The Work
The Violent Bear It Away was published in 1960 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (New York). It is Flannery O'Connor's second and final novel, and she considered it her most fully realized theological work - a judgment that most critics have endorsed. The novel is approximately 240 pages, divided into three parts, and tells the story of Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy raised in the Tennessee woods by his great-uncle Mason Tarwater, a self-proclaimed prophet who has instructed Francis to baptize the idiot child Rayber upon his own death. The title is drawn from the Douay-Rheims translation of Matthew 11:12: 'From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.'
O'Connor worked on the novel for seven years, alongside her short stories, during a period when she was increasingly disabled by lupus. It was her deepest engagement with the question that preoccupied all her fiction: what happens to prophetic vocation in a world that has decided God does not exist?
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 11:12 is both the title and the theological program of the novel. The verse (in context, Jesus's description of John the Baptist's ministry and the violent response of his enemies) is read by O'Connor in its fullest ambiguity: the kingdom is suffered - endured, afflicted - by those who receive it violently; and the violent take it, seize it, by force. Both the prophetic call and the demonic resistance to it are forms of violence. O'Connor's novel dramatizes this double violence: Mason Tarwater's fierce prophetic calling, Rayber's violent intellectual rejection of God, and young Tarwater's desperate flight from and return to his vocation all manifest the violent character of the kingdom's coming.
Jeremiah 1:5 ('Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations') is the novel's underlying theology of prophetic calling. Tarwater does not choose his vocation; it is imposed on him from before his birth, by an uncle who has seen himself as a prophet since his own violent conversion and who has shaped every aspect of Tarwater's upbringing toward this end. The question the novel poses is whether a vocation forcibly imposed by a human mediator - however sincere - can be genuinely divine, and the answer is yes: God works through Mason's fanaticism despite and through its excesses.
The book of Jonah provides the structural analogy for Tarwater's flight from his calling. Like Jonah fleeing to Tarshish (Jonah 1:3), Tarwater flees to the city (where he stays with his uncle Rayber) rather than performing the baptism Mason commanded. And like Jonah, he is overtaken by the necessity of the prophetic word. O'Connor was explicit about this parallel in her letters: the reluctant prophet who flees his commission only to be swallowed back into it is one of the Bible's great narrative templates for the novel.
Acts 2 provides the imagery of fire that runs throughout the book. The compulsion Tarwater feels - which he experiences as a burning in his stomach, a fire he cannot extinguish - echoes Jeremiah's experience ('his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones,' Jeremiah 20:9) and the Pentecostal fire of Acts 2:3. O'Connor connects prophetic calling, the Holy Spirit, and irresistible grace through this motif of fire that cannot be put out.
The baptism of the child Bishop is the novel's central action and its most ambiguous. Tarwater does baptize Bishop - accidentally, desperately, at the moment of drowning him - and the novel's final movement, in which Tarwater accepts his prophetic calling and sets out to prophesy to 'the sleeping children of God,' suggests that the accidental baptism was nonetheless real. The theology here draws on the debates about the sufficiency of baptismal intention, but more fundamentally on the biblical pattern of divine purpose working through apparently defeated or misdirected human actions.
Author & Context
Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She published her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952, and her first collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. She was diagnosed with disseminated lupus erythematosus in 1950 and spent most of her adult life at Andalusia, her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Georgia. She died at age 39.
O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic writing in the Protestant Bible Belt South - a position of double outsiderness that she found both productive and clarifying. She wrote extensively about her theological intentions in letters (published as The Habit of Being, 1979) and essays (published as Mystery and Manners, 1969). Her central artistic conviction was that fiction can reveal grace only by showing what resists it: the grotesque, the violent, and the shocking are the tools of a writer who wants a spiritually deaf audience to hear.
She was deeply read in Catholic theology - particularly Thomas Aquinas, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom she read with both admiration and critical distance), Romano Guardini, and the existentialist Catholic novelists François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Her understanding of grace as violent, unexpected, and resistant to human management is characteristically Augustinian and stands in sharp contrast to the sentimental, therapeutic Christianity she deplored.
Structure and Argument
Part 1 introduces Mason Tarwater's death and the contest between old Tarwater's prophetic world and Rayber's secular rationalism for the boy's soul. The novel opens with a magnificent sentence establishing that the old man has died as he lived - with prophetic excess: 'Francis Marion Tarwater's great-uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave.'
Part 2 follows Tarwater in the city with Rayber, where the novel becomes a sustained confrontation between prophetic compulsion and modern secular psychology. Rayber has written a clinical study of Mason and sees Tarwater as a victim of religious fanaticism to be cured by education and therapy. Their conversations dramatize the novel's central theological argument: that the secular humanist's compassion - however genuine - is finally a refusal of God's reality, and that such refusal cannot be neutral but must become actively hostile to the prophetic vision.
Part 3 returns to the lake, the drowning/baptism of Bishop, and Tarwater's rape by a stranger - which O'Connor presents as both literal violation and spiritual purgation. The final section, in which Tarwater burns the woods and sets out as a prophet to 'go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy,' is among the most powerful endings in American fiction.
Critical Reception
The novel received mixed reviews on publication. Many secular critics found it violent, bizarre, and theologically opaque. Catholic readers and critics recognized it as a major work of theological fiction. Robert Fitzgerald, O'Connor's literary executor and friend, called it her greatest achievement.
Subsequent critical estimation has consistently placed it among the major American novels of the twentieth century. The grotesque comedy of Rayber's secular rationalism, the terrifying grandeur of Mason's prophetic fanaticism, and the violent resolution of Tarwater's conflict have proved inexhaustible for critics working in religious studies, American literature, and literary theology.
Theological Significance
The novel's most significant theological contribution is its dramatization of prevenient grace - grace that operates prior to human choice and consent, that pursues the fleeing sinner as God pursues Jonah. Tarwater's ultimate acceptance of his prophetic calling is not a free decision in any voluntarist sense: it comes through violence, violation, and compulsion. O'Connor is deliberately confrontational here, insisting that the grace of God is not polite, does not ask permission, and is not experienced as comfortable. This is Augustine's understanding of grace, not the Arminian free-will tradition, and O'Connor writes it with full awareness of its theological offensiveness.
Legacy
The novel has been continuously in print and is regularly taught in American literature, Southern literature, and theological fiction courses. It has been influential on a generation of writers interested in the intersection of Christianity and violence - Cormac McCarthy has frequently been compared to O'Connor, and the comparison is instructive. It remains the fullest literary dramatization of prophetic vocation in American fiction.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Jeremiah 1:4-19 (the prophetic call that cannot be refused), Jonah 1-4 (the flight from prophetic commission and its failure), Matthew 11:2-19 (the violent kingdom and the role of John the Baptist), Acts 2:1-21 (fire and prophetic speech), and Ezekiel 2:1-3:15 (the installation of a prophet among a rebellious people who will not listen).
Further Reading
- Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (1969) - her collected essays and lectures on fiction and theology, which provide indispensable context for understanding what she was attempting in all her fiction, and especially in this novel. - Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) - a joint biography of O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy that traces the mid-century Catholic intellectual world from which The Violent Bear It Away emerged. - Ralph Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004) - the best single study of O'Connor's theology, with an extended reading of this novel in the context of Southern Christianity and Catholic sacramental realism.