The Displaced Person

Flannery O’Connor wrote “The Displaced Person” in the spring of 1954 as the final story in her collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The story draws on O’Connor and her mother’s experience of housing and employing the Matysiaks, a refugee family after World War II who arrived at Andalusia in the fall of 1953. Biographer Brad Gooch narrates that, in letters to friends, O’Connor “persisted in referring to Mr. Matysiak, like an allegorical character, by the flat moniker, ‘the D.P.,’ for ‘displaced person’” (239). Many parallels emerge between the situation of the Matysiaks, who were known as “displaced persons” along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees following World War II, and the story constructed in “The Displaced Person.” For example, the Guizacs reflect the Matysiaks. Mrs. Shortley mirrors Mrs. Stevens, a tenant at Andalusia. Father Flynn echoes Father John Toomey, a local priest in Milledgeville who worked with the Catholic Resettlement Commission and helped place refugee families in new homes. Finally, Astor and Sulk match Henry and Shot, two African American tenants who worked at Andalusia. After completing her first draft, O’Connor greatly expanded the story into a novella, which the Sewanee Review accepted for publication in its fall 1954 issue.

While O’Connor’s purpose for “The Displaced Person” perhaps lies in warning readers about becoming spiritually displaced, the story also contains several references to xenophobia as well as the institution of Catholicism. Many xenophobic comments toward the Guizacs, the new arrivals on Mrs. McIntyre’s farm from Poland, come from Mrs. Shortley. For example, in multiple instances, she derogatorily refers to the Guizacs as “foreigners” (O’Connor 204) and claims that “these people did not have advanced religion. There was no telling what all they believed since none of the foolishness had been reformed out of it” (198). Mrs. Shortley adds that to her, Europe is “mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station” (205), therefore defining the Guizacs as “from the devil” (203). As a result, Mrs. Shortley believes that, “with this kind of people, you had to be on the lookout every minute. She thought there ought to be a law against them” (205). While the Bible has variously been used to support as well as refute xenophobia, that text speaks in favor of showing kindness to displaced persons and specifically foreigners. Leviticus articulates God’s instructions concerning foreigners when he commands the Israelites to “not take advantage of foreigners who live among you in your land. Treat them like native-born Israelites, and love them as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19.33-34 NLT). Numerous other verses convey the same message of treating foreigners with kindness and empathy, including Exodus 22:21 and 23:9 and Deuteronomy 10:19. Additionally, “The Displaced Person” includes numerous references to Catholic tradition, including the “Pope of Rome” (201), “cherub[s]” (221), “Purgatory” (224), “sacraments” (229), and “Masses” (230). However, references to specific elements of Catholicism do not alter O’Connor’s purpose for the story in warning against becoming theologically displaced. Instead, scholar Bryan Giemza, for instance, deems it “remarkable” that O’Connor is “so sensitive to the presumptions of both Catholic and Protestant sectors of [her] society” (276), thus ensuring that references to Catholicism do not hinder the understanding of readers who may be uneducated in details of the Catholic tradition.

Mr. Guizac’s character first embodies O’Connor’s point of warning against spiritual displacement through parallelism to Jesus, supporting essayist Marshall Bruce Gentry’s claim that Mr. Guizac is “the clearest Christ symbol among O’Connor’s male characters” (68). Mrs. McIntyre immediately evokes imagery of Christ in direct relation to Mr. Guizac when she says, “But at last I’m saved! [...] That man is my salvation!” (O’Connor 203), which relates to Peter’s assertion about Jesus in Acts that “there is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4.12 NLT). As a result, scholar Margaret Earley Whitt concludes that “Mr. Guizac and Christ have merged in [Mrs. McIntyre’s] mind” (81), therefore also merging Mr. Guizac and Jesus in the minds of readers. Mr. Guizac aligns closest with Jesus through their shared positions as displaced people. Mrs. McIntyre observes to Father Flynn that “‘as far as I’m concerned,’ she said and glared at him fiercely, ‘Christ was just another D.P.’” (O’Connor 229). Due to the nature of his ministry, Jesus travels often throughout the Mediterranean region, never having a permanent home, which he acknowledges by telling his disciples, “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head” (Matt. 8.20 NLT). More profoundly, Mrs. McIntyre tells Father Flynn that Mr. Guizac “didn’t have to come here in the first place,” to which Father Flynn “smiled absently” and replies, “He came to redeem us” (O’Connor 226), never specifying whether “he” refers to Mr. Guizac, Jesus, or both. Ultimately, O’Connor perhaps uses Mr. Guizac as a potential Jesus-figure who serves as Mrs. McIntyre’s redeemer, providing her the opportunity to confront and overcome her spiritual detachment. However, the accident with the tractor that kills Mr. Guizac destroys Mrs. McIntyre’s opportunity to support him as a foreigner, as the Bible instructs, and therefore her chance for redemption, thus transforming Mrs. McIntyre into something of a displaced person like Mr. Guizac.

Mrs. McIntyre's transformation into a displaced person furthers O’Connor’s warning against spiritual displacement. Mrs. McIntyre reveals at least minor knowledge of Christian theology when she comments to Astor that “money is the root of all evil” (215), an almost exact quoting of the beginning of 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (NLT). However, meetings with Father Flynn demonstrate Mrs. McIntyre’s true feelings toward Christianity, contributing to literary scholar Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s description of Mrs. McIntyre as “spiritually blind” (105). To start one of their first meetings, Father Flynn “had been talking for ten minutes about Purgatory while Mrs. McIntyre squinted furiously at him from an opposite chair” (O’Connor 224), immediately exposing her displeasure toward conversations about Christianity. At a later point, she tells Father Flynn directly that “I’m not theological. I’m practical!” (225) and reflects in response to Father Flynn’s constant talk of religion that “Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother” (226). As a result, Mrs. McIntyre reveals that, instead of a connection to Christianity, she possesses, according to scholar and friend of O’Connor Robert Fitzgerald, a “managerial religion, the one by which daily business in a realm gets done” (26), thereby demonstrating Mrs. McIntyre’s complete rejection of Christianity.

After scorning the opportunity of redemption that the Jesus-figure Mr. Guizac gives Mrs. McIntyre, she begins her own transformation into a displaced person. In her final conversation with Father Flynn, Mrs. McIntyre “meant to tell him that her moral obligation was to her own people, to Mr. Shortley,” instead of an obligation to helping others equally and without prejudice, such as “Mr. Guizac who had merely arrived here to take advantage of whatever he could” (O’Connor 328). Once Mrs. McIntyre shuns helping Mr. Guizac in Christian compassion, Mr. Shortley notices that Mrs. McIntyre “looked as if something was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more fidgety, and not as sharp as she used to be. [...] The Pole never did anything the wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her” (230). The nervous and unstable Mrs. McIntyre ensures her fate as a displaced person when her rejection of Mr. Guizac culminates in not warning him about the large tractor drifting toward him down the incline, resulting in his being run over and killed. Afterward, she “came down with a nervous affliction” and eventually “lost her voice altogether. Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week [...] and [...] would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church” (235). As a result of rejecting the opportunity for redemption presented to her by Mr. Guizac and ultimately not preventing his tragic demise, Mrs. McIntyre becomes displaced both physically from everyone around her as well as theologically, thus creating the need for Father Flynn to explain Christianity to her. O’Connor therefore uses Mrs. McIntyre’s transformation to demonstrate and warn readers against the condemning downfalls of spiritual displacement.

Similarly, Mrs. Shortley becomes a displaced person despite her religious fervor due to her xenophobia toward the Guizacs, which provides her need for redemption. Mrs. Shortley’s inability to overcome her xenophobia against which the Bible speaks ultimately results in her downfall and displacement. For instance, Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28 ESV), thus positioning all people equally, regardless of their country of origin. Overhearing a conversation where Father Flynn attempts to convince Mrs. McIntyre to employ another Polish family, Mrs. Shortley, consumed by xenophobia, thinks to herself:

God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan! And she started from that day to read her Bible with a new attention. She poured over the Apocalypse and began to quote from the Prophets and before long she had come to a deeper understanding of her existence. She saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she had a special part in the plan because she was strong. She saw that the Lord God Almighty had created the strong people to do what had to be done and she felt that she would be ready when she was called. Right now she felt that her business was to watch the priest. (O’Connor 209)

Instead of using her heightened religious fervor as a chance to deliver herself from xenophobia, Mrs. Shortley’s determination to “watch the priest” (209) confirms her use of Christianity to further her xenophobic thoughts, thereby demonstrating a lack of genuine understanding of Christian theology. As a result, Mrs. Shortley’s hijacking of the Bible to support xenophobia exhibits her need for redemption.

Missing her first moment of redemption, Mrs. Shortley receives a second chance to redeem herself when she sees a vision of “fiery wheels with fierce dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around” (210). Mrs. Shortley’s vision matches that of the prophet Ezekiel, who receives a vision from God where he sees “living beings [that] looked like bright coals of fire or brilliant torches. [...] I saw four wheels touching the ground beside them. [...] The rims of the four wheels were tall and frightening, and they were covered with eyes all around” (Ezek. 1.13-18 NLT). God uses the prophet Ezekiel to call the Israelites to return to obedience in God, giving Ezekiel messages warning the people of God’s judgement. However, instead of recognizing her vision, which strikingly parallels Ezekiel’s, as a chance to restore herself, Mrs. Shortley persists in her xenophobia, believing that Father Flynn “come[s] to destroy” (O’Connor 210) when he visits Mrs. McIntyre. Next, Fitzgerald notes that “Mrs. Shortley’s final revelation [coincides] with the heart attack that kills her” (25). After forcing her family to leave out of xenophobic anger, Mrs. Shortley experiences a heart attack in the car where “there was a particular lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All of the vision in them might have been turned around, looking inside her. [...] All at once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her grip on what she had loosened” (O’Connor 213-214). Mrs. Shortley’s potential realization of the wrongness of her xenophobia occurs too late, and, having become physically displaced, she dies in her displacement. O’Connor confirms Mrs. Shortley as a displaced person by saying that her “family didn’t know that she had had a great experience or ever been displaced in a world from all that belonged to her” (214). While Mrs. Shortley never delivers herself despite multiple opportunities, O’Connor ultimately furthers her theological purpose of characterizing the downfalls of the spiritually displaced through Mrs. Shortley, who renounces overcoming her un-Christianly xenophobia despite her religious zeal.

In “The Displaced Person,” O’Connor connects the idea of physically displaced persons with spiritual displacement to warn readers against religious ineptitude. Scholar Sarah J. Fodor, partially quoting an early review of the story by Fitzgerald, says that, “Asserting that the ‘displaced person’ refers not only to the Polish refugee but also to Mrs. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyre, and many others among O’Connor’s characters, Fitzgerald concludes: ‘[Her stories] not only imply, they as good as state again and again, that estrangement from Christian plenitude is estrangement from the true country of man’” (28). As a result, O’Connor solidifies her determination to convey to readers the importance of practicing Christian doctrine. However, Baumgaertner compares Father Flynn and O’Connor by claiming that both “have a gargantuan task – [...] how to communicate the truths of the Church to a deaf and blind generation” (105-106), which emphasizes O’Connor’s struggle to aid her readers in understanding what she believes to be the importance of theological values. Ultimately, Fitzgerald concludes that “almost all [of O’Connor’s] people are displaced and some are either aware of it or become so. But [...] it is a religious condition, [...] common indeed to the world we live in” (30). Therefore, O’Connor displaces several characters in “The Displaced Person” to reveal their detachment from Christian theology, thus concretizing her warning for readers against the downfalls of spiritual displacement.

Works Cited

Baumgaertner, Jill Peláez. “Flannery O’Connor and the Cartoon Catechism.” 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. 102-16.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert. “The Countryside and the True Country.” Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor, edited by Harold Bloom, New York City, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 19-30.

Fodor, Sarah J. “Marketing Flannery O’Connor: Institutional Politics and Literary Evaluation.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, Athens, U of Georgia P, 1997, pp. 12-37.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Gender Dialogue in O’Connor.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 57-72.

Giemza, Bryan. Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 2013.

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

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

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Displaced Person.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 194-235.

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