Flannery O'Connor's Greenleaf

A detailed Summary of Flannery O'Connor's Greenleaf

In Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf," the unpleasant Mrs. May awakens to find a bull chewing on her shrubbery. She considers getting dressed and driving to her handyman Mr. Greenleaf's house in the middle of the night to tell him to tie up the bull, but rejects this idea because she believes Mr. Greenleaf would use the experience as a chance to belittle her sons and glorify his own. Mrs. May detests the entire Greenleaf family, from Mr. Greenleaf who has no common sense, to Mrs. Greenleaf, who spends her days on "prayer healing," to the Greenleaf boys who have married and started a farm of their own while her sons remain unwed and living at home. As she investigates throughout the day, she learns that the escaped bull belongs to the Greenleaf boys. She maliciously tells Mr. Greenleaf he is to shoot his sons' bull. Mr. Greenleaf reluctantly appears to comply, but instead chases the bull into a wooded area. Mrs. May angrily honks her horn, and the bull reappears, charges her, and buries "his head in her lap." As she dies, her face assumes the look of somebody "whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable."

Such shocking, violent endings for small-minded hypocritical characters are not at all unusual for

Mrs. May, then, perfectly fits Flannery O'Connor's conception of a people who have a form of godliness "but deny its power and relevance, who proclaim their own system of belief" (Friesen, Heading "Intolerant of Hypocrisy and Individualism," Paragraph 3).As such, she must suffer a painful, violent redemption. O'Connor uses the bull to symbolize the brutal but ultimately saving figure of Jesus. He is even shown to be wearing a crown of shrubbery that slips down to the base of his horns where it looks like "a menacing prickly crown," like the one Jesus wore at the crucifixion. Mrs. May ultimately, though unintentionally, calls this figure of redemption to her when she honks the horn of her car, causing the bull to charge her. Her death, though violent, is also passionate: "One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip...so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear." Mrs. May has been thoroughly, though agonizingly redeemed.

Finally, Mrs. May shows her godlessness by her anxiety about what will happen after she dies. Never once does she make reference to peace or a heavenly existence after her death, but instead worries constantly about what will happen to her farm, her boys, and the Greenleaf family. She begins by worrying that her sons will marry "trash" after she dies, and has her will changed to state that no one her sons marry can inherit the farm. Later, she considers having her will changed again so that her sons will not be able to hire Greenleaf after her death, since only she knows how to

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Approximate Word count = 1118
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels