Andalusia Farm
Milledgeville, Georgia
“When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being.
During the last thirteen years of her life — that is to say, from the first manifestation of her lupus in 1951 to her death in 1964 — Flannery O’Connor lived with his mother at Andalusia Farm, which, back in those days, was located just outside the town of Milledgeville, Georgia. After the first manifestation of the disease that had killed her father in 1941, she began accostumed to the idea of spending her life in this small town, which thus became her whole world.
Now Andalusia Farm — the house as well as the surrounding grounds — has been transformed into a museum whose purpose is that of preserving Flannery O’Connor’s memory by maintaining the environment as much alike to the one in which the author lived with her mother Regina. Indeed, since the visitors first set foot in the house, they can notice the resemblance to the original one from back in the 1950s and 1960s, as some of O’Connor’s pictures show.
The peacocks’ feather on display in various places of the house — on the piano and on the shelves in the living room, for example — are a reminder —in case one would forget — of O’Connor’s passion for those birds with which she has been constantly associated.
Indeed, the farm still raise some of the author’s favorite birds.
O’Connor’s bedroom — situated on the ground floor of the building so as to facilitate her wanderings around the house — still displays some originals pieces of furniture and personal belongings, as the crutches and the typewriter. In the opposite corner of the room one can see the bookshelves which hosted her library, most of which is now preserved in the Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.
The grounds of the farm were once managed by O’Connor’s mother, Regina, and a couple of tenants, Jack and Louise Hill, who used to live on a smaller property just behind the main house, and took care of the land.
After my tour of Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia and after having seen with my eyes the landscape which characterized almost her whole life, I could not help but wonder how these places had influenced her works. More specifically, I kept asking myself what kind of relevance a writer’s relation and attachment to her land has in her works — how is her background linked to her writings, and, vice versa, how are her writings informed and their understanding deepened by the context in which they have been produced. In other words, what evidence do we have of the influence that her Georgian, and therefore Southern, origins and background have had on the shaping of her poetic views?
