GREENLEAF BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR – ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY
The short story is an American and world masterpiece of the genre. It was published in one of the leading U.S. literary journals, The Kenyon Review, in 1956.
A key motif in the story is the bull, which in the story is a symbol for God, revelation, redemption, and the divine embrace of love, all paradoxically bound together, lurid and grisly in the manner characteristic of Southern Gothic. At the close of the story, the bull is a “wild tormented lover”—an allusion to Zeus, the pagan god of the Greeks (see below, the myth of Europa). The bull gores Mrs. May in her heart with one horn and with the other embraces her in an “unbreakable grip” according to a still not only amorous but also sexual. The moment of death is an instant of personal revelation—Mrs. May’s sight is “suddenly restored” in “light unbearable,” while the very last sentence of our tale describes her “whispering some last discovery” into the bull’s ear. Her contempt for Greenleaf, white trash, and all they represent of humanity that has so far pervaded, indeed, defined the narrative is suddenly revealing of her own hubris. She is condemned in her ineluctable epiphany yet simultaneously redeemed by her recognition and acceptance of it.
The modern parable is classic Flannery O’Connor. Grace has broken into Mrs. May’s wicked—the evil is recondite—life, violently, fatally, grotesquely. It is macabre redemption.
Background and concise summary of the short story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenleaf_(short_story)
—“Greenleaf (short story),” Wikipedia
Read the original short story at JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4333686
—Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” The Kenyon Review (Summer 1956) 18(3): 384-410
The myth of Europa:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Europa-Greek-mythology
—“Europa: Greek Mythology,” Britannica.com, September 18, 2021
Public domain photo
ReplyDeletePhoto link:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsl-libdev/15844958982
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…Each story concerns a proud protagonist, usually a woman, who considers herself beyond reproach and is boastful about her own abilities, her Christian goodness, and her property and possessions. Each central character has hidden fears that are brought to surface through an outsider figure, who serves as a catalyst to initiate a change in the protagonist’s perception. O’Connor’s primary theme, from her earliest to her last stories, is hubris—that is, overweening pride and arrogance—and the characters’ arrogance very often takes on a spiritual dimension.
ReplyDeleteClosely connected with the theme of hubris is the enactment of God’s grace (or Christian salvation). In an essay entitled “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” O’Connor states that her stories are about “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” and points out that the most significant part of her stories is the “moment” or “action of grace,” when the protagonist is confronted with her own humanity and offered, through an ironic agent of God (an outsider) and, usually through violence, one last chance at salvation. O’Connor’s protagonists think so highly of themselves that they are unable to recognize their own fallenness because of Original Sin, so the characters typically are brought to an awareness of their humanity (and their sinfulness) through violent confrontations with outsider figures.
…“Greenleaf,” also a major work, portrays still another woman, Mrs. May, attempting to run a dairy farm. Her two ungrateful bachelor sons refuse to take her self-imposed martyrdom seriously when she complains of the Greenleafs and their bull, which, at the beginning of the story, is hanging around outside her window. The Greenleafs are lower-class tenant farmers whose grown children are far more productive and successful than the bourgeois Mrs. May’s. O’Connor moves to pagan mythology as she characterizes the bull as a god (compared to Zeus) and unites the Greenleaf bull symbolically with peculiarly Christian elements. The coming of grace in this story is characteristically violent. Mrs. May is gored by a bull, which, like the ancient Greek gods, is both pagan lover and deity (although a Christian deity).
https://literariness.org/2020/06/21/analysis-of-flannery-oconnors-stories/
—Nasrullah Mambrol, “Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Stories,” Literary Theory and Criticism, June 21, 2020
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