Iconoclasm

Sara Ruth, Parker’s wife in Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” represents a confluence of religious themes. She is an uncorruptible Eve, who won’t be tempted to premarital sex even after accepting an apply from Parker. With her “icepick” eyes, she bores into his soul. She stands for the law, and hence for the Old Covenant. She is an iconoclast who attacks Parker when he returns home with a Byzantine Christ tattooed on his back.

Dennis Slattery suggests that in the final confrontation, Parker stands for the anti-gnostic orthodoxy against his wife: “Parker does not chose but is chosen by Christ. His faith is one in which revelation seeks its own image of that which has been revealed. By contrast, Sarah Ruth’s faith is dry, brittle (stretched tight like the skin of an onion), without moisture, without the ontology of the imagination. She confuses icons with idols and believes in neither. In fact, she is an iconoclast, for she believes in the excessive unknowability of God. The iconoclast ignores the art of the icon wherein the image reveals the visible of the invisible, the invisible in the visible, so that the invisible is mysteriously present. ‘Iconoclasm is a rejection of the reality of Incarnation and Redemption.’”

In a re-enactment of the crucifixion, she beats the image of Christ with a broom until welts appear on the icon’s face, and Parker sinks under a tree weeping. By making his body a bearer of Christ’s icon, Parker has become another Christ. Sara Ruth the stern iconoclast joins the Pharisees. Slattery quotes O’Connor: “when the physical fact is separated from the spiritual reality, the dissolution of belief is eventually inevitable.”