Were Flannery O’Connor’s novels and stories as widely accepted or appreciated back then as now among Christians? She intends not to make reading pleasant, even though her novels were considered comical by secular reviewers and critics, and by O'Connor herself while she lived. Yet, if uneasy Christians are to take her at her word, she is a true, fierce believer.
Previously, Fictionalizing Dead Authors
O’Connor’s characters seem to be Protestants not Catholics and it occurs to me to wonder if there was a reason for this beyond her crafting artistry. Could she have done what is called “comic” treatment of Catholics? I’m reminded of O’Connor’s severe dictum about stories conducive to escape, relaxation and rest. And of J.R.R. Tolkien’s less severe escapist a suggestion.
What we are looking for in her short story “Greenleaf” is the Lord Jesus Christ himself, embodied. The parables are models of Incarnation, God’s Word hidden in the world’s foundations and ever embodied in said world—creatively. The author has symbolized the swift and powerful working of Christ—the word-as-sword—in this Greenleaf story.
Opening it with a metaphorical intimation of Christ wooing his bride, O’Connor puts the sword aside. A bull stands under Mrs. May’s east-facing bedroom window, silvery in moonlight, head raised as though listening like some god waiting to woo. Seemingly, he listens for a sound from her room.
The Greenleafs are her rather disheveled neighbors and children of her hired hand, and this is their bull, escaped and wandering where he will—whether it be among her breeding stock or eating the hedges of her yard. His horns are wreathed with loops of Mrs. May’s shrubbery. He even dips his head to her, displaying this wreath on his horns.
As symbols in Greek and Roman mythology, horns can suggest erotic or even lustful desire, as with satyrs and fauns. But in the Judaic tradition horns signify authority. Yet, with this picture of the bull’s stance and his florally crowned head at the start of Mrs. May’s “dance” with him, the narrative may mean for us to consider the possibility of a more suitor-like encounter. I am not a Joseph Campbell fan, but will craftily use anything that comes to hand. He says marriage isn’t a mere love affair but an ordeal, a sacrifice of oneself to a relationship. In “Greenleaf,” O’Connor seems to incorporate a portion of this type of mythography—perhaps its most terrible aspect—expressing both Old and New Testament authority.
The story-teller here wears the mantle of the watchmen. Her story sometimes displays parallels to those ancient works; as in the story’s night scenes when the bull draws Mrs. May’s attention—suggestive of the King, a figure of Christ—calling the Shulamite to come out and experience his love. Both stories contain kernels of the redemptive story of Christ’s wooing of his bride. “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with drops of the night.” But the Shulamite bride hesitates to receive him and, when she finally responds to his movement toward her, finds him gone.
Subsequently, going abroad after him, she is punished: “The watchmen that went about the city found me; they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.” O’Connor’s gift and inclination suit her for the role of watchmen to Christians who have allowed themselves to slide comfortably into self-satisfaction, much as the prideful Mrs. May has done…becoming blind to their true state.
Mrs. May continues verbally chastising those around her, apparently believing herself the arbiter of righteousness to them, yet O’Connor takes pains to show Mrs. May’s ineffectualness: Her own sons are in a position to be on their own, but, while sponging, disdain and mock her. Her hired hand, Mr. Greenleaf, resists her at every turn with passive aggression. His sons magnificently failed to live up to her dire predictions for them.
And Mrs. Greenleaf—who in the view of Mrs. May should have reaped the sort of offspring currently parasitizing May herself—is such an irritant to that she avoids her entirely.
Mrs. Greenleaf appears as another of O’Connor’s wild-eyed fanatics. Her children are dirty, the yard is that of a slattern, her girls dip snuff. She spends her time in the woods, burying news clippings of all the terrible things people do to one another, to God—and torturing herself over them in prayer. “Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!” she prays. “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” This display, which her husband’s employer happens on one day, makes Mrs. May feel as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. In a huff she tells Mrs. Greenleaf that Jesus would be ashamed of her and tells her to go wash the children’s clothes.
This portrayal of Mrs. Greenleaf, along with the author’s use of the word “stab,” would point to the displacement in one of Joseph Cambell’s archetypal patterns, a variation resulting from what he would say is the personality of the writer using an archetype. Thus, according to him, Flannery O’Connor, with her peculiar vision, would mean us to see Mrs. Greenleaf as a sympathetic depiction. And that she and bull are all connected in sympathetic portrayal. This connectedness brings us to the terrifying conclusion that willful, misguided Mrs. May is meeting up with word-as-sword.
Flannery O’Connor actively streams her writing consciousness. She might not approve, but from here we proceed metaphorically, looking at the pattern as seen in the words, horn, stab, sword, heart and, even, gut. All pertain to the story of Christ.
While she waits for Mr. Greenleaf to find and shoot his bull (which has been traversing her property as though owning it), Mrs. May sinks into a reverie, recalling how hard she has worked, and nurturing feelings of superiority over Mrs. Greenleaf.
She caps her self-righteous excess with the determined hunting of this bull, unwilling to be dissuaded of her mission to teach everyone around her a lesson, including the bull. Tired of waiting for the hired hand to come execute his bull, she reaches into the car and gives the horn several honks to express her impatience.
And here is where the difficulty increased for Flannery O’Connor. For, as with the re-slanting of any myth, often the story-teller works out the archetype unconsciously, and so, as she states in a letter to her friend, her concerns at this point were technical: How to get the horns of this bull into Mrs. May’s ribs. She did not, at that moment of composition, give much thought as to why this should happen. And even tells her friend that things in her stories may be so frightening that ... she might not be able to write them if she knew. Even she, this fierce writer, would have escaped if she could.
It is difficult and frightening for all. Am I as selfish, self-righteous as Mrs. May?
We are on the horns of this dilemma—a choice of alternatives, each fatal and given. It should be said here that O’Connor eschewed applying the word symbol to the Eucharist. We can assume that for her the Christ Myth was true. And we see that for Mrs. May it was not. Either way, and in what might be our last discovery—as this parable shows—we are pierced to the heart.
© S. Dorman November 2023
Previously, Fictionalizing Dead Authors