Character Analysis Of 'Greenleaf By Flannery O' Connor

Greenleaf ELDERLY WOMAN, FARMOWNER, GORED BY BULL- This is what the newspaper headlines would have said on the morning after Mrs. May’s tragic death in “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor, and is the only thing that some people might get out of reading the short story. However, O’Connor wrote with a deeper meaning behind her words, and “Greenleaf” is not just the absurd, grotesque tale that it might originally appear. Through Mrs. May’s prideful, bossy, and self-righteous character the author conveys her message. O’Connor’s story is about the futility of being judgmental and absorbed in oneself, and how that can be countered by putting one’s faith in the Almighty God. Mrs. May, the main character of the story, is quickly established as

May is a highly opinionated woman, and the attitudes that she has about people shapes her interaction about them in different ways. No matter how much abuse she takes from her sons, she refuses to ever say a negative word about them in front of Mr. Greenleaf because he is so inferior to them that it would be unacceptable to let him know of any imperfections in her precious sons. Mrs. May also looks down her nose at Mrs. Greenleaf, who is eccentric but sincere in her Christian faith. Every day, Mr. Greenleaf’s wife prays intensely over clippings of tragedies from the newspaper that she buries in the woods, rolling on the ground, sobbing, and crying out to the Lord in “prayer healings.” Mrs. May thinks that this is a waste of time and that Mrs. Greenleaf is an irresponsible mother, because she doesn’t fawn over her children the way Mrs. May does. And if that is not enough, she also takes issue with the Greenleafs’ two sons, twins O.T. and E.T. They served in the military and earned a pension, and invested it into raising cattle. Now they have managed to establish a successful homestead and right before “Greenleaf” begins they have just gotten new high-tech machines for milking the cows. Mrs. May, however, is of the opinion that they have just mooched everything from the government, and that it is scandalous that someone from a family like theirs could rise in social standing and become

May prides herself, and the thing that ends up being her doom, is her “virtue.” When the farm owner first comes across Mrs. Greenleaf in one of the round little woman’s prayer healings, O’Connor writes “She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.” The fact that Mrs. May was righteous to herself and believed that she did not have to account any of her actions to God when she died was her undoing. She often threatened her sons with “If I die…” and also had multiple strange dreams in which she was destroyed in bizarre ways, which is both foreshadowing and shows that death was frequently on her mind. When the story finally comes to its climax with the rogue, pesky bull that was seemingly the most important issue in the course of the story goring Mrs. May, O’Connor drives her point home by showing that everything that Mrs. May was living for was pointless. In the main character’s final moments, she neither screams nor moves out of the way of the oncoming bull. Rather, she is shocked that anything would dare to disrespect her to such an extent, and that Mr. Greenleaf did not follow her orders to the letter and get the bull under control. She seems to be more indignant than terrified. The last sentence of the short story says that when Mr. Greenleaf reached her moments after the tragedy, Mrs. May is bent over the bull which Greenleaf shot a moment too late, and it