Monica Carol Miller - Dear Regina: Flannery OConnors Letters from Iowa

DEAR REGINA

A publication of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University

SERIES EDITOR

Clinton R. Fluker

Emory University

FOUNDING EDITOR

Pellom McDaniels

Emory University

Flannery OConnors Letters from Iowa

EDITED BY MONICA CAROL MILLER

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

2022 by the Mary Flannery OConnor Charitable Trust

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OConnor, Flannery, author. | OConnor, Regina Cline, addressee. | Miller, Monica Carol, 1974 editor.

Title: Dear Regina : Flannery OConnors letters from Iowa / edited by Monica Carol Miller.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Series: A publication of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021062321 (print) | LCCN 2021062322 (ebook) | ISBN 9780820361857 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820361840 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: OConnor, FlanneryCorrespondence. | OConnor, Regina Cline. | Iowa Writers Workshop. | Women authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Creative writing (Higher education)United States. | Mothers and daughtersUnited States.

Classification: LCC PS3565.C57 Z48 2022 (print) | LCC PS3565.C57 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23/eng/20220203

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062321

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062322

CONTENTS

In the fall of 1945, twenty-year-old Flannery OConnor arrived at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, to begin graduate school after earning a bachelor of arts degree in social sciences from Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) in Milledgeville, Georgia. Although she had been admitted to Iowas Graduate School of Journalism, once there she sought out Paul Engle, the highly respected director of the Writers Workshop. Their memorable first meeting has often been recounted:

When she finally spoke, her Georgia dialect sounded so thick to his Midwestern ear that he asked her to repeat her question. Embarrassed by an inability a second time to understand, Engle handed her a pad to write what she had said. So in schoolgirl script, she put down three short lines: My name is Flannery OConnor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers Workshop? Engle suggested that she drop off writing samples, and they would consider her, late as it was. The next day a few stories arrived, and to his near disbelief, he found them to be imaginative, tough, alive. She was instantly accepted to the Workshop, both the name of Engles writing class and of his MFA graduate writing program, the first in the nation, to which she would switch her affiliation from the Graduate School of Journalism by the second semester. (Gooch 11718)

OConnors education at Iowa was an important step in her evolution as a writer as well as an introduction to the writers life and community in which she would spend the rest of her short life and career. It was at Iowa that she wrote the beginnings of Wise Blood. There she met Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and others who would help her gain traction in publishing as well as provide the connections that would get her into Yaddos artists community. The work she accomplished at Iowa and the connections she made there formed the foundation for her future writing success.

While scholars have written about how her time at Iowa shaped her writing, there has been less focus (and few resources freely available to scholars and others) on how her time at Iowa shaped her personally. The correspondence in Dear Regina has only been freely available to scholars in the manuscript collections at Emory University since 2014; even since then, access required travel to Atlanta and appropriate credentials. Up until she left for graduate school, OConnor had grown up in Savannah and then Milledgeville, Georgia: both smallish, southern towns in which she was a member of well-respected, long-established families. Iowa was a revelation for many reasons: she was away from home, away from her known climate, region, family, and habits. Iowa gave her an opportunity to reinvent herself, as this was when she started going by Flannery OConnor, rather than Mary Flannery, as well as creatively, as her work evolved from the cartoons she first came to Iowa to create to the incisive fiction that she produced as a student in the Writers Workshop.

Yet while her graduate school experience allowed for such reinvention, much about her former life stayed constant: her daily mass attendance, her spiritual devotion, andsurprising to manyher strong relationship with her mother. When scholars and fans of OConnor alike consider the mother-daughter relationships in her work, they tend to assume that the dynamics in the stories have their basis in OConnors relationship with her mother, Regina Cline OConnor. To be sure, much of this interpretation is based on Flannerys own descriptions of their relationship. Often referring sardonically to Regina as the parent in letters to her friends,Country People, that of an overbearing mother preoccupied with appearances and her petulant, overintellectual daughter.

However, the 2014 acquisition of a significant collection of Flannery OConnors papers by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University has provided access to a significant amount of material previously unavailable (see Justice, Flannery OConnor Archive). Within the nineteen linear feet (forty boxes) of papers in this archive is a collection of letters that Flannery wrote to Regina nearly daily from 1945 to 1947, while she was a graduate student at Iowa. Collected here for the first time in print, the letters in Dear Regina reveal that their day-to-day relationship had much more depth and affection than the generally accepted narratives would allow. Indeed, I believe such characterizations have exaggerated and overemphasized the contentiousness between the two women. Flannery is clearly a willing participant in their correspondence, noting early on that I am the only one here who hears from home every day and should like to continue to be (5 Oct. 1945). I have argued that psycho-biographical readings such as Westlings distract from what I see as several striking currents of critique in OConnors work, including those of southern pastoralism and gender stereotypes. Indeed, I believe that exaggerations of the contention between Flannery and Regina have led to misreadings of the mother-daughter relationships in OConnors stories. A willingness to take such mother figures as Mrs. Hopewell in Good Country People or Mrs. Crater in The Life You Save May Be Your Own seriously, rather than reject them as flat, comical characters, offers enticing new readings of OConnors fiction.