Is Flannery O'Connor Overrated?

Okay, I admit that the title is a little bit of click-bait. But I've been thinking about O'Connor a lot lately, reading her letters compiled by Sally Fitzgerald in The Habit of Being, and I kind of have to ask myself, what's the big deal? Is she really one of the greatest American writers? 

She is because she was a craftsman of prose and she is someone you cannot shake from your consciousness after reading. She wasn't because she is not accessible and she has a narrow world view. That of course, is my opinion. She is not "overrated," but perhaps she is over-revered.

I did a Google search on this subject. I found the following:

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/caution-writings-flannery-oconnor

https://www.amazon.com/review/R18RL4F7924ZLB 

https://backland.typepad.com/backland/2020/06/why-i-hate-flannery-oconnor.html

https://edrenalinerush.com/2020/06/16/in-defense-of-flannery-oconnor/

https://themillions.com/2018/08/the-torture-box-a-critical-look-at-flannery-oconnor-and-disproportionate-retribution.html, where the essayist states:

"These stories are torture boxes, lovingly designed by a master craftsperson to enact maximal punishment for minimal crimes. A flawed character is set inside; that flaw catches on the ineluctable, merciless gears of her narrative logic; they are ground to dust. . .  .

"This is also to say, however, that there is something fundamentally cartoonish about the moral unfairness of O’Connor’s work, an unfairness rooted, if one is inclined toward biographical interpretation, in her Catholicism and illness. Here was a genius twice cursed—first with original sin, then with lupus. These outsized personal afflictions surely inflected her worldview, a worldview that allows characters no agency—rarely, if ever, does the cool breeze of free will blow through her humid North Georgia hellscapes. [note, actually Middle Georgia]

"It is an art of typology: types of characters, types of flaws and sins, types of punishments. This monolithic, caricatured quality is both a weakness and strength, manifesting in ways that are impossible to disentangle. It lends, in my mind, an imposing greatness to the work that sometimes comes at the expense of truth."

That seems apt to me.  I remember a guest speaker we had at our college early in my time there. She had produced some scholarship on O'Connor (actually quite a bit, including a biography) and was the mentor of one of our professors, himself a scholar. They got into a bit of a debate over how to interpret O'Connor and how "great" she was. My colleague concluded his viewpoint that one had to know so much about her background, the scholarship on her, and her overall work to get the sense of what she was about in any one particular story. From the viewpoint of teaching freshmen in an open access college one of her stories (almost always "A Good Man is Hard to Find") that was a tall order. 

Having taught literature to freshman, I get his point. She seems to be an acquired taste, at the very least. I mean, how many people would read her stories just for the pleasure of reading a good story? 

I would argue that Marilynne Robinson is greater. She's probably not going to be put in a typical freshman lit anthology, mostly because she is an essayist and novelist, but her body of work achieves the same contemplation of grace, embodied in real lives of pretty normal people, and she doesn't seem to dislike or want to disturb her readers for some esoteric purpose. And of course, I'm going to be more drawn to her because she writes from a Calvinist rather than Catholic world view. Neither of those are particularly appealing to people, but Robinson's Calvinism comes out more hopeful than the "tortured" characters in O'Connor, who seem to have no hope of grace. 

This is not to say Marilynne Robinson is easy reading. Just more redemptive without having to know everything that has been written by her and about her writing.