Article: The saving rape: Flannery O'Connor and patriarchal religion.

"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 ...

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