ABSTRACT
Flannery O’Connor’s position as a writer of violent scenes, in the Modernist Southern canon, is paramount—The Violent Bear It Away, the title of her first novel, ushered in her role as proprietress of holy murder and sacred destruction. O’Connor herself explained the apocalyptic bent of her work as a Catholic exposition of the necessity of inflicting violence on the subject to open true belief. Halberstam’s Female Masculinity emphasizes Frankie Addams’s sense of not belonging—“she belonged to no club”—to point to the young character’s gender ambiguity, her female masculinity. Likewise, one could argue that, in writing not only queer characters but also queer characters who embody female masculinity, McCullers, O’Connor, and to a lesser degree Hurston, write themselves out of the “club” of serious consideration as part of the literature of high Modernism.
