Flannery O Connor: The Role Of American Women

American Female Writers The role of the American woman and how she perceives herself has continued to change throughout American history. I have chosen three very different but equally influential women for their times. First, there is Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote of gender roles and coming of age. Second, there is Flannery O’Connor, who through he Southern Grotesque style still managed to express her spiritual and universal view of humanity. Lastly, there is Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had problem with expressing herself exactly how she was; opinionated and very sexually active. These three women, in my opinion, demonstrate how American women have evolved though time. We have gone from being complacent housewives to equal members of society. We are no longer to required to stay quiet and agree blindly with our husbands. We have a right to our own opinions and the ability to express ourselves however we see fit. Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine. She became famous for her local color stories set on the familiar Maine

When she was fifteen she lost her father to systemic lupus, the disease that would eventually end her own life at age thirty-nine. The publication of her first short-story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, made her Christian views and dark comic intent clear to her readers. The majority of her work resists conventional description. Although many of her narratives begin in the familiar quotidian world—on a family vacation—they are not realistic and certainly not in the sense of the southern realism of William Faulkner. Furthermore, although O 'Connor wrote during a time of social change in the South, those changes—and the relationships among blacks and whites—were not at the center of her fiction. She made constant use of violence and shock tactics. She argued that she wrote for an audience who did not share her belief in the fall of humanity and its need for