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Her name is Patricia Yaeger.
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She wrote a very compelling argument about O'Connor's fiction--
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not about Wise Blood particular, but about her stories.
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And in that essay she argues that O'Connor's grotesqueness,
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especially the grotesqueness of the women figures in her novels,
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is all wrapped up with the culture of southern womanhood.
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It's a culture of beauty that requires all kinds of grooming practices
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to form and shape the body in such a way
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that it can appear socially in a decorous way.
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So, Yaeger argues that what we see in scenes like this is
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the registration of the violence of those practices of beauty.
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So she does not let these things sit in the text to be assimilated to