The Comforts of Home

Just after completing her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor took advantage of the lull leading up to the novel’s release on February 8, 1960 to continue writing short stories. In the fall of 1959, during this period of several months, she wrote “The Comforts of Home,” which became the fifth story in Everything That Rises Must Converge, her posthumous second collection. Perhaps most surprising, the story includes a nymphomaniac, Star Drake, whose real name is Sarah Ham, as a central character. Sexual undertones throughout the story counter O’Connor’s typical exclusion of sex from her writing. But biographer Brad Gooch describes that when Robie Macauley, who became editor of Kenyon Review after John Crowe Ransom, published the story in the magazine “with an inch-high illustration of a naked Star Drake, Flannery fumed. ‘I was pretty disappointed and sick when I saw the illustration you stuck on my story,’ she angrily wrote him. ‘I don’t know what you’ve gained by it but you’ve lost a contributor’” (319). As a result, O’Connor never again submitted her work to Kenyon Review after “The Comforts of Home” appeared in its fall 1960 issue. O’Connor’s responses to her literary friends who suggested sexual implications in her stories also contained a naïve anger, showing O’Connor’s innocence as well as the depth of her piety. For instance, when an acquaintance wrote to O’Connor about “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and suggested a lesbian reading of the story, O’Connor shot back that “as for lesbianism I regard that as any other form of uncleanness. Purity is the twentieth century’s word but it is the most mysterious of the virtues” (319).

While sexual undertones saturate Star Drake, a possible meaning of “The Comforts of Home” generates Christian theological significance. Thomas’s mother embodies the Golden Rule, which represents the perfection of the Bible as a sacred text. Jesus instructs his disciples that “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matt. 7.12 ESV), an instruction known as the Golden Rule because it “should come naturally for believers who love God” (ESV Study Bible, 1834). Thomas’s mother embodies the aims of the Golden Rule by caring for Star despite her nymphomania, which Thomas’s mother describes as “‘just another way she’s unfortunate,’ his mother said. ‘So awful, so awful. She told me the name of it but I forget what it is but it’s something she can’t help. Something she was born with. Thomas,’ she said and put her hand to her jaw, ‘suppose it were you?’” (“Home,” 384-385). Thomas’s mother helps Star regardless of her shortcomings, obeying the Bible’s instructions to “do good and share what you have” (Heb. 13.16 ESV), to “look not only to [your] own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2.4 ESV), and to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6.2 ESV). Thomas’s mother justifies her actions by saying, “‘Think of the poor girl, Thomas,’ his mother said, ‘with nothing. Nothing. And we have everything’” (“Home,” 394). As a result, Thomas’s mother provides generously for Star because she would want someone to provide generously for her, or more so for Thomas, in their times of need. Through Thomas’s mother, O’Connor presents the Bible as a perfect text.

Unlike his mother, Thomas’s inability to overlook Star’s unfavorable qualities characterizes him as a representation of the flaws of humanity that detract from O’Connor’s elevation of the Bible. Thomas first comments that he has inherited “his mother’s love of good without her tendency to pursue it” (388). However, the disciple John asks, “If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person? Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions” (1 John 3.17-18 NLT). Therefore, Thomas’s inaction regarding Star nullifies his supposed desire to do good and aligns him with imperfect humanity. As critic Sarah Gordon claims, Thomas contributes to a “family of sinners” among O’Connor’s characters who relate “human frailty [...] to the emphasis on original sin” (112) in O’Connor’s work. Regarding Star, Thomas concludes that “he needed nothing to tell him he was in the presence of the very stuff of corruption” (“Home,” 390), showing his inability to overlook Star’s “psychopathic personality, not insane enough for the asylum, not criminal enough for the jail, not stable enough for society” (388). Therefore, Thomas’s lack of compassion aligns himself against the declaration of James, Jesus’s half-brother, that “pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you” (James 1.27 NLT). Literary scholar Margaret Earley Whitt explains that, in this way, Thomas “does not realize the cost and responsibility of Christian goodness” (137). Therefore, Thomas’s distinction from his mother’s goodness in refusing to help Star marks him as a representation of flawed humanity.

Like Thomas, Star, whom literary academic Robert Donahoo describes as the “embodiment of natural impulses and desires” (99), also represents the imperfection of humankind through her foolish manipulation. Thomas identifies her as the stuff of “blameless corruption because there was no responsible faculty behind it. He was looking at the most unendurable form of innocence. Absently he asked himself what the attitude of God was to this, meaning if possible to adopt it” (“Home,” 390). God shows understanding of the human plight against sin when David, king of Israel and Judah, laments, “How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart?” and asks God to “cleanse me from these hidden faults” (Ps. 19.12 NLT), thereby showing God’s compassion toward truly innocent people who inevitably sin. However, the Bible instead emphasizes resisting foolishness, explaining that innocence does not justify foolishness when the author of Proverbs says that, because “you cannot separate fools from their foolishness” (Prov. 27.22 NLT), “fools [will] die for lack of sense” (Prov. 10.21 ESV). Star confirms her foolish manipulation, specifically of Thomas’s mother, when Thomas threatens to “have [her] put back in jail,” and she replies, ‘“You and who else?’ she said and drew back in the car as if she did not intend to get out at all” (“Home,” 391). Star’s challenge of Thomas confirms his accusation that “she’s nothing but a little slut. She makes fun of you behind your back. She means to get everything she can get out of you and you are nothing to her,” to which his mother responds that she “know[s] I’m nothing but an old bag of wind to her” (392). By taking advantage of Thomas’s mother, the foolishly manipulative Star violates Paul’s instruction that “if you are a thief, quit stealing. Instead, use your hands for good hard work” (Eph. 4.28 NLT). Through further representing the flaws of humankind, Star degrades O’Connor’s elevation of the Bible as a perfect text.

Furthermore, Thomas’s idolization of comfort and his father’s role as a Satan-figure accentuate the separation between imperfect humanity and O’Connor’s perfect Bible. Thomas first comments that “his own life was made bearable by the fruits of his mother’s saner virtues – by the well-regulated house she kept and the excellent meals she served” (“Home,” 386). Thomas demonstrates the depth of the importance he places on comfort, thereby defining it as an idol, when he justifies telling the sheriff about Star by saying that “he was doing what he was doing for [his mother’s] own good, to rid her of a parasite that would ruin their peace” (401). Because Thomas exclusively cares about protecting his own comfort, scholar Anthony S. Magistrale concludes, “the comfortable order of Thomas’s microcosm is abruptly shattered by the entrance of Star Drake” (58), emphasizing Thomas’s desire to protect his comfort by ridding the house of Star. In Exodus, God condemns idolatry when he says that he “will not tolerate [his people’s] affection for any other gods” (Ex. 20.5 NLT). Expanding the definition of idolatry to include conceptual obsessions, such as Thomas’s obsession over his comfort, Paul demands that the people “put to death therefore what is earthly to you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3.5 ESV). Therefore, Thomas’s protection of his comfort reaches the level of idolatry when considering Paul’s assertion that “God is [...] the source of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1.3 NLT). As a result, O’Connor concludes that Thomas’s “own evil” is “putting comfort before charity” (The Habit of Being, 343). Ultimately, Thomas’s idolization of comfort represents the division between humankind as imperfect and the Bible as perfect.

The memory of Thomas’s father as the story’s devil-figure further achieves O’Connor’s purpose in elevating the Bible. Aggravated with his mother, Thomas determines that “it was at these times that Thomas truly mourned the death of his father [...] The old man would have had none of this foolishness” (“Home,” 387). Consequently, the memory of “his father took up a squatting position in his mind” (393), influencing Thomas with a scheming character “untouched by useless compassion,” who, in Thomas’s place, would “have pulled the necessary strings” to be rid of Star (387). In this way, Thomas’s father mirrors Satan, whom Jesus describes as “a murderer from the beginning, [who] has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8.44 ESV). For instance, Thomas knows he should ignore the dangerous memory of his father:

Several ideas for getting rid of her had entered his head but each of these had been suggestions whose moral tone indicated that they had come from a mind akin to his father’s, and Thomas had rejected them. He could not get the girl locked up again until she did something illegal. The old man would have been able with no qualms at all to get her drunk and send her out on the highway in his car, meanwhile notifying the highway patrol of her presence on the road, but Thomas considered this below his moral stature. Suggestions continued to come to him, each more outrageous than the last. (“Home,” 398)

Despite Thomas’s weariness toward his father’s memory, his father controls the story’s final scene when “Thomas, as if his arm were guided by his father, caught [the pocketbook] first and snatched the gun. [...] Fire! the old man yelled. Thomas fired” (403). Thomas’s father’s orchestration of his wife’s death affirms him as a Satan-figure. Thomas’s mother’s death, therefore, accentuates the distinction between herself, whose good conduct elevates the Bible, and Thomas, Star, and Thomas’s father, who represent humanity’s imperfection. As a result of the Satan-figure vanquishing O’Connor’s representation of the Bible as a perfect text, O’Connor achieves her potential theological purpose in elevating the Bible above imperfect humans, ultimately defining the Bible as wholly irreproachable.

Works Cited

Donahoo, Robert. “Beholding the Handmaids: Catholic Womanhood and ‘The Comforts of Home.’” Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction, edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede, Mercer UP, 2007, pp. 79-101.

ESV Study Bible: English Standard Version. Translated by Crossway, ESV text ed., Wheaton, Crossway Bibles, 2011.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.

Gordon, Sarah. “‘The Crop’: Limitation, Restraint, and Possibility.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 96-120.

Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Translated by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.

Magistrale, Anthony S. “O’Connor’s ‘The Comforts of Home.’” The Explicator, vol. 43, no. 1, fall 1984, pp. 57-60. MLA International Bibliography, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1984.11483845.

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Comforts of Home.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 383-404.

---. The Habit of Being. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, New York City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.