The Essex And Hazel Motes In Flannery — страница 2

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Motes, even in trying to become a living negation of his grandfather’s principles, cannot escape his Christian origins. In his article “The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” William Rodney Allen notes how the Essex functions for Hazel when he says that “The emblem of Haze’s absurd motion is of course his battered Essex, his symbolic home, pulpit, and coffin” (264). Haze’s ownership of the car signifies his inability to escape the legacy of his grandfather. Haze, who says he “wanted this car mostly to be a house for me” (O’Connor 37), uses his car much as his traveling preacher grandfather did his, with the Essex serving as a constant throughout his evangelical travels. Also, Haze’s practice of preaching from the hood of

his car comes directly from his grandfather. The car, which Haze says “will get me anywhere I want to go” (65), becomes not a means of escape but a symbol of entrapment, as Allen points out: . . . as fast as he runs from these terrifying memories, he repeatedly finds himself boxed in symbolic coffins: his berth on the train, the toilet stall at the station, Leora Watts’s tiny room, his car. As a means of escaping his past, Haze’s motion is as futile as a rat’s on a treadmill, or a rat-colored car’s down a highway that seems to be “slipping back under” (p. 207) its wheels. (262-63) Haze’s embracing of this symbol of entrapment further shows his inner drive to return to the Christian ideology of his youth. In her essay “White Trash, Low Class, and No Class at

All: Perverse Portraits of Phallic Power in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” Linda Roher Paige gives a Freudian interpretation of the novel, asserting that, despite their low social status, the characters of Wise Blood “function as visionaries, their vehicle of achieving vision, the way of the phallus” (333). For Paige, the Essex “merges the functional and the religious, representing the embodiment of both home and temple” while exhibiting itself as “the ultimate phallic weapon” (331). Paige says that Hazel’s use of the car as a bed and as a murder weapon symbolize a sexual relationship between Hazel and the Essex (331). Indeed, there is a certain romantic nature to Hazel’s relationship with his car — it is the one entity to which he seems truly devoted.

Paige’s identification of the Essex as a phallic symbol sheds light on Hazel’s utter impotence. When Sabbath Lily Hawks, whom Hazel says he intends to seduce, tries to seduce him, he bolts from the car. When Haze, unable to go through with the seduction, returns to the car, he finds it similarly incapacitated. Like Hazel with his unsuccessful proselytizing, the car “only [makes] . . . a noise like water lost somewhere in the pipes” (O’Connor 64). Another example of the Essex’s symbolization of Hazel’s lack of potency comes soon after he purchases the car, when, infuriated by a slow-moving pickup truck, he hits the horn “three times before he realized it didn’t make any sound” (38). However, Motes continually professes that the Essex is a “good car” and

says that he believes that his relationship with it can serve as a reason for living: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified” (58). Once again, his romantic relationship with the Essex calls to mind an episode from Motes’s childhood — the incident at the carnival. While Haze is confused about what exactly it is that he is searching for, it is clear that his love affair with his car represents some sort of pathetic attempt to get back to his childhood. In chapter eleven of Wise Blood, O’Connor writes that Hazel “would . . . make a new start with nothing on his mind. The entire possibility of this came from the advantage of having a car – of having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be” (95). Hazel Motes clearly thinks of his

car as a quick ticket to freedom. “This car’ll get me anywhere I want to go. It may stop here and there but it won’t stop permanent,” he says (65) Motes, of course, means not only that the car can physically transport him from place to place but also that such mobility provides him with the only spirituality that he needs. Brian Abel Ragen, in his book A Wreck on the Road to Damascus, addresses O’Connor’s opinion of such notions, writing, “This extreme idea of personal freedom — which is finally not so different from Pride — is used to show what makes a man God’s enemy and what he must lose before he can become one of His disciples” (108). Thus, the Essex helps O’Connor illustrate her theme of the futility of self-will and the importance of Christianity