Teaching Cultural Aspects of Class and Race in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”

Abstract

In Flannery O’Connor’s stories, racial issues have not received full attention due to her grotesque depiction of religiousness. This paper argues that O’Connor displays cultural reflections on whites’ rages against their deteriorated social status through the dynamics of racial rivalry in “Greenleaf” (1965). Before the two World Wars, whites were able to maintain their farms with African Americans and low-class whites. However, after the wars, social structures changed in a completely different way because many African Americans substituted for whites in occupational roles. Especially Mrs. May, a white female protagonist in “Greenleaf,” explodes with rage because she is not fully respected by her African-American worker family. Metaphorically, O’Connor depicts Mrs. May as a senile, weak Southern woman who faced the looming of the Civil Rights movement. A female version of the South, Mrs. May cannot help but watch her own destruction at the end of the story. Following the emancipation of the African Americans after the Civil War, whites began to struggle with their deteriorated social status, and O’Connor describes their miserable lives in a modern context. This paper explores how O’Connor’s fictional characters’ anger and anxiety against the rising middle class and African American groups are depicted on a national level. Furthermore, in the form of redemptive action, we can see whites’ psychological and physical resignation to the rising groups in the American South.