Flannery O’Connor wrote almost all of her fiction at Andalusia, a dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived with her mother from 1951 until her death in 1964 at thirty-nine. The farm is open to the public, it is about four hours from Dorchester County, and it is the single most important place you can stand if you want to understand where the Southern Gothic grotesque came from. This is a guide to visiting it, and to what it explains.
Who was Flannery O’Connor?
Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah in 1925, the only child of a Catholic family in a Protestant state. She grew up on Lafayette Square, moved to Milledgeville as a teenager, went north to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then to New York and Connecticut, and was on her way to the life of a literary expatriate when, in late 1950, at twenty-five, she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father. She came home to Georgia to be looked after and never left again.
In the thirteen years that followed she wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and the thirty-one stories collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). That is a small body of work. It is also, story for story, the most influential American short fiction of the twentieth century, and nearly all of it was written in a downstairs bedroom at Andalusia, in the mornings, on a typewriter facing the wall so she wouldn’t look out the window.
What is Andalusia?
Where is Andalusia Farm?
About four miles north of downtown Milledgeville on U.S. 441, at 2628 North Columbia Street. It was a working dairy farm of some five hundred acres, owned by O’Connor’s mother Regina’s family and run by Regina with hired help, with a white two-story farmhouse set back from the road under big trees, a pond, outbuildings, pasture, and a great many birds.
The birds matter. O’Connor raised peafowl, dozens of them, and wrote one of her best essays about it. The peacock’s scream and its absurd, sacred tail show up throughout her fiction as the image of grace arriving where it isn’t wanted. There are peafowl at Andalusia today; the foundation that runs the farm keeps them, and you’ll hear them before you see them.
Can you visit Flannery O’Connor’s house?
Yes. Andalusia opened to the public in 2003 and since 2017 has been owned and operated by Georgia College & State University, O’Connor’s alma mater, as a historic site and museum. The main house is furnished as it was, including the downstairs bedroom she wrote in, with her crutches by the bed and the typewriter on the desk. The grounds, the pond, the barn and the outbuildings are open, there is an interpretive center with exhibits, and admission is modest. Hours vary by season, so check Georgia College’s Andalusia page before you drive; it’s closed some weekdays. Plan on two hours if you read the exhibits, half a day if you walk the farm.
Two other stops complete the pilgrimage. Memory Hill Cemetery in downtown Milledgeville holds her grave, beside her parents, under a plain stone. And in Savannah, the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home at 207 East Charlton Street, on Lafayette Square, is a small, well-kept house museum where she lived until she was thirteen; it’s about two and a half hours from Dorchester County down I-95 and makes a shorter day.
How did Andalusia shape the Southern Gothic grotesque?
Here is the thing most visitors don’t expect: the farm is not Gothic at all. It’s pretty. Open fields, a pond with ducks, a comfortable white house. There’s no decay. O’Connor’s grotesque didn’t come from the landscape. It came from the people who passed through it, and from a theological conviction that the world is fallen and grace is violent.
The people are the easy part to trace. Regina O’Connor ran the farm with a series of tenant families and hired hands, and Flannery, confined to the house by her illness, watched them all. The displaced persons, the dairymen, the farm wives with opinions about everybody, the salesmen who came up the drive: they are in the stories under thin paint. “The Displaced Person” is about a Polish refugee family Regina actually hired. “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” are set on farms that are Andalusia with the name filed off. Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” ranking every person in a doctor’s waiting room by class, is a Milledgeville type O’Connor had sat across from a hundred times.
The harder part is what she did with them. O’Connor’s grotesques, the Misfit, Hazel Motes, Hulga with her wooden leg, are not deformed to frighten you. They are deformed because, in her Catholic reading of the world, everyone is, and most people have simply arranged not to notice. Her stories strip the arrangement away, usually by violence, and in the moment after the violence the character sees clearly for the first time. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a vain, foolish woman right up until the gun, and then for one sentence she isn’t. That sentence is the whole genre.
So Andalusia explains the grotesque by showing you the ordinary. Stand on the porch, look at the drive, and imagine the Misfit’s car coming up it. O’Connor could, every morning, from a bedroom she couldn’t leave. We go into the trope more fully at What Is Southern Gothic?, and into how it differs from the European monster at Southern Gothic vs. Traditional Gothic.
Making the trip from the Lowcountry
From St. George it’s about four hours west on I-26 and I-20, then south on U.S. 441 to Milledgeville. The sensible plan is an overnight: Andalusia and Memory Hill one afternoon, the Georgia College campus and downtown Milledgeville (the old state capital, with its own considerable ghost trade) the next morning. If you’d rather stay in South Carolina, Savannah is closer and the childhood home is a fine substitute, and you can pair it with the haunted places within a day of Charleston on the way back.
If you came here for O’Connor
Her method, an ordinary place, ordinary people, and one moment where the arrangement comes off, is the method behind every County Line Confidential dispatch. The one that owes her most is The Grits Judge, which takes the most ordinary event in Dorchester County, a festival cook-off, and sets one chair at the table that shouldn’t be there. The Second Congregation, a homecoming Sunday with too many people in the pews, is the other. From there, start at Almost Here and read forward.
For the writers who came before and after her, see Top 10 Southern Gothic Authors to Read.
Sources
- Georgia College & State University, Andalusia: The Home of Flannery O’Connor (hours, admission, history).
- Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (2009).
- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (1969), especially “The King of the Birds” and “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”