From Conan O'Brien's Harvard Thesis on William Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner...

"I have found that several Southern Renaissance writers have articulated
their regional sense of contradiction through what I have termed literary
progeria. Progeria is an often fatal disease that strikes children and
ages them pre-maturely. In the works of several Southern writers the child
protagonist becomes "old" long before his time because he is tormented by
the same anxiety over myth which troubles Cash and Woodward. In an effort
to construct an identity the child is drawn to past myths and builds the
foundation of his character on archaic beliefs. The result is that this
child caries the vast experience of these myths as burden; he or she
becomes an "old child" who tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his elderly
identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child"
who tries unsucessfully (sic) to reconcile his elderly identity with the
modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" symbol in
Katherine Anne Porter's _Pale Horse, Pale Rider _ as well as in Caron
McCuller's _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ and _A Member of the Wedding_,
but these authors do not explore the symbol extensively enough to
establish its characteristics and thematic significance. Both William
Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor do develop the "old child" symbol
extensively, however, and although they differ in their specific fictional
concerns it is clear that the image emanates from similar regional
instinct. Each author places the "old child" in the center of generational
argument over the value of past myths and the child, unable to reconcile
opposing views, represents experience and thus an anguished state of
conflicting loyalties. The extreme generational attitudes towards myth
resemble the same extremes Cash and Woodward delineate in their argument
over the South's relation to the past. The myth Faulkner's children turn
to is the myth of the Old South and his "old children" suffer from a
spiritual progeria. O'Connor adds a second layer of significance to the
symbol by incorporating the myth of Christian redemption and this
increased complexity produces in her children both a spiritual _and_ a
physical progeria which borders on the freakish."

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