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Article: The saving rape: Flannery O'Connor and patriarchal religion.
- Article from:
- The Mississippi Quarterly
- Article date:
- December 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Mississippi State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Batter my heart, three-personed God" - so begins Donne's Holy Sonnet 14, the best-known literary text in English that figures spiritual redemption as a purifying sexual assault:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Nothing in O'Connor quite so flagrantly bears out the feminist theologian Mary Daly's assertion that "[t]he myths and symbols of Christianity are essentially sexist" - which is to say "rapist."(1) Certainly none of O'Connor's women - neither Mrs. May nor Mrs. Turpin nor Joy/Hulga Hopewell - invites assault. Still, it is the author's strategy in ...