ClaudiaC+O'Connor

While there is a distinct religious undertone to all of her writings, Flannery O’Connor’s //The Displaced Person// deals with the interaction of social and religious factors. In fact, the main conflict of the story comes from the issue of society and religion concerning the Polish immigrant, Mr. Guizac. As the story progresses, the other character in the story become more and more distrusting of the foreigner. From the beginning of the story, Mrs. Shortley, wife to one of the farmers, believes that Mr. Guizac and his family do not fit in on the farm, because things are too different in American; “They belong to be back yonder where everything is still like they been used to. Over here it’s more advanced than where they come from” (O’Connor 199). Mrs. Shortley believes that because the Polish immigrants are not from America and because they speak a different language, they are more primitive than they are. Mrs. Shortley asks her husband if “he can drive a tractor when he don’t know English” (O’Connor 201). She even fears that the “shrill”, “dirty and all-knowing and unreformed” Polish would “fling mud on the clean English words”, and has a vision of the words of both languages piled in a room like the dead in the Nazi camps. Though Mr. Guizac is brought to America by a Catholic priest, and he is often referred to as a Catholic man, there is some uncertainty over then man’s religion. While complaining to her husband about the man, Mrs. Shortley says of the Polish, “They’re full of crooked ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same religion as a thousand years ago” (O’Connor 206). This implies that Mr. Guizac and his family may be Jewish or from Jewish decent. There is the possibility that the Polish family may have be victims of the forced baptisms that were taking place in Europe during that time. As a result victims were often times shunned from both the Catholic and Jewish faiths because they did not fully belong to either religion. This could have caused some of the tension directed toward Mr. Guizac by Mrs. Shortley. However, there is an even larger problem than Mr. Guizac not knowing the language; the Polish man does not understand the social construction in the south. At that time, there was a clear distinction between how black people and white people were treated by one another. Mrs. Shortley notes that when Mr. Guizac first arrived on the farm he shook the black worker’s hands “like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been black as them” (O’Connor 207). During this first part of the story, the farm’s owner, Mrs. McIntyre views Mr. Guizac as her salvation, but over the course of the story, she comes to view the man as Mrs. Shortley does, “salvation got from the devil” (O’Connor 203). One of the main events that causes her to change her view of the man is when she finds out that one of the black workers is planning on marrying Mr. Guizac’s cousin. This outrages Mrs. McIntyre because interracial marriage was unheard of at the time. Mrs. McIntyre can not wrap her mind around the idea that a good Christian white man could marry off his cousin to a “half-witted thieving black stinking nigger” (O’Connor 222). Mr. Guizac does not see anything wrong with the situation, because he views the worker as a good man who could help his cousin get out of the horrible situation in Poland. From this point on, Mrs. McIntyre’s focus is trying to bring herself to fire Mr. Guizac. She sees him not longer as a savior, but as an outsider, and refers to him only as “the D.P.” or Displaced Person. “He’s extra...he doesn’t fit in” she tells the priest, “he doesn’t understand how to get on with my niggers and they don’t like him” (O’Connor 225). Although nothing in how Mr. Guizac acts has changed (he still works harder than anyone else on the farm), he becomes “the most irritating sight on the place” for Mrs. McIntyre (O’Connor 228). Mrs. McIntyre even admits that “the Pole never did anything the wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her” (O’Connor 230). The interesting aspect of this story is that the social and religious differences are not the specific reasons for the farmers to dislike Mr. Guizac, but rather it is the idea that he is different then they are and that intimidates them. It doesn’t matter to Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre why the Polish immigrants are different, its the mere fact that there are things about him that they don’t understand that causes them to ostracize him. This fear of the unknown is what leads to Mrs. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyres, and most tragically, Mr. Guizac’s downfalls.