In Part 1 I discussed the backstory and context of O’Connor’s “Greanleaf.” Please
read Part 1 if you haven’t already. I
apologized for taking so long to post the second part. Life doesn’t always allow me to ponder and
write as much as I would like. But the
interim delay has let the story settle and allow me to really think it through. Now I’ll get to the story’s main narrative,
the finding of a loose bull on Mrs. May’s property, and the attempts to get it
off and then finally kill it.
The
first four paragraphs of the story capture all the themes, motifs, and
symbolism that the bull carries throughout.
So it’s worth reproducing those paragraphs here.
Mrs. May’s bedroom
window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight,
stood under it, his head raised as if he listened—like some patient god come
down to woo her—for a stir inside the room.
The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be
carried outside. Clouds crossing the
moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in
the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose
for himself caught in the tips of his horns.
When the moon drifted into retirement again, there was nothing to mark
his place but the sound of steady chewing.
Then abruptly a pink glow filled the window. Bars of light slid across him as the venetian
blind was slit. He took a step backward
and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.
For almost a minute
there was no sound from inside, then as he raised his crowned head again, a
woman’s voice, guttural as if addressed to a dog, said, “Get away from here,
Sir!” and in a second muttered, “Some nigger’s scrub bull.”
The animal pawed the
ground and Mrs. May, standing bent forward behind the blind, closed it quickly
lest the light make him charge into the shrubbery. For a second she waited, still bent forward,
her nightgown hanging loosely from her narrow shoulders. Green rubber curlers sprouted neatly over her
forehead and her face beneath them was smooth as concrete with an egg-white
paste that drew the wrinkles out while she slept.
She had been conscious
in her sleep of a steady rhythmic chewing as if something were eating one wall
of the house. She had been aware that
whatever it was had been eating as long as she had had the place and had eaten
everything from the beginning of her fence line up to the house and now was
eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through
the house, eating her and the boys, and then on, eating everything but the
Greanleafs, on and on, eating everything until nothing was left but the
Greanleafs on a little island all their own in the middle of whatever had been
her place. When the munching reached her
elbow, she jumped up and found herself, fully awake, standing in the middle of
her room. She identified the sound at
once: a cow was tearing at the shrubbery under her window. Mr. Greanleaf had left the lane gate open and
she didn’t doubt that the entire herd was on her lawn. She turned on the dim pink table lamp and
then went to the window and slit the blind.
The bull, gaunt and long-legged, was standing about four feet from her,
chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor.
Here
we already see two of the same themes that were in the backstory: the lower
classes encroaching upon Mrs. May, and her paranoid belief the lower classes
are plundering her belongings. The bull
is referred to as “some nigger’s scrub bull,” meaning it’s associated not with
pure breed bovines but with the contaminated and lowbred, as she views the
lower classes. And Mrs. May dreaming
that the bull is eating away at her property signals the reader toward her
perception of the Greanleaf’s rise at her expense. That there is so much sexual suggestion (the
bull “coming to woo her” “like an uncouth country suitor” for a “stir inside
her room” and she “hanging loosely” in her nightgown) calls forth the fertility
motif, and her rejection of the wooing establishes her sterility, symbolized
oddly by the “egg-white paste” upon her face.
But
the bull doesn’t just symbolize some scrub lower class such as Mr. Greanleaf. The bull is “like some patient god” and is
identified with light and has a wreath crown across his head. A bull deity wooing a woman alludes to the
classical myth of Europa, where Zeus, disguised as a white bull, seduces the
nymph Europa and carries her away to Crete where their progeny become the three
judges of the underworld. The whole main narrative of the bull
culminating with a sexual embrace at the story’s climax constructs a story of a
modernized retelling of an ancient myth.
James Joyce made this famous with his novel Ulysses, a modern retelling of the Odyssey. In such a retelling,
while there are parallel events and details, there is usually an inversion of
some kind that makes the modern character an anti hero. While Leopold Bloom parallels Odysseus in Ulysses, he is hardly heroic. Joyce has inverted a key element while
maintaining the parallel. Another
example of a modern retelling is how Joe Christmas of William Faulkner’s Light in August is an inversion of Jesus
Christ, though the events of his life parallel Christ’s. Here Mrs. May is an inversion of a fertility
goddess, and clearly the inversion of fertility is sterility.
But
the Bull stands for more than a pagan deity.
The wreath across his head is a kingly crown, and a few paragraphs
further we are told it’s a “prickly crown.”
And given the “light” and the glow that comes off the bull into Mrs.
May’s room and the connotation of the prickly crown to a crown of thorns, we
can easily make the association that he also represents Christ. Notice too how in the first paragraph quoted
above the bull bows before her, beckoning.
O’Connor is suggesting through this pantomimed allegory Christ calling
Mrs. May. In fact the whole main
narrative of the bull showing up and the attempt to drive him away is an
analogue of Christ calling upon the woman and her driving Him away. Notice her first interjection to the bull:
“Get away from here, Sir!” The use of
“Sir” as an honorific address is very natural to southern articulation, though
here used cynically. But “sir” is just a
shade away from “lord” and what O’Connor wants the reader to hear once the
analogy is identified is, “Get away from me, Lord.” And to pursue this a
bit further, “get away from me” is an inversion of what Virgin Mary says at the
embrace of God at the Annunciation “Let it be done unto me.” And May is Mary’s month, as I pointed out inmy reading of Hopkins’ poem, “The May Magnificant.” O’Connor is working on several planes
simultaneously.
One
can also see the attempt to get the bull off her property as a sort of
liturgy. In fact there are implied
liturgies throughout, almost as a sort of bass rhythm that modulates the
story. We see the repetitive return of
the bull calling as a ceremony; we see Mrs. May’s reaction to the bull as a
ritual; we see Mrs. May sitting at table with her sons as a rite, the broken
table from the son’s fighting as a sort of black ceremony. O’Connor portrays liturgies as gratifying or disdained. We see Wesley’s ritual of his commute and
teaching at school as sort of a bitter observance. But the most important ritual presented is
Mrs. Greenleaf’s healing ritual. The
first time Mrs. May saw her perform this ritual, she was taken aback. It was in the field, by the woods, the about
the same place the bull would later gore Mrs. May.
Out of nowhere a
guttural agonized voice groaned, “Jesus!
Jesus!” In a second it came again
with a terrible urgency. “Jesus! Jesus!”
Mrs. May stopped still,
one hand lifted to her throat. The sound
was so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out
of the ground and was charging toward her.
Her second thought was more reasonable: somebody had been hurt on the
place and would sue her for everything she had.
She had no insurance. She rushed
forward and turning a bend in the path, she saw Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled on her
hands and knees off the side of the road, her head down.
The
“violent unleashed force charging” is an allusion to the bull which would later
come toward her, which is also clearly an allusion to Christ. Throughout
the story you can find several instances of things charging toward Mrs. May,
setting up the climatic ending. Mrs.
Greenleaf’s embrace of ritual and Mrs. May’s rejection of it (she winces at the
scene before her, but especially at the articulation of Jesus’ name) furthers
the theme of fertility in the numinous sense as opposed to the sterility of a
secular world view. It is significant
that Mrs. May is the cause for breaking the ritual.
“What is the matter
with you?” she asked sharply.
“You broken my
healing,” Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. “I can’t talk to you until I’m finished.”
And
then Mrs. Greenleaf goes on in her charismatic state of mind to call out, “Oh
Jesus, stab me in the heart! Jesus, stab
me in the heart.” That is foreshadowing,
yes, since it is Mrs. May that gets literally stabbed in the heart by Jesus,
but more than foreshadowing. O’Connor
is suggesting that the avoidance of numinous ritual is impossible. Mrs. May will eventually meet Jesus, will be
stabbed in the heart, and the broken ceremony will be completed. You can avoid and reject Jesus, but Jesus
through life’s rituals and rhythms of life is still going to call on you.
And
the overarching rhythms of life are suggested in a number of places. The story flows with intervals of day and
night. The interweaving of past and
present and future (the future through Mrs. May’s projection of her son’s
futures and her death) as the story unfolds, and then emphasized when Mrs. May
lays back on the hood of her car waiting for Greenleaf to kill the bull: “With
her eyes closed, she didn’t think of time as divided into days and nights but
into past and future.” There is also the
bull’s “rhythmic chewing.” There are the
frequent images of round configurations, the circle of the wreath around the
bull’s horns, “the rim of the pasture” with the bull in the center, the circle
of the trees on Mrs. May’s property. The
circle is a loop back to itself, and so associated with rhythm. There are the seasons of the year, especially
spring, the season of return. That is
the significance of the names Greenleaf and May, and Mrs. May even exclaims,
“Spring is here!” on the morning of going out to kill the bull. And there are the rhythmic allusions to light
and the sun throughout the story. The
rhythms and rituals connect the story to a sacramental fabric that O’Connor
sees woven into the world.
And
finally the climatic event ties together all the elements of the story. She is waiting on the hood of her car for Mr.
Greenleaf to have killed the bull.
In a few minutes
something emerged from the tree line, a black heavy shadow that tossed its head
several times and then bounded forward.
After a second she saw it was the bull.
He was crossing the pasture toward her at a slow gallop, a gay almost
rocking gait as if it were overjoyed to find her again. She looked beyond him to see if Mr. Greenleaf
was coming out of the woods too but he was not.
“Here he is, Mr. Greenleaf!” she called and looked on the other side of
the pasture to see if he could be seen coming out there but he was not in
sight. She looked back and saw that the
bull, his head lowered, was racing toward her.
She remained perfectly still, not in fright, but in freezing
unbelief. She stared at the violent
black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she
could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his
head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression
changed. One of his horns sank until it
pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an
unbreakable grip. She continued to stare
straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line
was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a
person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light
unbearable.
Mr. Greenleaf was
running toward her from the side with his gun raised and she saw him coming
though she was not looking in his direction.
She saw him approaching on the outside of some invisible circle, the
tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet. He shot the bull four times through the
eye. She did not hear the shots but she
felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her forward on its head, so
that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering
some last discovery into the animal’s ear.
In
the first post on this story, I started this analysis by questioning the
worthiness of the ending, and now that I’ve gone through the story in micro
detail, I conclude the ending is most definitely fitting. My qualms on the initial read had to do with
whether the reader was prepared for such an ending. Her death from the bull seemed to come out of
the blue. But most definitely the
climaxed was foreshadowed. It was
foreshadowed from the subtle allusions in the story to Mrs. May’s future death,
all in a hypothetical context, and from the various things that are
metaphorically “charging” toward Mrs. May.
The other complaint that might get placed on this ending is that it’s
rather awkward, if not contorted.
O’Connor does revel in the gothic, and she is identified as an author of
Southern Gothic, and the American Southern Gothic Movement. Such a grotesque situation is at the essence
of the gothic, so one shouldn’t be surprised.
But
more importantly the ending pulls all the themes together. We can see the ending as the sexual union
with the pagan deity, culminating the Europa myth. We can see the ending as a final answering to
Christ’s call. No matter how she tried
to reject Jesus, ultimately you cannot avoid Him. We can see the ending as enlightenment, an
epiphany: her “sight has been suddenly restored.” We can see that the gradations of humanity that
she was so concerned about in life are in the end unimportant: she consummates
with a “scrub bull.” We can see the
sterility of her life ended and transformed into a new fertility. Christ through His sacrifice is an agent of
fertility. We can even see the climatic
death as a crucifixion, pinned and suffering, her life now transfigured. We can see the ending as the closing of the
circle, the return to the bull beckoning outside the window. We can see the ending as a healing, perhaps
inspired by Mrs. Greenleaf’s prayer. All
the hurts, the paranoia, the concerns, the burdens are now relieved. And finally the culminating act can be seen
as acceptance of fate and God’s will.
Here Mrs. May finally transforms into the Blessed Virgin at the
Annunciation and has God’s will be done unto her. I would like to think that the whispering in
the bull’s ear contains the word “yes.”
It
is astounding how rich and deep this story is, as rich and deep as any ever
written. A masterpiece.
