Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

Flannery O’Connor informed Betty Hester in mid-January 1956 that she was very happy to be writing a story in which she planned for a sixty-three-year-old heroine to be gored by a bull. O’Connor continued that she was not sure whether she would identify with the heroine or the bull, but that the risk involved was that which was making her happy.[1] Four days later, she told Hester that she had made the bull “the pleasantest character in this story.”[2]

The story was “Greenleaf,” which would win the 1957 first place in the O. Henry Prize Collection. Mrs. May, a widowed farm owner, wakes up in the middle of the night to find a scrub bull munching on the hedge under her window. Her mind races to whether she should get Mr. Greenleaf, the hired farmhand. This leads her to think about how Mr. Greenleaf was barely adequate for any job, but also the risk that if she heads out for the Greenleaf’s place she might run into Mrs. Greenleaf, whom she always tries to avoid.

From this beginning, the story unfolds with a series of contrasts between Mrs. May and the Greenleafs that can be read on multiple levels. The story can be read as a straight forward tale that has comic and tragic elements as Mrs. May is undone by her two grown sons, Wesley and Scofield, who refuse to help her, by Mr. Greenleaf, who is desultory in his duty, and by the bull that will not go away. It can also be read as a story about the transition from the old South, represented by Mrs. May and her sons, to the new South, represented by the Greenleafs’ sons, O. T. and E. T. It can also be read as pointing to the reality and significance of Jesus Christ in this life and the one to come.

That the story can be interpreted on multiple levels, combining as it does natural, cultural-economic, and mystical elements, speaks to O’Connor’s methodology. She declared that in order to make a story work there needs to be an action or gesture that flows out of daily life but at the same time suggests both this world and eternity.[3] Consequently, her gaze in writing extends beyond the surface level, beyond the moralitistic level at which mainstream religion is content to remain, to the heavens, the realm of mystery and our participation in it, which is the concern of the prophets. For O’Connor, the novelist’s duty is to see the ultimate meaning of near things in order to expose far things close up.

In “Greenleaf,” Mrs. May views near things under her ownership, the product of her hard work. Her life centers on preserving her place, her lawn, her oats, her cows, and her herd. O’Connor contrasted Mrs. May’s perspective with “connected and sympathetic” characters, Mrs. Greenleaf, the sun, and the bull. O’Connor described to Hester with enthusiasm a point in the story where they converge. “Mrs. May sees the bull as the sun’s shadow cast at an oblique angle moving among the cows, and of course he’s a Greenleaf bull!”[4]

Setting and Characters

“Greenleaf” opens with a bull, silvered in the moonlight, standing under Mrs. May’s bedroom window that faced east, “his head raised as if he listened—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir inside the room.”[5] Although the bull at first glance could be referencing Greek mythology and Zeus coming down to woo a mere mortal, O’Connor makes clear that the bull is symbolic of Christ.[6] Hearing his chewing (Christ’s voice), Mrs. May awakes, opens the blind, and views the bull, a hedge-wreath across his horns.[7]

Mr. Greenleaf, she thinks, has left the gate open, and now the bull was eating everything that belonged to her, but, of course, not touching anything that belonged to the Greenleafs. Before she closes the blind she looks again and sees the bull staring at her “like an uncouth country suiter“ with “the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown.”[8]

She squints at him fiercely and begins to think about how others have taken advantage of her. Shiftless people’s hogs rooted up her oats, their mules wallowed on her lawn, and now a scrub bull would breed her cows unless he is put out immediately. But she also realizes that Mr. Greenleaf is soundly sleeping in the tenant house and there is no way for her to get him to take care of the bull unless she gets dressed and drives there to wake him up. She also dreads the thought of what would undoubtedly be his response, “If hit was my boys they would never have allowed their maw to go after hired help in the middle of the night. They would have did it theirself.”[9]

The next morning Mrs. May tells Mr. Greenleaf about the bull and that she wants it penned up at once. Mr. Greenleaf responds that the bull had been on the farm three days. When he had tried to put the bull in the pen, the animal tore out and Mr. Greenleaf hadn’t seen him since.

Hearing this conversation are Mrs. May’s grown sons who live with her on the farm. Wesley, an intellectual, taught at a local college, and Scofield, a business type, sold insurance to black folk.[10] Mrs. May’s dream is that they both would marry nice girls. When she tells Scofield that if he sold decent insurance that a nice girl would marry him, he taunts her that he is going to wait until she dies to get married. He even added once, to Mrs. May’s chagrin, that he would marry some nice lady like Mrs. Greenleaf.

Mrs. Greenleaf

The thought that one of her boys might marry someone even remotely like Mrs. Greenleaf was enough to make Mrs. May ill. Instead of Mrs. Greenleaf doing her duty, cleaning her house or washing her five daughters, she spends her time praying and participating in grotesque worship. Daily she cut out from the newspaper morbid stories of rape, torture of children, horrible accidents, and divorces of movie stars. She then would place the clippings on the ground, where she would gyrate over them crying out to Jesus for help.[11]

Mr. Greenleaf had only been employed for a few months when Mrs. May found out that this was Mrs. Greenleaf’s practice. The encounter came about because Mr. Greenleaf had used the wrong seeds in the grain drill. Mrs. May “was returning through a wooded path that separated two pastures, muttering to herself and hitting the ground methodically with a long stick she carried in case she saw a snake.”[12] As Mrs. May rehearses what she is going to say to Mr. Greenleaf about his seeding mistake, she hears an agonized voice groaning, “Jesus, Jesus.” She stops still, the sound “so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her.” Her next thought is more reasonable, someone is probably hurt, although that immediately brings fear that she might be sued and lose everything since she has no insurance. She rushes forward and sees that it is Mrs. Greenleaf face down on the ground off the side of the road.

“Mrs. Greenleaf!” she shrilled, “what’s happened?”

Mrs. Greenleaf raised her head. Her face was a patchwork of dirt and tears and her small eyes, the color of two field peas, were red-rimmed and swollen, but her expression was as composed as a bulldog’s. She swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned, “Jesus, Jesus.”

Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. “What is the matter with you?” she asked sharply.[13]

“You broken my healing,” Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. “I can’t talk to you until I finish.”[14]

Mrs. May stood, bent forward, her mouth open and her stick raised off the ground as if she were not sure what she wanted to strike with it.[15]

Mrs. May’s carrying the stick is O’Connor’s gloss on Genesis 3:15. Mrs. May believes in salvation through her own efforts—at the judgment she will be able to confess that she bruised the head of the serpent through her tireless work on the farm. The implication of Mrs. May not being sure of what she wants to strike is that she considers Mrs. Greenleaf’s way of life a serpent-like threat. Mrs. Greenleaf’s only concern is Jesus and redemption in his name. Unlike Mrs. May, who trusts in the merit of her own works, Mrs. Greenleaf knows she cannot save herself. “‘Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!’ Mrs. Greenleaf shrieked. ‘Jesus, stab me in the heart!’ and she fell back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth.”[16]

Mrs. Greenleaf’s total abandon to Jesus scandalizes Mrs. May. “‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes!’ and she had turned and walked off as fast as she could.”[17]

O. T. and E. T. and Scofield and Wesley

Mrs. May works and works, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf are the ones that have no worries, no responsibilities. They live like the lilies of the field, hardly aging at all.

As “scrub-human” as the Greenleafs are, it particularly goads Mrs. May that Mr. Greenleaf never fails to proclaim the superiority of his boys, O. T. and E. T. The Greenleaf boys had fought in World War II and married some nice French girls who did not know what type of people the Greenleafs were. Educated on the G.I. bill, O. T. and E. T. operate a prosperous farm on top of a treeless hill a couple miles from Mrs. May’s farm.

The thought of her boys without nice girls as wives, compared to the Greenleaf boys’ married bliss, leads Mrs. May to nag her sons. Wesley snarls in return, “Well, why don’t you do something practical, Woman? Why don’t you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?” “I don’t like to hear you boys make jokes about religion,” she had said. “If you would go to church, you would meet some nice girls.”[18]

Scofield then breaks the news to her that the bull belongs to O. T. and E. T.[19]

This sets Mrs. May into a rage. “Do you see that if I hadn’t kept my foot on his neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o’clock?” Wesley murmurs, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.” Teary-eyed, she replies, “I know you wouldn’t.”[20]

She gets up from the table and looks out the window. She sees the cows grazing on the green pastures across the road, and behind them, fencing them in, a black wall of trees with a sharp, sawtooth edge that held an indifferent sky. The sight calms her momentarily, but then the sun, which was just a little brighter than the rest of the sky, moves over the grazing cows, and Mrs. May sees a darker shape that might have been the sun’s shadow cast at an angle moving among the herd. Angry at the sight of the bull mixed with her milk herd, Mrs. May marches over to Mr. Greenleaf. She informs him that she knows that the bull belongs to his boys and that she is going to drive over to O. T. and E. T.’s and tell them to come get him. In a half-hour, she sees the bull ambling down the road with Mr. Greenleaf behind him in procession. Mr. Greenleaf looks on the bull with approval, but Mrs. May mutters that surely it is a Greenleaf bull, the awfullest looking one she ever saw.

When Mrs. May turns in O. T. and E. T.’s driveway to tell them that their bull is on her farm, the sun beat down directly on their new white-roofed house. Their children approach, and Mrs. May feels as if she is on trial for her life, facing a jury of French-speaking Greenleafs. She decides to go down to the barn, and there she sees firsthand how advanced O. T. and E. T.’s mechanical milking parlor is, the white concrete filled with sunlight.[21] She withdraws quickly, closes the door, and leans against it frowning. “The light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.”[22]

Mrs. May writes a message about the bull for the Negro workhand to deliver to O. T. and E. T. He recognizes her as the policy man’s mother, but she says sharply, “I don’t know who your policy man is.”[23] The disintegration of the relationship between mother and her offspring continues when she returns home. Scofield chides her for becoming so upset about the bull and declares that with such a mamma it is a wonder that he turned out to be such a nice boy. Wesley barks that Scofield is not her boy, and adds to the torment by stating that neither is he. Mrs. May runs from the room, and the boys fight about who is at fault.

Mrs. May would have collapsed, but she hears a knock from the back door and finds Mr. Greenleaf looking through the screenwire. She tells him that his boys did not come for the bull and that tomorrow he would have to shoot him. Mr. Greenleaf answers—the sky above him crossed with thin red and purple bars, and behind them the sun moving down slowly as if it were descending a ladder—that tomorrow he would drive the bull home for her. She tells Mr. Greenleaf that would not do, because the next week the bull would be back.

She then adds in a mournful tone that she is surprised that O. T. and E. T. treat her this way in light of everything that she has done for them when they were growing up. “They wore my boys’ old clothes and played with my boys’ old toys and hunted with my boys’ old guns. They swam in my pond and shot my birds and fished in my stream.”[24] She looks at the disappearing sun, and then tells Mr. Greenleaf the real reason they did not come for the bull is that she is a woman. Quick as a snake striking, he replies that they knew that she had her two boys on the farm. The sun had disappeared behind the tree line as she looks at him to make sure that he understands her hurt.

The Bull

That night as Mrs. May dreams, she hears a sound like a large stone grinding a hole on the outside of her head. She was walking over beautiful rolling hills, planting her stick in front of every step. “She became aware after a time that the noise was the sun trying to burn through the tree line and she stopped to watch, safe in the knowledge that it could not, that it had to sink the way it always did outside of her property.”[25] But then the swollen red ball began to narrow until it looked like a bullet coming at her, at which point she awakens to hear the bull’s munching.

The next morning she orders Mr. Greenleaf to get his gun. Mr. Greenleaf, upset that she would ask him to shoot his sons’ bull, stomps and kicks until he throws himself into the car with a violent thud. They find the bull grazing peacefully among the herd. Mr. Greenleaf tries to sneak up on the bull, but the bull gallops off.

As Mr. Greenleaf searches for the bull, Mrs. May leans back against the hood of the car and closes her eyes. She believes that she has every right to be tired, as hard as she has worked.

Before any kind of judgment seat, she would be able to say: I’ve worked, I have not wallowed. At this very instant while she was recalling a lifetime of work, Mr. Greenleaf was loitering in the woods and Mrs. Greenleaf was probably flat on the ground, asleep over her holeful of clippings. The woman had gotten worse over the years and Mrs. May believed that now she was actually demented. “I’m afraid your wife has let religion warp her,” she said once tactfully to Mr. Greenleaf. “Everything in moderation, you know.”[26]

Impatient for Mr. Greenleaf to draw the bull into the pasture where he can shoot him, she starts honking the horn. In freezing unbelief, she stares at the violent black streak coming at her as if she has no sense of distance. Before she could decide his intention, the bull buries his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover. One of his horns pierces her heart and the other curves around her side and holds her in an unbreakable grip. She is flipped upside down. Granted new vision, the entire scene in front of her changes. She sees beyond the land that she worked so hard to maintain, “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.”[27]

She also sees Mr. Greenleaf running toward her with his gun raised, even though she is not looking in his direction. She sees him “approaching on the outside of some invisible circle, the tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet.” He shoots the bull dead, but Mrs. May did not hear the shots but felt the quake of the bull’s body as it sank, pulling her forward. As she dies in the bull’s embrace, she appears to whisper “some last discovery into the animal’s ear.”[28]

Critical Commentary

Kathleen Feeley writes that two years before “Greenleaf” was published, O’Connor had taken special interest in Blasé Pascal’s statement that “to be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false.” Feeley posits that it “may well be this mistake of which Pascal speaks is Mrs. May’s ‘last discovery.’”[29]

Regarding Mrs. May’s salvation, Feeley maintains that the ending is ambiguous. She has the look of one who finds the light unbearable; she also whispers a “last discovery” that may indicate God’s final mercy.

Ralph Wood argues that O’Connor grants Mrs. May eschatological vision and salvation at the end. Mrs. May’s eyes are opened to the fact that woods and sky belong to the infinite God. The violent stab of death is a consummation that far surpasses a life lived in damning self-ownership.[30]

Frederick Asals maintains that taken by itself, “Greenleaf” might well suggest the theological docrtrine of the irresistibility of grace. He states that the story “is particularly notable in that it is the single O’Connor work, to my eye, in which the protagonist (and the bull’s victim), Mrs. May, seems to harbor no longing, however suppressed, for the divine.”[31] It is the bull’s violent embrace that leads to the opening of Mrs. May’s eyes.

Michael Bruner places Mrs. May in that category of those characters in O’Connor’s stories in which one is hard pressed to see how they fit into the Roman Catholic view of salvation. Mrs. May does not “cooperate” with God, nor is she “prepared and disposed” by the action of her own will.[32] The impaling of Mrs. May finds its origins in the inscrutable will of God.[33]

Endnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” January 13, 1956, Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 129.

[2] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” January 17, 1956, Habit of Being, 132.

[3] Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 111.

[4] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” March 24, 1956, Habit of Being, 148.

[5] Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories (Noonday Press, 1995), 311.

[6] Sally Fitzgerald, “Introduction,” Three by Flannery O’Connor (Penquin, 1983), xxv.

[7] O’Connor implies that between the first and second coming of Christ, when he is not seen with the eye, that his presence is marked by his voice, “When the moon retreated and there was darkness, there was nothing to mark his place but the sound of steady chewing” (Complete Stories, 311).

[8] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 312.

[9] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 312.

[10] One wonders if O’Connor’s naming of the intellectual son after the famous Methodist Wesley and the business son after fundamentalist Bible theologican Scofield, inspired Norman Maclean to write in his novella A River Runs Through it, “The Burns family ran a general store in a one store town and still managed to do badly. They were Methodist, a denomination my father always referred to as Baptists who could read.”

[11] Jessica Hooten Wilson suggests a connection between O’Connor’s having Mrs. Greenleaf pray over the news clippings and Ivan Karamazov’s use of newspaper clippings in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. She writes, “Prostrate in the dirt before Christ, Mrs. Greenleaf submits to God whose ways she cannot fully understand. Unlike Ivan, who uses newspaper clippings of others’ suffering to fuel his metaphysical rebellion, Mrs. Greenleaf grieves and prays over the afflicted.” Jessica Hooten Wilson, Giving the Devil His Due (Cascade, 2017), 131.

[12] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 316.

[13] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 316.

[14] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 316.

[15] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 316–317.

[16] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 317. Hewitt observes that although O’Connor asserted that grace was central to her fiction, there are rare scenes of gracious living like Mrs. Greenleaf’s praying. Hewitt asserts that Mrs. Greenleaf’s prayer “might be taken as a mantra for O’Connor’s project. To O’Connor, the fiction writer does not work with the goal of ‘uplift,’ of demonstrating to a tired but eager populace how well they are doing, how ‘successful’ they are.” Avis Hewitt, “Introduction,” Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism, eds. Avis Hewitt and Robert Dunahoo (University of Tennessee, 2010), vii–viii.

[17] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 317.

[18] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 320.

[19] S. Burns argues that the fact that the Greenleafs own the bull suggests that they possess the Spirit of Christ, as does Mrs. May’s contemptuous reference to them as “scrub-human.” Stuart Burns, “‘Torn by the Lord’s Eye’: Flannery O’Connor’s Use of Sun Imagery,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 13, no. 3 (Oct. 1967), 161.

[20] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 321.

[21] Kathleen Feeley maintains that the contrast between the Mays and the Greenleafs is that of the “old” (Mays) and “new” (Greenleafs) South. She writes, “Her (Mrs. May) visit illustrates what the opening section of the story has intimated: with hard work and government aid, the Greenleaf family—the ‘new South’—is rising economically, will rise socially, and will eventually displace the Mays, complacent middle-class Southerners.” See, Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (Rutgers, 1972), 94.

[22] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 325.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 326.

[24] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 328.

[25] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 329.

[26] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 332.

[27] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 333.

[28] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 334. M. Bruner writes that the “violence so often assumed to be evil in nature, like the impaling of Mrs. May . . . finds its origins in the inscrutable will of God.” Michael Bruner, A Subversive Gospel (IVP, 2017), 153.

[29] Feeley, Voice of the Peacock, 98.

[30] Ralph Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005), 90.

[31] Frederick Asals, The Extremity of Imagination (Univ. of Georgia, 1982), 223.

[32] Michael B. Bruner, A Subversive Gospel (IVP, 2017), 105.

[33] Bruner, A Subversive Gospel, 153.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, June, 2025.