A Circle in the Fire (1954). Content and Description

“A Circle in the Fire” appeared in the Kenyon Review in 1954, one year before Harcourt, Brace published it in the O’Connor short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). That same year the story appeared in Prize Stories 1955: The O. Henry Awards and in The Best American Short Stories of 1955, helping to establish O’Connor as one of America’s most important short story writers. As with several of O’Connor’s works, “A Circle in the Fire” takes place presumably on a Georgia farm and involves outsiders who arrive mysteriously and disrupt the usually uneventful farm life, much like Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” and Tom T. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” two other stories in the same collection.

The three boys who arrive mysteriously at the Cope farm—the son of a former employee and his two friends from Atlanta—turn out to be arsonists who cause Mrs. Cope to realize her worst fears: that she will be disobeyed and her property, which she tends as she does her weeds and nut grass “as if they were evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place,” will be consumed by fire.

The story opens with a conversation between Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard, who works on the farm with her husband and daughter. Through Sally Virginia, Mrs. Cope’s 12-year-old daughter, who overhears their banter while eavesdropping from a second-story window in the house, the reader learns that the two women engage in cyclical conversations. As always Mrs. Pritchard, ever the pessimist, annoys Mrs. Cope, only to be irritated by Mrs. Cope’s daft optimism. After a short period the narrator exposes Mrs. Cope’s obsession with her property and material gain, an obsession neither Mrs. Pritchard nor the African-American farmworkers share. Thus, Mrs. Cope exists in an insular world, impervious to those who surround her.

When the three boys arrive, the narrator conveys that Mrs. Cope views her black farm workers “as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass.” By observing Mrs. Cope’s “minions,” who share neither her zeal for productivity nor her false wisdom, industry, and religious devotion, the reader learns of Mrs. Cope’s darker side, one governed by self-righteousness, racism, and excessive pride. She is one of O’Connor’s self-consumed characters. Ironically, those who surround her possess greater wisdom, especially knowledge about human nature, than their hypocritical employer. It is significant that much of the story is told through the eyes of a child. An awakening character and a moral compass for the story, Sally Virginia decides to confront the boys in the woods but ultimately is unable to act.

This perspective highlights Mrs. Cope’s naivete; she, as does Sally Virginia, confronts the inability to control her life and the anxiety accompanying modern life, the undergirding presence shown on Mrs. Cope’s face in the final paragraph: “It was a face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself.”

In this moment, Sally Virginia also hears the prophetic voices of the boys in the distance. While literally the boys act as a foil and serve the role of antagonists in the story, they also function as symbolic representations whose significance lies in the embedded literary allusion O’Connor employs. The story’s title and final scene are borrowed from the Book of Daniel, in which the tyrannical King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon throws three Jewish boys—Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego—into a fiery furnace. Miraculously, the three boys are spared by God’s intervention and are unharmed by the flames.

The use of such biblical parallels is referred to as an allusion. In the biblical story the three boys are messengers from God who refuse to accede to Nebuchadnezzar’s decrees. O’Connor’s story portrays them less sympathetically, especially as the reader’s take on the boys is conditioned by the thoughts of Sally Virginia, who is both an innocent child and an objective observer not yet pulled into the complex social world her mother and Mrs. Cope inhabit. Sally Virginia sees the boys as evil and wants to confront them, to eradicate their presence. Her strategy for confronting the boys directly opposes the passive way Mrs. Cope tries to deal with them. Yet ultimately, even though Sally Virginia intends to act, she is unable to do so.

As the story ends, the reader senses that Mrs. Cope, despite all of her religious pretense and eternal optimism, has been an imprisoning force encircling the farm. As Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego do, the farmworkers refuse to be burned by Mrs. Cope. Unlike the biblical prophets, the farmworkers have longed for both Mrs. Cope’s and the farm’s demise. As with many of O’Connor’s tales, the violence shocks both Mrs. Cope and Sally Virginia into a sudden awareness.

The fire creates a theophanous revelation, an unfolding of the world’s frailty and vulnerability for Sally Virginia, but this revelation also unveils the arrogant blindness of Mrs. Cope, who comes to terms with herself as she finally beholds the fire.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The historical context of “A Circle in the Fire” is important to consider. When “A Circle in the Fire” was published, the South was governed by the Jim Crow laws that relegated African Americans to lesser roles and often encouraged their mistreatment. After consulting an encyclopedia or trustworthy Web site that addresses civil rights abuses during this period and the impact of Jim Crow laws, assess the black characters in the story and the way Mrs. Cope treats them. Is O’Connor presenting social commentary, especially with the character Culver? Why or why not?

2. By making a parallel between her farm story and a biblical story, O’Connor uses a literary allusion, a reference by one text to another text. What is the significance of the biblical allusion from which O’Connor derives the story title and the fiery ending, in which Sally stands tall, listening to “a few wild shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them?” How does this allusion contribute to the story’s meaning?