The space of women’s writers in Flannery O’Connor’s The crop and Grace Paley’s A conversation with my father

Résumé

The purpose of this article is to analyse the space of women’s writers and of women’s writing in two short stories: The crop, written by Flannery O’Connor in 1947, and A conversation with my father, written by Grace Paley in 1994. Understanding writing as a space (McFadden, 2007, p. 4), our hypothesis is that the objects of analysis manifest women’s difficulty to enter and be taken seriously within such realm, as well as the issues related to such difficulty. Writing, as a professional work, has always been a gendered place. Considering Eastern Europe/North-American literature, it was only in the late 19^th century and on that women have begun to actually have a voice in literature; before that, it was nearly uncommon to see women achieving professional status with writing. Comparing these stories, our analysis concerns the presence of women writers in literature setting off from the literary evidence to a reflection upon the theme. Every space is a space of struggle, and our interest in this study is to analyse if and, if so, how the selected short stories play with women’s failed attempt at ‘changing’ the false neutrality in the art creation process — looking into it through a materialistic perspective in accordance with Olsen (2003) a­nd Russ (2018).