Family Crises, Half‐Truths, Ironies, and Private Devils
Family Crises, Half‐Truths, Ironies, and Private Devils

Summary/Abstract: The four American stories discussed in this paper – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “MyKinsman, Major Molineux”, Sherwood Anderson’s “The Untold Lie”, Katherine Anne Porter’s “He”, Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” – have been first grouped together by Dean Flower, in his Counterparts, but for reasons different from ours. The title points to the four elements we identified in each – (family) crisis, lying, irony, private devil – and that turned out to be sort of crossing borders from one into the others; moreover, on a closer look, they are all interconnected and almost synonymous: lies result in crises, ironies may also end up in crises, a crisis may lead up to irony, irony is basically a lie and expressive of a crisis, and a devil, private or public, or whatever, is in each of them. Our point, therefore, is not that Hawthorne and Porter may have influenced O’Connor (which they did) and that Anderson belongs in the series as well, but that apparently different short stories are made up of theoretically identical components.

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