“The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant
and hostile. “You been whipped,” it said, “by me” and then it added, bearing
down on each word, “and I’m PURE Pitts.” (545)
Filling this story with vivid imagery, O’Connor allows us to
envision each event in our mind as if we were a part of it. From the very beginning, we are told of Mr.
Fortune’s “battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, the red corrugated lake, and the
black line of woods which appeared at both ends of the view to walk across the
water and continue along the edge of the fields.” (525). But perhaps the most
important sight in this story is how Mr. Fortune views his granddaughter, Mary
Fortune. Despite the seventy years that separates them in age, Mr. Fortune is
convinced that Mary is his splitting image both inside and out and most
importantly to him, he believes they are similar in the way they think. “He had
seen that even at the age of one day she bore his unmistakable likeness.”
(527).
As Mary begins to turn against her grandfather, we can also
see that the imagery in the story begins to turn darker. Mr. Fortune began to
have hallucinations of someone being wounded behind the woods and the trees
were bathing in blood. He awoke to an
empty room, one that was unfamiliar to him because Mary had always been there
to great him in the morning, perhaps symbolizing that as his granddaughter
started to drift away from his life, he himself became empty and had nothing
else to live for. Before the brawl between the two, we are brought into a scene
that is threatened with a storm brewing, helping set the mood for something
gloomy to follow.
I felt that the quote I provided was the most important
image in O’Connor’s work. I feel that he was looking into a mirror image,
needing to beat out the Pitts that had entered his body and go back to seeing the
world the "Fortune way". He had allowed his own greed to somehow get the best of
him. By using the word "it" when he sees
Mary over him, we can tell that he is no longer looking into the eyes of the
granddaughter that he has loved since day one, but instead I believe that he
sees a problem within himself that he must fix, sacrificing his granddaughter
for his own greed and pride.
Discussion Question: How does Mr. Fortune resemble Mr. Pitts throughout the story? Is imagery truly effective in helping reflect the twists and turns as they happen?
Discussion Question: How does Mr. Fortune resemble Mr. Pitts throughout the story? Is imagery truly effective in helping reflect the twists and turns as they happen?
To me, "A View of the Woods" is, in part, O'Connor's ironic commentary on the tension between urban modernity and rural tradition. Mr. Fortune's passive anxiety concerning Mary, and his disgust for the rest of the Pitts family, spring from a need to assert his modernity, his connection to the industrial and the practical. As Ben suggested, the story of Fortune's fall is, in a way, the story of his failure to completely distance himself from Pittsian ruralness. We observe that Mr. Fortune's ability to assert his difference from and superiority to the Pitts family- and what they symbolize to him- depends in no small part upon Mary's behavior and attitudes. To Mr. Fortune, Mary is a symbol of his own rejection of Pitts, and his commitment to progress. At several instances in the story, Mary's concessions and shows of loyalty to Pitts wound Mr. Fortune because these concessions seem to him to be his own. Confronting Mary at the story's climax, he seems to be confronting what he desperately wishes to escape, but knows at last that he can't. This is why he responds so violently to Mary's assertion that she's "PURE Pitts." Mary ceases to symbolize Fortune's triumph over Pitts, and becomes instead that part of Pitts which Fortune sees in himself. Fortune, the modern man, the businessman, the sire of progress and commerce, cannot escape something somehow backwards in himself, and Mary is there to keep him from forgetting that fact.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, though, is that I can't quite wrap my mind around what it is about Pitts, exactly, that Fortune can't escape. Hence my questions: What aspect or aspects of Fortune's identity are at stake in his confrontation with Mary. Why are the emotions brought forth by her claim to being "pure Pitts" so strong that he cannot simply ignore or accept them?
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