Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [14]
A composite of Sister Mary Consolata and other Mercy nuns shows up in O’Connor’s fiction in the guise of Sister Perpetua. In an early draft of Wise Blood, Sister Perpetua, a Sister of Mercy, teaches at Immaculate Conception, and is seen by one cowering pupil as able to “smash an atom between her two fingers.” In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” another Sister Perpetua, also a Sister of Mercy, advises her teenage girls to warn forward boys, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” When the story’s protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Mary Flannery — her braces “glared like tin” — visits Sister Perpetua’s school chapel, a nun reaches out for an embrace, but the girl instead “stuck out her hand and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister’s shoes at the wainscoting.” Evidently revealing her own adolescent thoughts, O’Connor writes, “You put your foot in their door and they got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished corridor.”
This tough attitude toward the sisters was already set by the fifth grade, and continues to register in her adult letters. Given license by the unconditional love of her father, and by the contentious attitude of her mother toward a few of the sisters — Mrs. O’Connor, for instance, felt her daughter ought to be allowed home for lunch — she might well, as a sarcastic fifth-grader, have said, or overheard, a comment along these lines, as she wrote to her friend Ted Spivey in the late fifties: “A lot of them who are teaching are competent at most to wash dishes.” Writing as a thirty-two-year-old to her spiritual adviser Father McCown, she complained of having been “taught by the sisters to measure your sins with a slide rule.” Elsewhere she evoked the “hot house innocence” of the cloistered nuns in her convent school. Rebellion still rising in her voice, she bragged of herself as “a long standing avoider of May processions and such-like nun-inspired doings.”
Between the third and seventh grade, these tussles with the Mercy nuns spilled over into the safe haven of an upstairs room in her home. In a state of mind somewhere between a child’s daydream and one of the scriptural visions she heard preached about in church, she imagined bouts with a guardian angel she pictured as half nun, half bird. As she mock-confided to Betty Hester, twenty years later: “From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude myself in a locked room every so often and with a fierce (and evil) face, whirl around in a circle with my fists knotted, socking the angel. This was the guardian angel with which the Sisters assured us we were all equipped. . . . You couldn’t hurt an angel but I would have been happy to know I had dirtied his feathers — I conceived him in feathers.”
She was clearly conflicted. Her authority issues with the nuns were obvious, yet she loved feathered creatures. As these boxing matches did not sum up all of her juvenile feelings about the Catholic religion, she began to draw a distinction, within herself, between the sisters and the Church. On May 8, 1932, Mary Flannery O’Connor was led with the other girls by their captain up the left aisle of the cathedral, while the boys proceeded up the right, for a First Communion she felt was “as natural to me and about as startling as brushing my teeth.” Two years later, on May 20, 1934, she was just as naturally confirmed in the Church. If the little girl of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” embodied her anti-nun sentiments, she also displayed more vulnerable girlhood devotion. As O’Connor