Wise Blood - Literary Context

Literary Context

Wise Blood began with four separate stories published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. Flannery O'Connor then published it as a complete novel in 1952, and Signet advertised it as "A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption."

In the novel, O'Connor revisits her recurring motif of a disaffected young person returning home and the theme of the struggle of the individual to understand Christianity on a purely individualistic basis. O'Connor's hero, Hazel Motes, sneers at communal and social experiences of Christianity, sees the followers of itinerant, Protestant preachers as fools, and sets out to deny Christ as violently as he can. Against his individual attempts, Motes faces the tendency of all around him to identify him as a preacher. Enoch Emery, a friend of Motes who is in search of a new Jesus, explains that some people have "wise blood": that the blood knows even if the mind does not. Hazel is obsessed with preachers, with salvation, and with denying redemption. He seeks to save people from salvation, eventually becoming an anti-priest of The Church Without Christ, where "the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the dead stay that way," and, in the end, becoming a hallowed ascetic.

Some critics have argued that what Flannery O'Connor consistently writes about is not salvation, but heresy. Each of her "heroes" encodes one or another of the classic heretical movements, whether Chartist in "The Enduring Chill" or Jansenist in Wise Blood. At the same time, O'Connor's heretical heroes often flirt with existentialism (e.g. the Misfit from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") and its demands that only the solitary individual's experiences can provide a basis for belief. O'Connor saw these ancient heresies blooming in a post-Reformation world, and particularly in the fertile fields of the decentralized evangelical realm of the South.