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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
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a theological structure, but she brings them out.
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And by reading things like contemporaneous autobiographies from
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southern women that she's chosen from the canon,
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and just accounts of what was required of women-- etiquette and so on,
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she weaves a reading of passages like this into that kind of context
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to suggest that O'Connor's vision of violence
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has more to do with being a woman in the South than it does
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with the stated religious concerns that O'Connor talks about in her letters.
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Now, remember, as I mentioned, O'Connor suffered from lupus,
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and she was disfigured by this disease.