REPRESENTATIONS OF WHITE SOUTHERN MASCULINITY IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE

The paper aims to examine representations of masculinity in the short stories that constitute Flannery O’Connor’s short story cycle Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Specifically, the goal is to analyze how the texts in question represent different models of white southern masculinity and whether the models offered problematize the way Southern literature and culture has traditionally conceptualized the way white southern men should behave and think. The analyses are supported by theoretical considerations of masculinity in general, as well as several definitions of white southern masculinity and its representations in literature over time. Another aim is to see whether the texts dramatize the well-documented crisis of masculinity in the South in the twentieth century, and whether they expose its ideological underpinnings.