"Wise Blood": A Crossroads of the Erotic and the Religious
Abstract
In 1947, US writer Flannery O’Connor wrote the last entry of her journal asserting that she would be abandoned to erotic thoughts. In 1952 she would publish her first novel, Wise Blood, a portrait of post-World War II American religiosity. Her condition of being a devout Roman Catholic in the Deep South (with a Protestant social majority) made her a great connoisseur of the different versions of the Christian faith. This novel, through the traumatic experience(s) of the starring character Hazel Motes, offers a never-ending projection of Christian ideas and dogmas. Besides this, Motes’s relationship with Sabbath Lily Hawks also allows the reader the opportunity of transgressing, via sexuality, some of the most sacred Christian mysteries, such as Nativity, the Afterlife, or Redemption.
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