White trash, low class, and no class at all: Perverse portraits of phallic power in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1997 by Paige, Linda Rohrer

At eighteen, Motes joins the army, and again, manifests phallic guilt. When his army buddies (or really, his acquaintances) invite the young soldier to accompany them to a house of prostitution, Haze refuses to be drawn further into sin:

He only stared at them, trying to steel his face. His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddamn soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him that he didn't have any soul and left for their brothel. ( 11 )

Upon finally being released from the service, O'Connor's Hazel Motes wholly attempts to unburden himself of sin, preferring to believe, in fact, that no sin exists at all. Still looking for a sign from God, however, Haze finds one: this one, not surprisingly, both a literal and a figurative sign that Wise Blood 's protagonist lifts from a bathroom wall:

Mrs. Leora Watts!

60 Buckley Road

The friendliest bed in town!

Signed Brother. (15)

Paradoxically, this sign leads Haze to a "business" involving phallic pleasure, and simultaneously, introduces him to yet another unlikely holy seer, Mrs. Leora Watts, who embodies low class Southern culture. Having earlier been accused by a taxi driver of looking like a preacher, Haze ardently insists before Mrs. Watts that he "ain't no preacher," that he has come for "the usual business" (17). Blind to his own capacity for seeing Jesus, Motes appears taken aback when the greasy-looking, pink "negligeed" prostitute demonstrates her ability to perceive truth of which he remains unaware. Snatching Haze's black hat from his head, and briskly placing it atop her own, Leora unabashedly refers to this appropriated object as "that Jesus-seeing hat" (31 )-even she recognizes Haze's potential as a holy visionary. At this point, however, the hero of Wise Blood deliberately, and vociferously, denies the existence of God! Mrs. Watts, despite her coarse cheapness, illuminates the "filaments" of truth which Haze cannot spark. Not unusual is O'Connor's irony of allowing a common whore to "see the light," where others cannot. Running like concurrent streams throughout the Georgia writer's fiction, the themes of sin and religious vision intermingle, often intersecting and fusing with one another. Indeed, O'Connor views the writer's task as one which both permits and contributes to distortions:

the writer who emphasizes the spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees . . . for him the fact that we are the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world doesn't mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him. (qtd. in Nisly 45)

Hazel Motes seems the quintessence of O'Connor's "sharper" "light of faith," for he insists upon a distorted view of the universe, despite his unrealized, yet "glaring" faith. Indeed, O'Connor's hero has no idea that he has exited one army only to be inducted into another service, God's.