Short Story Analysis: “The Displaced Person,” by Flannery O’Connor, Post #2

This is second post on the short story analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s, “The Displaced Person.”  You can read Post #1 here.  

 

The trajectory of the story would seemingly be headed for the displacing of the southern farm help with the European immigrants except that toward the middle of Section II, O’Connor introduces a twist that changes the direction of the story.  The disparity between the immigrant’s culture and the native culture gets introduced and shocks Mrs. McIntyre.  While watching over the happenings on the farm, she noticed from a distance Mr. Guizac give a photograph to Sulk, one of the young African-American men.  She walked over to him.

 

He didn’t see her and he paused and dipped his knees and leaned over his hand, his tongue describing little circles. He had a photograph. He lifted one finger and traced it lightly over the surface of the picture. Then he looked up and saw her and seemed to freeze, his mouth in a halfgrin, his finger lifted.

 

“Why haven’t you gone to the field?” she asked.

 

He raised one foot and opened his mouth wider while the hand with the photograph edged toward his back pocket.

 

“What’s that?” she said.

 

“It ain’t nothing,” he muttered and handed it to her automatically.

 

It was a photograph of a girl of about twelve in a white dress. She had blond hair with a wreath in it and she looked forward out of light eyes that were bland and composed. “Who is this child?” Mrs. McIntyre asked.

 

“She his cousin,” the boy said in a high voice.

 

“Well what are you doing with it?” she asked.

 

“She going to mah me,” he said in an even higher voice.

 

“Marry you!” she shrieked.

 

“I pays half to get her over here,” he said. “I pays him three dollar a week. She bigger now. She his cousin. She don’t care who she mah she so glad to get away from there.” The high voice seemed to shoot up like a nervous jet of sound and then fall flat as he watched her face. Her eyes were the color of blue granite when the glare falls on it, but she was not looking at him. She was looking down the road where the distant sound of the tractor could be heard.

 

“I don’t reckon she goin to come nohow,” the boy murmured.

 

“I’ll see that you get every cent of your money back,” she said in a toneless voice and turned and walked off, holding the photograph bent in two. There was nothing about her small stiff figure to indicate that she was shaken.

 

Mr. Guziac has made a deal with Sulk that for some money he can marry Mr. Guziac’s cousin, and so get his cousin over to the United States.  What shocks Mrs. McIntyre is not the deceit of the immigration laws nor the borderline prostituting of the young girl, but the fact that a young white girl is being married to an uneducated, black farm hand.  This is a culture shock, the meeting of two different worldviews.  She confronts Mr. Guziac. 

 

“I want to talk to you,” she said and beckoned him to the edge of the thicket where it was shady. He took off the cap and followed her, smiling, but his smile faded when she turned and faced him. Her eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider’s leg, had drawn together ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under the red bangs into the bridge of her nose. She removed the bent picture from her pocket and handed it to him silently. Then she stepped back and said,

 

“Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!”

 

I’m going to go through this dialogue in detail, since so many of the immigration themes arise from it.  Yes, there is racism here, but the racism is part of the cultural divide.  This is the pre-Civil Rights South, after all, and Sulk is not even an educated, cultured, and suave Sidney Poitier type.  He is an uneducated farm hand.  Mrs. McIntyre is reacting to the cultural divide between the immigrant’s worldview and hers.  Mr. Guziac tries to explain.

 

He took the photograph with a slowly returning smile. “My cousin,” he said. “She twelve here. First Communion. Six-ten now.”

 

He means sixteen in his broken English, but that is still awfully young girl to be brought to a foreign country and married into an outside the mainstream relationship.  And it only confirms Mrs. McIntyre’s presumptions. 

 

Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face was red and bristled with short yellow hairs. His eyes were like two bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been mended over the nose with haywire. His whole face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, beginning slowly and then speaking faster until she ended breathless in the middle of a word, “that nigger cannot have a white wife from Europe. You can’t talk to a nigger that way. You’ll excite him and besides it can’t be done. Maybe it can be done in Poland but it can’t be done here and you’ll have to stop. It’s all foolishness. That nigger don’t have a grain of sense and you’ll excite…”

 

That she now looks “at him as if she were seeing him for the first time” is an important transition in the story.  Until now she had reaped the benefits of an immigrant but once there is a cultural divide between the two the perception of the immigrant changes.  Her emotional bond has changed.  Mr. Guziac tries to explain to no avail.

 

“She in camp three year,” he said.

 

“Your cousin,” she said in a positive voice, “cannot come over here and marry one of my Negroes.”

 

“She six-ten year,” he said. “From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die. She wait in camp. Three camp.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket and fingered through it and took out another picture of the same girl, a few years older, dressed in something dark and shapeless. She was standing against a wall with a short woman who apparently had no teeth. “She mamma,” he said, pointing to the woman. “She die in two camp.”

 

“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre said, pushing the picture back at him, “I will not have my niggers upset. I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you but not without them and if you mention this girl to Sulk again, you won’t have a job with me. Do you understand?”

 

His face showed no comprehension. He seemed to be piecing all these words together in his mind to make a thought.

 

Mrs. McIntyre remembered Mrs. Shortley’s words: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases,” and her face regained the look of shocked wrath she had begun with. “I cannot understand how a man who calls himself a Christian,” she said, “could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!” and she shook her head and looked into the distance with a pained blue gaze.

 

Notice the disparity between the narrator’s telling of Mr. Guziac’s lack of comprehension and Mrs. McIntyre now believing the anecdotal stereotype of discrimination that comes from innuendo: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases.”  Once the cultural gulf manifests, the taking on of prejudices come easier.

 

After a second he shrugged and let his arms drop as if he were tired. “She no care black,” he said. “She in camp three year.”

 

I think this shows the extreme condition of Mr. Guziac and his family.  I don’t think most immigrants would go as far as Mr. Guziac, but in the case of refuges there is a desperation that makes them suppress cultural barriers.  My Italian immigrant parents would not have done this, but they weren’t in a desperate situation.  Mrs. McIntyre becomes hardened.

 

Mrs. McIntyre felt a peculiar weakness behind her knees. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I don’t want to have to speak to you about this again. If I do, you’ll have to find another place yourself. Do you understand?”

 

The patched face did not say. She had the impression that he didn’t see her there. “This is my place,” she said. “I say who will come here and who won’t.”

 

“Ya,” he said and put back on his cap.

 

“I am not responsible for the world’s misery,” she said as an afterthought.

 

“Ya,” he said.

 

Her afterthought—perhaps the central question of the story—rejects the obligation to solve issues that go beyond her sphere of responsibility.  To what responsibility is she accountable?  Is there a limit to her responsibility or is she obligated to go beyond local purview? 

 

On these questions we will come to a conclusion as we walk through the third and final section of the story. 

###

Now that we’ve seen O’Connor set the story up of the Displaced Person arriving at a Southern farm, the conflicts his success creates with the long established farm hands, the tension within Mrs. McIntyre to have a prospering enterprise, and the cultural shock created by the foreigner’s different values, we could wonder where O’Connor could take the story.  She could let the long held farm hands go and replace them with even more hard working immigrants.  That would cause the farm to prosper.  Or, she could let the Guizacs go and return to the struggle of making the farm prosperous.  Both present a moral dilemma.  Letting the long held farm hands go breaks a trust that southern plantation owners had for their dependent help.  Letting the Guizacs go pushes them into a dire uncertain, condition.  The cultural shock of Guizac offering a black farm hand his niece for marriage tips the scale.  O’Connor has Mrs. McIntyre decide to let Mr. Guizac go.  Section III of the story starts with Mrs. McIntyre inviting the priest over for a talk where she’ll tell him Mr. Guizac has not worked out. 

The priest, with his long bland face supported on one finger, had been talking for ten minutes about Purgatory while Mrs. McIntyre squinted furiously at him from an opposite chair. They were drinking ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony jingling its harness. There is no moral obligation to keep him, she was saying under her breath, there is absolutely no moral obligation. Suddenly she lurched up and her voice fell across his brogue like a drill into a mechanical saw. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not theological. I’m practical! I want to talk to you about something practical!”

 

“Arrrrrrr,” he groaned, grating to a halt.

 

She had put at least a finger of whiskey in her own ginger ale so that she would be able to endure his full-length visit and she sat down awkwardly, finding the chair closer to her than she had expected. “Mr. Guizac is not satisfactory,” she said.

 

The old man raised his eyebrows in mock wonder.

 

“He’s extra,” she said. “He doesn’t fit in. I have to have somebody who fits in.” The priest carefully turned his hat on his knees. He had a little trick of waiting a second silently and then swinging the conversation back into his own paths. He was about eighty. She had never known a priest until she had gone to see this one on the business of getting her the Displaced Person. After he had got her the Pole, he had used the business introduction to try to convert her—just as she had supposed he would.

 

“Give him time,” the old man said. “He’ll learn to fit in. Where is that beautiful birrrrd of yours?” he asked and then said, “Arrrrr, I see him!” and stood up and looked out over the lawn where the peacock and the two hens were stepping at a strained attention, their long necks ruffled, the cock’s violent blue and the hens’ silver-green, glinting in the late afternoon sun.

The priest, Fr. Flynn, had been to the farm before and had been captivated by Mrs. McIntyre’s pet peafowl, especially the dramatically beautiful male peacock.  Here he looks for the bird, sees it, and is astonished to its beauty once again. 

I think it’s time to introduce two motifs which blossom in the story in this scene.  There is the motif of Catholicism as manifested by the Polish Catholicism of the Guizacs and by the priest who sponsored their immigration.  And there is the motif of the peacock, which is right in the opening scene following Mrs. Shortley when Fr. Flynn first brings the Guizacs to Mrs. McIntyre’s farm. Now in Part III we see Mrs. McIntyre trying to explain to Fr. Flynn why Mr. Guizac is not working out.

 

“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre continued, bearing down with a flat steady voice, “is very efficient. I’ll admit that. But he doesn’t understand how to get on with my niggers and they don’t like him. I can’t have my niggers run off. And I don’t like his attitude. He’s not the least grateful for being here.”

 

The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it, ready to make his escape. “Arrrr, I must be off,” he murmured.

 

“I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I’d have to let Mr. Guizac go,” she said and stood up again.

 

He turned then and looked her in the face. “He has nowhere to go,” he said. Then he said, “Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t turn him out for a trifle!” and without waiting for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice.

 

She smiled angrily and said, “I didn’t create this situation, of course.”

On the one hand, Catholicism adds to the culture shock against the predominant Protestantism of the Southern culture.  O’Connor has the priest explaining Purgatory to an oblivious Protestant though unreligious woman.  In addition, and more importantly, Catholicism acts as the moral core of the story.  Fr. Flynn will lay down something very heavy on Mrs. McIntyre’s conscience.  “He has nowhere to go,” the priest says.  What is implied here is Catholic social doctrine concerning the plight of immigrants and migrants.  “I didn’t create this situation,” Mrs. McIntyre retorts, defending her position with utilitarian logic.  The priest presses the moral obligation while Mrs. McIntyre pushes for an out, perhaps a legitimate out but one that pricks at conscience.  What is Mrs. McIntyre’s duty here? 

And then the peacock displays his plumage.

 

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

What does Fr. Flynn mean when he says “Christ will come like that”? For Mrs. McIntyre the mention of Christ in the conversation seemed out of place.  She continues with her utilitarian logic. 

 

Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”

 

The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured.

 

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said, giving him a hard look.

 

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

What Fr. Flynn was talking about was the peacock displaying his plumage in all his glory.  He identifies it with the Transfiguration where Christ revealed His glorified state.  At the very moment when Mrs. McIntyre’s moral obligation was about to be discussed, O’Connor brings in the Christ symbol of the story, the peacock.  And then Fr. Flynn and Mrs. McIntyre talk past each other:

 

“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word. The old man smiled absently.

 

“He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

Mrs. McIntyre, of course, is referring to Mr. Guizac as not having to come to the United States or at least to her farm while Fr. Flynn explains why Christ came to earth.  The “he” in the conversation refers to both Mr. Guizac and Christ and thereby conflates the two.  Rejection of Mr. Guizac becomes rejection of Christ.