SOURCE: Beringer, Cindy. “‘I Have Not Wallowed’: Flannery O'Connor's Working Mothers.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, pp. 124-41. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Beringer considers the depiction of working mothers in three of O'Connor's short works.]

The distinctive characters of Flannery O'Connor's stories are drawn masterfully from the red clay of southern agrarian life. The author blends humor, irony, and satire to create characters whose lives are thwarted and misguided. They believe they have progressed along the path of success, yet eventually most come to realize, albeit too late, that their actions have not led to personal fulfillment. The families in her stories exist in a grotesque state of permanent hostility, and any offspring exhibit such a lack of civilizing influence that O'Connor elicits little emotion other than nervous relief when a vengeful God exacts his mercy with what would otherwise be considered terrifying violence.

Most of O'Connor's stories are set on farms managed by single—usually widowed or divorced—women. Andalusia, a large farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, which O'Connor's widowed mother, Regina, inherited and operated, comes readily to mind. Like her mother's farm, O'Connor's fictional farms have large white farmhouses on hills, tenant farmers or sharecroppers, and African American laborers. While successful at agrarian capitalism, the strong-minded female farm managers are noticeable failures when they combine career with motherhood.

O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life under the care of her mother at Andalusia. Many critics have noticed that the sometimes vicious, often emotionally lacking offspring of O'Connor's fictional mothers may well be the author's self-parodies. Her unsuccessful mother-child relationships are remarkable for their bitter and bizarre dysfunctionality. In letters and essays about her fiction, O'Connor insists that the bleak social and psychological constructs of her narratives arise from the helplessness of mortals before God. She also relentlessly satirizes southern habits and manners she finds irritating—foolish pride, excessive vanity, deceitful courtesy, and false piety. She delights in skewering the pomposity of hypocrites. “Interlektuals” with educations rivaling her own, especially social scientists, receive the sharpest prods.

Aware of the economic realities of the material world she loved to satirize and of her privileged place within it, O'Connor posited a connection between the South's highly structured and antiquated socioeconomic system and the failure of human relationships. In a 1963 interview, however, she defended the “charity and necessity” of formal southern manners: “The South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together.” “Social discipline” may be interpreted as a society's means of separating the haves from the have-nots so as to avoid any threat to the status quo. Etiquette creates a certain social tension that, significantly, mirrors the adversarial bond between mother and child as depicted in O'Connor's fiction and mordantly alluded to by Erma Bombeck as “the ties that bind—and gag.”¹

The challenge for O'Connor's female farm managers is to succeed in business and as parents within the South's peculiar feudal, paternalistic, hypocritical, and myth-steeped code of conduct. O'Connor bestows little praise on them, although her widowed or divorced working mothers are quite successful at wresting profit from the soil. Devout in their adherence to the American work ethic, they compete successfully in agribusiness, but are incapable of imparting to their children either the importance of that ethic, a sense of reverence for the land on which their fortunes and opportunities depend, or a nurturing atmosphere of love and spiritual guidance. The maladjusted children of the fiction spend their days trying to get even for what they perceive to be improper rearing.

The independent post-Civil War southern farmer relied on a system of cheap labor provided by tenant families and African American day laborers. For the female farmer, operating within this system was especially tricky, since she feared victimization by a system in which she was a vulnerable player. Such a farmer must at least appear to be in constant control of her workers. In O'Connor's stories the female farmer-to-worker relationship is typically one of parent to perpetual child. The female protagonists must compete in a world of men trained in the South's social code of treating women as either children, victims, or southern belles needy of protection—predictably, these characters often respond by playing the role of the helpless child, the martyr, or the manipulator of others. While these techniques are mostly successful in the business sphere, O'Connor's fictional mothers treat their own children as pawns in the socioeconomic struggle. Seemingly forced into roles of both tyrant and infantile manipulator when dealing with their progeny, these women set in motion an unhealthy cycle of mutual dependency, disrespect, and conflict.

In addition, the invisible rules of the social order permit, if not require, that those mothers, successful as free-enterprise farmers, must lavish prosperity upon their youngsters. This practice not only spoils the ungrateful children that O'Connor creates, but usually affords them an education and newly acquired pretense to intellectual superiority—all of which provides a convenient form of psychological distancing and escape from their mothers. The lack of true communication, begun with the mothers' role playing, is perpetuated, and the mothers never receive a real return on their investments.

O'Connor's stories often point to a poverty of the soul as the underlying cause of the failed relationships between mother and child. In “The Enduring Chill,” “Greenleaf,” and “Good Country People,” adult, educated, but dependent offspring live with shrewd, belittling, or even cloyingly doting mothers in permanent states of animosity. In these stories, a direct correlation is drawn between a woman's success in business and her abysmal failure as nurturer.

I.

The sixty-year-old matron of “The Enduring Chill,” Mrs. Fox, has owned and operated a dairy farm since the death of her husband, “a lawyer and businessman and farmer and politician all rolled into one” who, like herself, “certainly had his feet on the ground.”² She receives guests in the parlor of a two-story white farmhouse sitting on the top of a hill, a home she says many people “would give their eye teeth for” (552). She is proud to have put her daughter, Mary George, and her son, Asbury, “through college and beyond,” but she is wise enough to notice “that the more education they got, the less they could do” (551).

Neither daughter nor son has inherited the personal drive of their mother, and neither child shows the least appreciation for her efforts. Although she has some good, vinegary one-liners, Mary George remains a minor character. At thirty-three she is a country school principal who still lives at home. Her brother is quick to point out that her position is hardly the pinnacle of success in the education world, and her Girl Scout shoes are certainly proof positive that she has elected not to be a part of the “dress for success” crowd. Mary George detests her brother and seems merely to tolerate her mother.

Asbury's relationship with his mother is dysfunctional and even grotesque. At twenty-five, he has come home to die, a feat he could easily have accomplished by starving in his damp, freezing New York City walk-up where he slept in his overcoat bundled in several thicknesses of the New York Times. Though he might have preferred such an end, he sadistically does not want to deny his mother participation in the final event. He has lost his part-time bookstore job, and his savings are gone. When he gets off the train, he is delighted to see his mother's shock at his deteriorating physical condition. He tells her he is going to die and tries “to make each word like a hammer blow on top of her head” (562). Having adopted no real ports of anchor in his childhood, Asbury quickly embraced intellectual nihilism in college and ran with the existentialist crowd while living in New York. A writer, his magnum opus is a two-notebook letter to his mother, to be read following his death; he intends that when she reads it she will understand that he has magnanimously forgiven her for all he thinks she has done to him and will see, for the first time, exactly what she has done to him. He destroys all his other literary attempts, since he realizes that he has no imagination and no talent—for which he blames his mother: “Woman, why did you pinion me?” (554).

While her children thus pursue their warped lives, Mrs. Fox's condescension and arrogance surface. Unable to relax for a moment the meticulous control of her dairy operation, she is convinced that her workers are either incompetent or bent on sabotage. On the way home from fetching Asbury from the train station at six o'clock in the morning, she makes a stop to inspect a full-uddered cow, noting that, by failing to milk the cows, her workers have failed her—again. The two black men employed at the dairy, Morgan and Randall, are the only employees depicted; Mrs. Fox views and treats them, stereotypically, as naïve but not guileless children. She enumerates their many faults for Asbury. In her opinion, her workers will do “as little as they could get by with” (551), but “they know how to look out for themselves” (558). Her understanding of the southern work ethic requires only that her employees follow her orders; to see them as individuals capable of intelligent action would endanger the prevailing economic order.

Mrs. Fox treats her daughter and son with the same insufferable manner otherwise reserved for her workers—as children who have never grown up. She lapses into giddy nursery-rhyme language, announcing arrival at the farmhouse with a cheery “Home again, home again, jiggity jig!” (553). The grown woman and man, however, think such nonsense demeaning, as do the farm workers. The economic security of the offspring, however, unlike that of the workers, does not depend on paying attention or passively enduring these outbursts. Instead, the children consistently respond with essential immaturity and blatant disregard for their mother. The previous year, Asbury had been in the dairy barn gathering background material for an intended play “about Negroes” (551). When he begins smoking in the barn, Randall tells him his mother does not allow it. Nonetheless, the two workers agree to accept the free cigarettes Asbury offers them. This action results in the loss of two cans of milk, returned because they smell of smoke. Asbury's disobedience of his mother has resulted in her economic loss.

Asbury also proposes interracial milk drinking from a communal jelly jar, but Randall tells him, “That the thing she don't 'low” (559). Randall thus gets even with both his employer and with Asbury, the latter for his fawning and insincere protestations of brotherhood. By deliberately telling Asbury of Mrs. Fox's orders not to drink the milk—but neglecting to reveal the true reason—the danger of unpasteurized milk—he spurs Asbury to disobedience. Although Mrs. Fox obviously has not taken the time to teach Asbury about such dangers, any more than she has trained him how to operate the milking machines, she is convinced that hard work in the dairy would cure her son—although she knows “he would be a nuisance” (551). She simply issues orders and expects them to be followed. No commitment exists in any of these relationships. The participants step carefully around each other and interact according to a rigid code of manners. Resentment and a lack of trust builds from the superficiality, and desires for revenge emerge.

Asbury resents the treatment he receives from his mother, and views her behavior as childish. He plots his revenge, which he believes will cause her to face her childishness. By his death he will force his mother to confront reality, to “assist her in the process of growing up” (547). He feels that his letter will coerce her into acknowledging her role in “his tragedy” and “perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was” (544-5). Infatuated by the idea of the significance of his death, he resists suicide because that would expose Mrs. Fox's failure as a mother to the neighbors; a private comeuppance will be sufficient.

Asbury realizes his mother's ability to make others bow to her will; when she looks at him sternly and asks, “Do you think for one minute … that I intend to sit here and let you die?” he fears for the first time that she might actually be able to prevent his revenge (562). What bothers Asbury most of all is her conviction that she is always right: “Her self-satisfaction itself [is] barely conscious” (554). Mrs. Fox has worked out a system of blame for everyone except herself. She credits her children's lack of a strong work ethic or the barest rudiments of civility to their education. Asbury's problems are confounded, she is convinced, by his “artistic temperament” (551). The priest's chiding for neglecting her son's prayers eludes her, and when it ultimately becomes known that undulant fever has caused her son's illness, she shows no remorse or recognition of responsibility for her behavior or Asbury's condition.

The educations she has provided her children by her hard work obviously fulfills some sense of obligation that Mrs. Fox feels society demands of her, although she certainly is not pleased with the results. Mary George's and Asbury's so-called intellectualism, in her estimation, has not enhanced their ability to communicate or achieve personal satisfaction. She is convinced that writing is not real work and that only physical labor, such as fence mending, will deliver Asbury. Since she was never able to instill in him a sense of responsibility for the farm, the long-suffering young man greets this idea with contempt. Only when his talk of dying scares her, Mrs. Fox indulges her son by encouraging his writing. Initiating conversations on topics she thinks would interest him, she forces him to sit on the porch and tortures his overly refined artistic sentiments by suggesting that their area of the country “need[s] another good book like Gone with the Wind” (560).

By thus manipulating her children through role playing, Mrs. Fox denies Mary George and Asbury their independence. Although her maternal actions have inspired only hatred, for some reason they remain bound to their mother in an unhealthy climate of manipulation and mutual dependency. Asbury is not sure why he blames his mother for his dependency and lack of imagination. “It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. … Her way had simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had found other air, he couldn't survive in it” (554-5). Asbury requests that his mother call a priest for him, knowing this will upset her. She makes the call because she realizes his condition is in fact deteriorating. Mrs. Fox feels obliged by good manners to inform the priest that her son's illness has affected his mind. Asbury leans over the banisters in order to eavesdrop on the call, just as he knows she will listen outside his door when he communicates with the priest.

Randall asserts his opinion that Asbury's nastiness arises from Mrs. Fox's not having “whupped him enough when he was little” (560). His comment rings of the pure genius that rises out of folk wisdom to confound the theoreticians. Even those strongly opposed to corporal punishment do not have to spend much time with Asbury before beginning to hope for a good thrashing, despite his fever and chills. Sympathy for Asbury starts to increase, however, when he begins to see himself more clearly. He realizes his life has been useless and frantically searches his mind for one justifying and meaningful experience before he dies. Unfortunately, following the meeting with Randall and Morgan in his room, he knows that for him there will be no “significant experience” (570). Blaming his mother seems too easy, but he senses that she is largely responsible for failing to provide meaning in the lives of her children. The unattractive Mary George—although her achievements are gargantuan compared to Asbury's—is not the southern belle Mrs. Fox believes a woman of her social stature should have for a daughter. Rather than praise her daughter for her accomplishments, Mrs. Fox instead nags her about improving her appearance. Mrs. Fox recognizes that “Mary George [is] not a happy girl herself” (552), but she stops thinking about it before she asks herself why or what can be done about it. Asbury for his part turned to the self-consoling activity of writing in response to his mother's false positivism—which is simply her emotional shield against her children's cries of pain.

II.

“Good Country People” examines the relationship of the tenant family to the economic and social life of the female farm owner. A man must head this adjunct family, to do the majority of the farm work. Within the renting household, sons are considered a great asset and wives can prove very useful, but daughters, elderly mothers and fathers, and any other hangers-on must also pitch in and help. No matter how large, the family crowds into a small, rudimentary dwelling on the farm. The farm owner cannot fail to become involved, to some degree, in the personal lives of her tenants. Despite little or no education, social advantage, stability, or silver service sets, the tenant family fits—by virtue of skin color—on the class ladder above the African American day laborers and below the farm owner. In O'Connor's stories, the tenant often provides comic relief in addition to new twists on mother-child relationships.

Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People” is living embodiment of the title—at least in her own estimation. She becomes another butt of O'Connor's stinging criticism. A divorcée of many years, she runs a farm with the help of her tenants, the Freemans. In addition to her management duties, she must also contend with the antagonism of her daughter Joy. She is proud of her home, which she describes as elegant; her status as a shrewd, but good, country person; and her many favorite sayings, which allow her to live almost entirely by cliché. As her name suggests, she remains cheerful and positive at all times, but she is not proud of her daughter, although one of Mrs. Hopewell's aphorisms is “nothing is perfect.” Joy is thirty-two years old, and her given name is the antithesis of the general attitude of this “large hulking” woman “whose constant outrage [has] obliterated every expression from her face.”³ She changed her name to Hulga when she turned twenty-one, but her mother refuses to acknowledge it. The name change is both a desperate attempt to establish her own identity and a tremendous insult to her mother. Joy-Hulga has a wooden leg to replace the one blown off in a hunting accident when she was ten. She has a heart condition and, to make matters worse, a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Other psychological difficulties as well mar the daily operations of Mrs. Hopewell's farm. Mrs. Hopewell does not seem to share Mrs. Fox's need for constant hands-on management, perhaps because, if we take her at her word, she has “no bad qualities of her own but she [is] able to use other people in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack” (264). Before she hired the Freemans four years earlier, she had employed a new tenant family every year. This time, even though a previous employer had told her that Mr. Freeman is a good worker but Mrs. Freeman is rather unbearable in her nosiness, Mrs. Hopewell hired the family anyway, since they were her only applicants. In deciding what management technique to use with Mrs. Freeman, her reasoning is all but deranged: “Since she was the type who had to be into everything, … she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything—she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge” (264).

What Mrs. Hopewell needs more than anything is companionship, and Mrs. Freeman provides her this commodity. The two women start the day's business at Mrs. Hopewell's breakfast table and spend a great deal of the day together. They walk the fields and pull onions while Mr. Freeman is presumably off operating the heavy equipment. Mrs. Hopewell, however, has the upper hand in the relationship. She is the boss and has the additional status of a property owner. Considering the closeness of the two women, etiquette demands that the relationship be handled delicately; Mrs. Hopewell is careful to establish that the Freemans are not “trash,” as were her previous tenants. Mrs. Hopewell tells everyone that “Mrs. Freeman [is] a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet” (264). Mrs. Freeman has faults; she thinks herself never wrong and always the first to think of everything. Fortunately for their friendship, Mrs. Hopewell possesses an extraordinary amount of patience.

When Joy-Hulga returned home after a few years at school, her health problems were paramount. Her heart condition is her excuse to do almost nothing. She constantly reminds everyone that if she were healthy she would be far away, teaching. Those familiar with Flannery O'Connor's battle with lupus cannot help but see the parallel dependency resulting from a debilitating illness with Joy-Hulga, and to some extent Asbury. This reality exacts a painful toll on the sufferer and the relationship with her caregiver. Joy-Hulga certainly might do more with her life if she really wanted—she certainly manages to climb readily up into the hayloft with the Bible salesman. Though she is capable of living alone, she remains at home to prove to her mother on a daily basis that she is the opposite of her mother's hopes for her (hence the meaning of Mrs. Hopewell's name). In her motherly role, Mrs. Hopewell gets up early and lights her daughter's heater. She frets because Joy-Hulga has never danced, partied, or socialized in the way southern young ladies should. She blames Joy-Hulga's general nastiness on her education and her wooden leg. Instead of instilling in her daughter a sense of responsibility by having her walk the fields with her mother, Mrs. Hopewell does not even ask, fearing Joy-Hulga's negative reaction. Puzzled that her daughter does not “like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature” (268), Mrs. Hopewell fails to realize that such appreciations are usually acquired in early childhood with the help of a loving mentor.

Mrs. Hopewell abhors the slightest hint of ugliness; therefore Joy-Hulga is a constant thorn in her side. The two spar continually and are steady sources of mutual irritation. Mrs. Hopewell clings to a childish belief in the truth of sugary maxims like “A smile never hurt anyone” or “People who look on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they are not.” Joy-Hulga thumps around the house on her wooden leg just to annoy her mother with its ugly sound. Mrs. Hopewell tells the Bible salesman that her atheist daughter will not abide her keeping the Bible in the parlor. She lies when she tells him her Bible is in her bedroom, another indication of Mrs. Hopewell's willingness to bend the truth for the sake of manners. Mrs. Hopewell wishes that “the child had not taken the Ph.D.” because “it had certainly not brought her out any” (267). By habitually treating her daughter as a child, the mother fosters the daughter's vengeful rejection of Mrs. Hopewell's endless optimism and belief in the supremacy of the social graces. Joy-Hulga treats her mother as if she were an imbecile. Although Mrs. Hopewell is easily duped by the Bible salesman, believing his good-country-people spiel is “so sincere, so genuine and earnest” (272), she does not buy a Bible. She loses only the price of a dinner.

On the other hand, Joy-Hulga loses much more. She thinks she is going to seduce and control the salesman with her superior intellect. Instead, she loses her wooden leg and her dignity. She is shocked by the whiskey and deck of cards hidden behind the Bibles in his valise. She is flabbergasted to discover that he is a petty con man, not “just good country people” (282). She finally sees not only that the simple Bible salesman has duped her, but also that she has, against her better judgment, put all her assets into the stock of her mother's trite ontology. Both of their portfolios are now worthless on the open market.

O'Connor's sharp criticism of the mother figure is most piercing in her description of Mrs. Hopewell reactions to Hulga's education. Mrs. Hopewell wanted her daughter besieged by suitors, a social butterfly of little mind. But Joy-Hulga's intelligence is too great, her size too large, and her disposition too stubborn. Thus she has sought meaning in nihilistic philosophy, finding, as she tells the Bible salesman, “a kind of salvation” in seeing “through to nothing” (280). “Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had ‘gone through,’” (268) to become intellectually separated from her mother. It is bad enough that the daughter is “bloated, rude, and squint-eyed,” but her chosen field of study further compromises Mrs. Hopewell's social standing: “You could say, ‘My daughter is a nurse,’ or ‘My daughter is a school teacher. … You could not say my daughter is a philosopher.’ That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans” (268). Like Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Hopewell refuses to hear her child's cry for help. She blocks Joy-Hulga's requests with suggestions for “proper behavior” (266). When the Bible salesman tells Joy-Hulga that her wooden leg makes her different from anyone else, she surrenders to him completely and loses the leg she has treated as her soul.

Competition is as essential to social systems as to economic ones, linked as the two spheres are by greed and ambition—and even a tenant family can provide a landowner with competition. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman engage in an ongoing contest to deliver the most clichés and engage in the most virtuous behavior. Joy, too, delights in a sarcastic rivalry with Mrs. Freeman. Competition occurs at its cutthroat best, however, when Mrs. Hopewell throws Joy-Hulga unwittingly into the ring with Mrs. Freeman's two daughters. Glynese is an eighteen-year-old redhead, admired mightily by the opposite sex. Carramae is fifteen, blonde, married, and pregnant. Together these two epitomize the proper combination of vapidity and fecundity to make a perfect southern belle, the kind of daughter Mrs. Hopewell has always hoped for. As Mrs. Freeman stands hovering over the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table, Joy-Hulga listens to Carramae's tales of the vomiting and gastric distress and reports of Glynese's backseat acrobatic antics. The two girls receive praise from her mother that Joy-Hulga has never received. Mrs. Hopewell feels that Joy-Hulga does not “have a grain of sense” (268), which is precisely what she admires most about the Freeman girls. No wonder she finds solace in a book that promises “nothing of Nothing” (269).

III.

In “Greenleaf,” one of O'Connor's most technically competent stories, it is the bond with sons rather than daughters that is destroyed by the mother's spiritual bankruptcy. Mrs. May runs a thriving business and fancies herself a living martyr to hard work in a shiftless world. Spiritual blindness, egregious materialism, and stubborn willfulness in her dealings with the Greenleaf family, her tenants of fifteen years, fuel her frenetic management technique, poison her already revolting relationship with her sons, and eventually lead to her death.

All Mr. May left his wife and sons when he died was a piece of land purchased when prices were low. Mrs. May would have anyone believe that she single-handedly turned the tract into an impressive dairy farm: “When she looked out any window in her house, she saw the reflection of her own character.” When her friends in the city come to visit, she credits her amazing success to the “iron hand” with which she struggles to put down “everything [that] is against you … the weather … the dirt … and the help … all in league against you.”⁴ Her sons, two particularly unpleasant fictional siblings, object to the necessary move to the farm, after which their mother provides them with a more-than-adequate living, college educations, and doting personal attention. Although they hate every minute spent in country air, some inexplicable—and probably unhealthy—bond prevents them from leaving.

Scofield and Wesley May strive constantly to compromise any social standing that their mother has gained. Mrs. May refers to Scofield, the elder at thirty-six, as a “business type.” She does not object that he sells insurance for a living, but she disapproves of the fact that he sells “the kind that only Negroes buy.” That choice, she believes, prevents nice girls from wanting to marry him. But Scofield can make more money selling this type of insurance than any other kind, and, moreover, he enjoys undercutting his mother's obvious prejudice by announcing loudly in her company that “I'm the best nigger-insurance salesman in this country” (504-5). Mrs. May describes Wesley as an intellectual, though this claim is highly debatable. She blames his problems on rheumatic fever. Wesley's own musings remain for the most part unarticulated, but his intellectualism runs along the same lines as Asbury's and Joy-Hulga's: “He didn't like anything. He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it. He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery. But in spite of all he said, … he never went even to Atlanta” (509).

As soon as Mrs. May had cleared her land for dairy farming, she hired the Greenleaf family. From Mrs. May's point of view, Mr. Greenleaf has been a completely unsatisfactory worker and has added nothing to the success of the business. Even though she views him as completely “shiftless” and believes that “no one else would have had him five minutes,” she has not fired him (502). She does not think she could find a better family—a cross she must bear, perhaps, or an indication of the size of the salary. She treats Mr. Greenleaf as if he were a child too dull to be insulted. She continually asks him if he understands, repeats instructions, and describes in detail the suffering she, a poor woman, has been forced to endure because of his inadequacy. “Over the years … Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf had hardly aged at all. They had no worries, no responsibilities. They lived like the lilies of the field, off the fat that she struggled to put into the land” (509).

The arrival of the Greenleaf family, complete with their two sons, also marks the beginning of the competition arising from the inevitable comparison of the two sets of offspring. Mrs. May resents Mr. Greenleaf's obvious pride in his sons. “He acted,” she comments, “as if this [the fact that the boys are twins] were something smart they had thought of themselves” (507). O.T. and E.T. Greenleaf are a few years younger than Mrs. May's boys. They grow up on her farm, helping their father, learning the dairy business, and surviving on the hand-me-down toys and clothes from the more privileged Wesley and Scofield—a generosity for which Mrs. May expects gratitude to the grave. Mrs. May considers the Greenleafs to be trash, and she likens Mrs. Greenleaf's overzealous erotic faith-healing practices, in which the woman writhes obscenely in the dirt, to the wallowing of mules in the yard. In her mind the lowly Greenleafs are equivalent to the scrub bull that impregnates her cows and weakens the stock. Whenever Mrs. May feels threatened by the success of the Greenleaf boys, she consoles herself by thinking them stupid and ill bred: “Well, no matter how far they go, they came from that” (507).

World War II proved to be a stroke of luck for the young adult Greenleaf twins. They both joined the service during World War II, rose to the rank of sergeant, and had the good fortune to be wounded and net pensions. Returning home, they earned degrees in agriculture on the G.I. Bill. They bought land a couple of miles from Mrs. May and built a brick duplex and modern dairy farm with the help of government wartime subsidies. Mrs. May attributes the twins' success solely to the war and the taxpayer (herself). “If the war had made anyone, Mrs. May said, it had made the Greenleaf boys” (507). To make matters worse, both marry French girls while overseas. Mrs. May naturally assumes that because they are French, they are “nice girls” who have fallen for O.T. and E.T. because, “disguised in their uniforms, they could not be told from other people's children” (507). The Greenleaf boys each have three children, and, because their mothers are French, they will go to convent school that will eradicate the vestiges of social inferiority based on their relative lack of education and their speaking “Greenleaf English.” Such dumb luck in economic and social matters represents to Mrs. May a complete disruption of her sense of what is fair and deserved in her conservative and competitive understanding of the world. O.T. and E.T., who grew up without property and without learning correct manners, should have, in her mind, remained hired hands on the dairy farm. They should have been grateful for all she did for them. The Greenleaf twins eventually displace her and her childish, childless sons; thus all her work to maintain her economic status for the sake of Wesley's and Scofield's social status is wiped out.

Since the rearing of Wesley and Scofield is given scant attention, responsibility for the miserable outcome of their lives may belong to either the wretched mother or the wretched sons themselves, but the mother seems the safest bet. She overindulges them as adults (or, rather, as adult children). In order to maintain her elevated social standing, she prevents them from working on the farm or from helping Mr. Greenleaf and his boys get to know the place. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither has any appreciation for the land or for their mother's efforts. She tells them that if she hadn't “kept her foot on [Mr. Greenleaf's] neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o'clock.” Given her lack of humility, it is easy to sympathize with the sons' lapses of gratitude, although Wesley's comment, that “I wouldn't milk a cow to save your soul from hell,” seems a bit extreme (510).

Although she does not eat, Mrs. May hovers maternally over the breakfast table each morning to attend to her sons' needs, including preparing a salt-free diet for Wesley. Though she does not believe any of it, she thinks Christianity a fine religion, and urges the two to go to church to meet nice girls. She makes no attempt to throw them out or force them to grow up, and they make no attempt to leave. She constantly reminds them of her sacrifice for them and berates them for their inadequacies, especially by comparing them to O.T. and E.T. They respond with horrible taunts, calling her “sweetheart” and threatening to marry women like Mrs. Greenleaf. She calls them “boys” and makes excuses for their behavior. “Poor boy,” she says of Wesley, “he could not help making [his voice] deliberately nasty” (509). As a consequence of this emotionally hostile environment, Wesley and Scofield detest each other so completely that they resemble two vicious animals lying at opposite corners of a cage, each waiting for the right moment to go for the jugular. “I am the only adult on this place,” Mrs. May tells her sons in exasperation (510). The three characters thrive on mutual hatred.

All of Mrs. May's efforts—both maternal and social—are in vain. Her death resonates with the symbolism of judgment, for which she erroneously believes her work ethic makes her ready. On her Day of Judgment Mrs. May awakens to the sound of a stray bull chewing outside her window. She is concerned that the bull will weaken her stock—weakened stock, bovine or human, is one of her greatest worries—but again, it is a misplaced concern. The bull has pursued her relentlessly through the story and now resumes the fateful chase. Seeking respite, she reclines, exhausted, to rest on the hood of her car, and cries out the justification of her life: “Before any kind of judgment seat, she would be able to say: I've worked, I have not wallowed” (522). She thus believes she has led a correct life, but actually she has failed to see through the code of conduct and manners to what is important. Her self-satisfied statement is, from O'Connor's point of view, heavy with irony, weighing down her soul, for in truth, she has wallowed—in hubris and condescension, in arrogance and prejudice, in her failure to love and her lack of piety before God. In her unbelief, she does not recognize her culpability; judgment comes at a time and from a direction that she cannot anticipate; she has not seen, nor can she receive the light of God's mercy. Emerging from the trees, the beast—like the wrath of God—rams his horn through her loveless heart. She sinks down, burdened by her sins. “She had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable” (333). What is unbearable at that moment is the shocking recognition that the social and economic code to which she gave her complete faith has failed to provide any meaning or substance to her life.

Mrs. May's death may constitute for her an epiphany of another sort: the ultimate triumph of the patriarchal social and economic system, which the southern manners defended by O'Connor helped keep firmly in place. All of the author's frantic and class-conscious female farm managers must operate in a system that devalues them while highly valuing men and fathers. When Mrs. May berates Mr. Greenleaf because his sons have not come to take their inferior bull from her property, she recognizes the problem: “They didn't come because I'm a woman. … You can get away with anything when you're dealing with a woman. If there were a man running this place. …” Mr. Greenleaf reminds her of two men on the place—her sons. This rejoinder is “quick as a snake striking” (519). Mrs. May has emasculated her sons by not teaching them respect for male authority, thus subverting the natural order of patriarchy; therefore, in their impotence, Wesley and Scofield cannot continue its traditions. Having displaced a man as the head of the patriarchy, Mrs. May must be brought down and forced to face her weakness before men as well as before God.

IV.

O'Connor often attributes her characters' lack of virtue and failed relationships to their ignorant refusal to acknowledge the mercy of God. Speaking at an orphanage, she once observed: “Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.” She also bemoaned the unreflective student enthusiasm displayed at the local college for candlelight ceremonies, reasoning that these students had never experienced formal religious ceremonies “where these things have their proper place and are relegated to the background and have meaning.” The absence of love and meaning in the lives of the Fox, Hopewell, and May families explains a great deal about the failures of the mother-child relationship in these three stories. The sense of noblesse oblige is strong in the southern patriarchal social system. In order to maintain control of their “underlings,” those at the top of the social system were careful to keep up a public stance that exhibited the same cold objectivity in dealing with their family members and close friends as with their servants, tenants, and laborers. For many, this lack of emotional connection dominated all relationships.

O'Connor herself stoically endured the illness that left her bound to her mother's care, and she rarely missed an opportunity to acknowledge her debt to Regina. The tensions and strains within this mother and daughter relationship at Andalusia, however, are quite evident in the story told by O'Connor's letters. The relationship as she depicts it was one in which “the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.”⁵ O'Connor's letters are full of humorous and ironic tales about Regina's troubles and successes running her business enterprise. Many of these tales appear transposed into fiction in these three stories of businesswomen and failed mothers and their children whose pain is evident through the veil of sarcasm. The real lives and the fictional ones are connected, as are the successes and the failures.

Notes

1. Flannery O'Connor, interview by C. Ross Mullins, in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 233-4; Erma Bombeck, Family: The Ties That Bind—and Gag (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987).

2. Flannery O'Connor, “The Enduring Chill,” in Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 551, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

3. Flannery O'Connor, “Good Country People,” ibid., 264-5, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

4. Flannery O'Connor, “Greenleaf,” Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 511, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

5. Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 244, 254, 163-4.