A Circle in the Fire (Criticism)

Criticism

Candyce Norvell

Norvell is an independent educational writer who specializes in English and literature. In this essay, Norvell discusses the lack of a hero in "A Circle in the Fire."

Think of the body of Flannery O'Connor's fiction as a patchwork quilt. The quilt's backing — the large piece that underlies the patches and holds them together — is O'Connor's much-written-about Catholic theology. Each patch, cut from a cloth with a unique pattern, represents an individual story. Yet all the patches share something in common: the stitches that crawl across the squares are most irregular. Where they should march in a neat line, they jut unpredictably. They are tiny and puckered here, and long and loopy there. They are irreparably crooked and contorted. They are O'Connor's characters, and they are all villains and ne'er-do-wells. It has been said that in all of O'Connor's stories and her two novels, there is not a hero to be found.

"A Circle in the Fire" is not one of O'Connor's most written-about stories and is not considered one of her masterpieces. But as an illustration of her ability to craft a powerful, affecting tale without a hero — or even a single sympathetic character — it serves as well as any other story.

If "A Circle in the Fire" had a traditional structure, its main character, Mrs. Cope, would be its hero. She would be the good woman beleaguered by bad boys. She would contend with them wisely and bravely, and she would either be victorious (a comedy) or endure defeat with grace (a tragedy), comforted by the knowledge that she had fought with honor. Win or lose, a hero is somehow changed for the better by the struggle; he or she gains wisdom or compassion or some other virtue through the events of the story.

In this story, of course, it is none of the above. Mrs. Cope is its main character; she is not its hero. She demonstrates neither wisdom nor courage. She has neither understanding of human nature nor of human relationships. She fails to see that while she has authority on the farm; the boys have all the power. She assumes that her superior wealth makes her superior in wisdom, and she has no compassion for the many who have less than she does. Worse than all of this, Mrs. Cope refuses to learn from experience or to be changed by her struggle with the boys. She persists in her self-satisfied ignorance even as the other characters in the story recognize that she is creating the conditions for her own ruin. Mrs. Cope has none of the qualities of a hero.

Mrs. Pritchard, on the other hand, has one such quality: she is as savvy as Mrs. Cope is dense. Her assessment of the boys and their intentions is on target at every turn. She looks at the facts — the boys' ages, their poverty, their fearless sullenness — and makes faultless predictions about what kinds of behavior these combined elements will produce.

Yet Mrs. Pritchard does not qualify as a hero. Although she possesses wisdom, she does not value it. A hero would be eager to use wisdom as a weapon to overcome challenges. Mrs. Pritchard is a prophet of doom who is convinced that challenges cannot be overcome. She enjoys her wisdom for the sense of superiority it gives her over Mrs. Cope and because it allows her to relish the certainty of Mrs. Cope's coming ruin — hardly heroic impulses.

Mrs. Cope's daughter, Sally Virginia, makes a halfhearted stab at heroic action. Having watched and listened to her mother's mishandling of the boys, Sally is finally overcome by frustration. Arming herself with two pistols, she sets off to find and deal with the invaders. But the pistols are only toys, and Sally is just a child. When she finds the boys, her bravado melts into fear, and she hides and watches them instead of confronting them. Even when she knows they are about to set fire to the woods, she does nothing. For a time, she is not even able to run.

At twelve, Sally is already smarter than her mother. But her idea that she can "handle" the boys is as much a fantasy as her mother's idea that they will go away of their own accord. Sally is only a child, and it seems unfair to place the burden of conquering three teenage boys on her shoulders. But children can certainly be heroes, and often are in literature. If she had somehow followed through on her desire to confront the boys, she would have been heroic even if she had failed to save her home from them. It is her lack of courage and determination that deny her the hero's role. As she realizes at the end of the story, she is very much like the mother she despises.

That leaves the boys, Powell, Garfield, and W. T. They cannot be the story's heroes because they are its villains. They invade Mrs. Cope's farm, camp there against her will, and respond to every request and command by becoming increasingly destructive. They are juvenile delinquents who finally commit a serious crime that destroys Mrs. Cope's property, wealth, and livelihood. If they had acted in the service of some ideal or cause, the boys might be seen as antiheroes in the tradition of Robin Hood. But their actions are purely impulsive, selfish, and destructive.

The boys are neither heroes nor antiheroes, but in O'Connor's judgment they are, of all the story's characters, most deserving of mercy. In a biblical allusion that echoes the story's title, O'Connor ends the story with the narrator reporting that Sally "stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them."

In this image, the boys are not invaders or delinquents or criminals but "prophets." In the Old Testament world that O'Connor has conjured up, prophets were righteous men who warned the worldly of divine punishments to come if they did not change their ways. While the fire consumes everything around them — everything that they longed for and could not have — the boys are described as dancing in "the circle the angel had cleared for them." Only the boys, of all the story's characters, receive divine favor and protection. The irony of this is heightened by the fact that Mrs. Cope has repeatedly reminded those around her that she thanks God every day for all He does for her. Further, when she asked the boys if they too thanked God every day, they responded with silence. O'Connor's God, it seems, looks at something other than people's words when deciding their fates.

That the story's cast of characters is bereft of a hero is not surprising. That there are a few among them the author deems worth saving is a little more so. But the real shock, at first, is whom she chooses to save. In a story populated with ignorant, pathetic people, in the end what distinguishes the boys is not that they are the worst of a bad lot but that they alone may be redeemable. O'Connor draws readers in not by giving them a hero who represents all the best of humanity but by shaking up their notions about who represents the worst.

Source: Candyce Norvell, Critical Essay on "A Circle in the Fire," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2004.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Complete Stories (1971), by Flannery O'Connor, contains all thirty-one of O'Connor's short stories and has been reprinted more than forty times. The book includes two of her best-known stories: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge."
• Wise Blood (1952) is one of only two novels O'Connor wrote. It is a piercing satire of humanism in general and American society in particular. The book was made into a film starring and directed by John Huston.
• Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1982) includes all forty-one of Welty's published short stories. Like O'Connor, Welty was a twentieth-century southern writer and was recognized primarily for her short fiction. Elements of humor and southern gothic style appear in both writers' work, yet their sensibilities were quite different.
• Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950) gathers forty-two stories — far from a complete collection — by the man many consider the best southern writer of the twentieth century and one of the greatest writers of his time. Known for his use of stream-of-consciousness style and symbolism, Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers, is a critically acclaimed novel by a writer who was O'Connor's contemporary and, like O'Connor, a native of Georgia. It is the story of John Singer, a deaf-mute living in a southern mill town in the 1930s.
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee, is the story of eight-year-old Scout and her older brother Jem growing up in the South during the Great Depression. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize.