`Types'

Of a character in her story “Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor writes: “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”

Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter live in the South, in a small town, probably in Georgia. The story’s center of gravity shifts from Mrs. Hopewell to her daughter, the grotesque and grotesquely self-named Hulga, but in O’Connor’s fallen world there’s enough perdition to go around. If her vision seems excessively cruel, it’s only because she sees in the Mrs. Hopewells of the world what most of the rest of us choose to ignore or dismiss with Mrs. Hopewell’s own favorite platitude: “It takes all kinds to make the world.”

In “Grant Wood’s The Good Influence,” a brief essay he collected in The Hunter Gracchus, Guy Davenport writes of a drawing Wood made to illustrate Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street:

“Once we have the iconographic information that this all too typical Midwestern American woman is a specific character in a satirical novel (she is a widow and has spoiled her son, who is a lout), we see her for what she is: a gossip, a hypocrite, a self-righteous critic of other people.”

She is, in short, an Iowan Mrs. Hopewell and, depending on the rigor of our self-honesty, she is also a part of each of us. O’Connor’s sentence describes a fictional, albeit vividly familiar character, while Davenport glosses Wood’s rendering of a character in a novel, but the passages harmonize. They are written in a tradition we can trace at least to Theophrastus – concise portraits of moral types, a form congenial to satire.

It’s pertinent that both writers were Southerners. O’Connor was born in Georgia and lived there most of her life. Davenport was born in South Carolina and lived the last 40 years of his life in Kentucky. Both were at home in small towns, always reliable hot houses of gossip, and both internalized their otherwise very different religious upbringings. In such a setting, sin – defects of character, if you will – is as conspicuous as Hulga’s wooden leg, if only we can see it.

All politics really is local, as Tip O’Neill reminded us, but only in the most literal sense, for what goes on in our feverish minds is about as localized as local can get. Another Irishman said satire is a glass in which beholders discover everybody's face but their own. Unless, of course, we choose blindness.