he murmured, looking at the tires. (CW 172–73) Shiftlet will ultimately get Mrs. Crater’s Ford, but only by marrying her handicapped daughter. By story’s end he will have abandoned his new wife at a roadside diner, driving off to Mobile, Alabama, as fast as he can in his true love—the stolen Ford. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is a story about a man who falls in love with a car. For many mid-century American authors it may have remained just that. Yet in O’Connor’s hands this innocent, all-American scenario becomes a grotesque story about desire deflected in terrifying, inhuman ways that reveals the unspoken political truth of postwar America’s consumer society. O’Connor presents Tom T. Shiftlet as a new kind of American who inhabits an alienating Doug Davis 170 world in which the regime of mass production has collapsed the boundary between man and machine in ways both personal and physical. O’Connor figures this collapse in the inhuman image of Shiftlet himself, a man she describes not only literally as in love with an automobile but also figuratively as part automobile himself. Shiftlet is O’Connor’s model modern American, a conflicted figure driven to find meaning and satisfaction in things but also driven by a sense that the things he desires are essentially meaningless. The story of Shiftlet’s choice of a Ford over his wife is a fable about the terrifying kind of person that the American worker has become: a consumer. As critics such as Roger N. Casey, David R. Mayber, Brian Abel Ragen, and Deborah Clarke have observed in their respective analyses of O’Connor’s automotive imagery, O’Connor is a keen observer of American car culture. Cars play a central and often critical role in a great many of O’Connor’s stories, propelling her characters through her plots and signifying their fealty to American consumer culture and its secular materialist ways.1 Many of O’Connor’s characters are eager participants in America’s postwar car culture. They have profound relationships with their automobiles, projecting their hopes and dreams upon them, putting their faith in them, preaching atop them, sleeping and eating in them, experiencing divine visions in their presence, killing with them, dying besides them, and even, in the case of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” resurrecting them. As Jon Lance Bacon and Ralph C. Wood observe, the car is one of the main symbolic means by which O’Connor demonstrates the perils of buying too thoroughly into the whole “American Way of Life” (Wood 15–22; see also Bacon 38–41). In this essay I turn O’Connor’s story inward upon the subject who inhabits the American way of life and its automobiles—Tom T. Shiftlet, model American —and read “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” as a politicized technocultural fable about not only what the American Way of Life is but also what the American worker and consumer have become. O’Connor’s close observance of America’s car culture stands out strikingly in this particular story when it is...