"When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville"
About this Quote
A proverb about social camouflage gets a Georgia accent and, with it, a whole ethic. O'Connor takes the polite cosmopolitan advice of "When in Rome..". and spikes it with Milledgeville, her small-town home base and a stand-in for the stubborn particularity her work refuses to outgrow. The joke lands because it inverts the usual hierarchy: Rome is supposed to be the center of civilization; Milledgeville is the provincial outpost you graduate from. O'Connor's line insists the outpost has its own gravity.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is defensive and strategic. It reads like a refusal to perform sophistication on demand, a way of keeping your moral and imaginative bearings when the room is trying to make you fluent in its codes. Under the wit sits a warning about the cost of adaptation: blend in too easily and you start mistaking manners for truth.
Context matters because O'Connor was a devout Catholic writing from the Protestant South, a regionalist who distrusted both genteel liberal uplift and secular literary fashion. She got treated as an exotically "Southern" voice by Northern tastemakers even as she skewered Southern pieties from the inside. Milledgeville, then, isn't just a hometown; it's a vantage point. The line signals her conviction that the grotesque, the local, the "backward" are not embarrassments to edit out but engines of revelation. If Rome wants you to play along, O'Connor's telling you to keep your drawl - and your skepticism - intact.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is defensive and strategic. It reads like a refusal to perform sophistication on demand, a way of keeping your moral and imaginative bearings when the room is trying to make you fluent in its codes. Under the wit sits a warning about the cost of adaptation: blend in too easily and you start mistaking manners for truth.
Context matters because O'Connor was a devout Catholic writing from the Protestant South, a regionalist who distrusted both genteel liberal uplift and secular literary fashion. She got treated as an exotically "Southern" voice by Northern tastemakers even as she skewered Southern pieties from the inside. Milledgeville, then, isn't just a hometown; it's a vantage point. The line signals her conviction that the grotesque, the local, the "backward" are not embarrassments to edit out but engines of revelation. If Rome wants you to play along, O'Connor's telling you to keep your drawl - and your skepticism - intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Flannery
Add to List
