Flannery O’Connor: An Ugly Route to Goodness

No stories stir up debate like those of Flannery O’Connor. In high school, tea cooled and cookies lay untouched as members of my book club gesticulated about their opinions on “Greenleaf,” one of O’Connor’s short stories. In the story, Mrs. May lords over her farmhand, Mr. Greenleaf, and insults his charismatic, lower-class family. As a roundabout result of her arrogance, a bull impales Mrs. May through the heart. O’Connor intimates that the bull piercing Mrs. May strips away her prejudices and enables her to see clearly. Despite accusations that “Generation Z” suffers from apathy, my peers argued ferociously about whether the story could be beautiful, despite its medium of violence.

“The style is beautiful, but the content it ugly,” someone insisted.

“It’s beautiful because it shows you something true about life, even though the truth might not be beautiful,” suggested my friend. 

I shook my head vigorously. “Can truth and beauty be divorced?”

Although we reached no conclusions, O’Connor’s story forced us to confront and contemplate the nature of goodness.

O’Connor was born one hundred years ago, on March 25, 1925, and did not live to see her fortieth birthday. Her short stories and novels, ever shocking by design, still ignite confrontations and conversations about what is good. She stirs a stagnant world. O’Connor’s stories unmask hypocrites and puncture the self-righteousness. The splinters in her characters’ eyes reveal the planks in our own. By swelling the familiar to spectacular and grotesque proportions, we may recognize the monstrosities in O’Connor’s stories for what they are: a mirror in which we see ourselves.

To find goodness in O’Connor’s stories, we readers must host the suspicion that we are not entirely good. Now, three new offerings – a miniseries from The Great Courses, a posthumously published novel, and the movie Wildcat (2023) – provoke us to probe O’Connor’s fiction, her person, and our own hearts in a quest to more deeply understand the mysteries of human sin, goodness, and grace.

Not too long ago, in a high-school discussion much like mine, Maya Hawke and her classmates were having their own rousing debate about a character’s morality. O’Connor’s strange story made the familiar foreign enough for students to question the trappings of seeming goodness. Hawke’s appreciation for O’Connor’s work grew when the young actress and musician resonated with the struggle between ambition and humility depicted in O’Connor’s Prayer Journal. Hawke does not come from a Christian background, but found that O’Connor challenged and engaged her moral imagination.

Maya came to her father, Ethan Hawke, with an idea: to make a movie about O’Connor’s interior life, alternating between fiction and biography. With Ethan directing and Maya doubling as O’Connor along with many of her characters, Wildcat intersperses scenes from the author’s life with select short stories.

Although exploring the person of O’Connor textures interpretations of her stories, Wildcat risks conflating the author with the fiction. While watching Wildcat, my brother (a stranger to Flannery O’Connor’s work) kept interrupting to ask me why the protagonist had once again been transported into an alternate costume and setting. After all, she kept slipping into lucid dreams in which she lost a wooden leg, beat a tattooed man bloody with a broom, and strangled an old lady. Because Maya Hawke played both Flannery O’Connor and the main short story characters, the fictional scenes bled into the biographical tale. This convergence suggests that O’Connor’s writing process entailed playing paper dolls with herself: cutting herself out and testing her personality in different clothes, contexts, and attitudes.

But the choice invites the viewer to engage with O’Connor’s fiction as an extension of her person, and in doing so, tries to dispel the idea that fiction can be totally morally prescriptive.

Photograph by Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo.

“Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit,” O’Connor said in a lecture on writing. “It is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.”

Wildcat indulges the senses: Hawke’s rasping accent, the hammer of typewriter keys, and clack of crutches. Ethan Hawke paid diligence to O’Connor’s habits: her praying over the rosary, curving over her writing desk, and injecting herself with cortisone. The movie depicts the habits that shaped O’Connor’s soul and daily life.

The picture the film paints of O’Connor’s character is complicated, illustrating her ambition, scorn, and pettiness. Although ambition is not always sinful, and in some cases can be God-honoring, it became an idol to O’Connor. In Wildcat, the author’s desperation to write something good – at times for herself and at other times for God – shows the fissure between who O’Connor wanted to be and who she was. By showing the struggles of O’Connor’s interior life, the Hawkes enable readers to follow these battles into her fiction.

“Wildcat brings the right things to life. It knows how to put flesh on the right places with Flannery,” says Jessica Hooten Wilson, praising the film’s attention to habit and its portrayal of O’Connor as a person, not just a writer.

For Wilson, O’Connor’s work emboldened her to explore the mutilated fragments of goodness in a broken world. As a Christian teenager, Wilson felt obligated to write nice, clean, happy stories. In other words, true and beautiful tales. However, O’Connor exposed Wilson to the hypocrisy of nice people and guided her down an ugly route to goodness. As a result, Wilson devoted much of her career as a writer and scholar to studying O’Connor’s fiction.

Her recent Great Courses miniseries, Flannery O’Connor and the Scandal of Faith, is an excellent introduction to the themes of O’Connor’s work. And in 2024, Wilson published Why Do the Heathen Rage?, in which she stitches together the pieces of an unfinished novel manuscript that O’Connor was working on before she died. Wilson buttresses this text with her own commentary and educated speculation about the direction in which the author might have developed the novel had she lived to complete it.

Through her book, Wilson guides readers to approach O’Connor’s work with both moral skepticism and grace. Her commentaries force readers to look critically at O’Connor’s fiction. O’Connor’s work holds a mirror to our souls. However, the glass is scarred and chipped. The author’s own prejudices and racism tainted her fiction. In Why Do the Heathen Rage? Wilson discusses the flawed aspects of O’Connor’s work, seeks the good, and imagines ways to redeem the sinful elements.

Why Do the Heathen Rage? deals more directly with race and civil rights than O’Connor’s other work. Although race often appears in O’Connor’s stories, here it moves from the periphery to the center of the story.

One of the two main characters, Oona Gibbs, dedicates herself to social activism at Fellowship Farm, which refers to the real Koinonia Farm, the racially integrated cooperative a short distance from O’Connor’s hometown. The other main character, Walter Tilman, writes to Oona posing as a black man to test her civil rights sentiments. Although Wilson sees O’Connor’s treatment of the civil rights movement in this novel as increased sensitivity toward issues of race, O’Connor’s drafted plot parodies champions of social justice without offering a positive alternative.

Through her commentary, Wilson attempts to redeem the cracks in O’Connor’s moral vision. She offers a theology through which to approach O’Connor’s racist slurs and letters and acknowledges the “other half of the story” by reflecting on black authors’ approaches to O’Connor. Ultimately, Wilson writes an imaginary ending to O’Connor’s story that opens Walter’s eyes to the image of God in his black counterparts. Through examining the imperfections in O’Connor’s work, Wilson offers readers a way to read O’Connor without rejecting either her work or the fact of her racism.

In most cases, Wilson’s careful research illuminates O’Connor’s efforts. However, although helpful, some of these explanations of grace demystify the strangeness of the spiritual intrusions in O’Connor’s fiction. While describing O’Connor’s work, Wilson writes, “prophetic vision does not depict the facts of the moment so much as portray the mystery of the human hearts participating in the events.” In contrast, Wilson dissects how the facts of O’Connor’s historical moment forecasted her authorial decisions. Her imagined ending to the novel must rely on patterns suggested by O’Connor’s past work, rather than partake in the metamorphoses that occur within a writer. In her Great Courses series, Wilson points to a letter O’Connor wrote about her work in progress, and how she hoped to do something new and different with it beyond the shock of grace that characterized most of her climaxes. But ultimately, any guess as to what this would have entailed is just a guess, perhaps colored by our own hopes for what it might have been.

Why Do the Heathen Rage? reads as an apology for O’Connor in both senses of the word. Wilson’s repentance on behalf of O’Connor’s failure to view racism as evil, as well as her defense of the good found in O’Connor’s work, parallels the movements of redemption. Referring to the letters that reveal O’Connor’s ambivalence about civil rights, Wilson says, “She didn’t expect those letters to be published, but they admit a vulnerability that’s almost like a confession from the writer.”

There is a beauty and honesty in the confession throughout the book, but the apology comes from Wilson and not O’Connor. Rather than try to repent on O’Connor’s behalf, readers should use Why Do the Heathen Rage? as a confessional guide reading O’Connor’s work: recognizing depravity, relinquishing sin, and looking toward the good.

Despite my hesitations about posthumous publishing, I yearned to see the rough shape of O’Connor’s early drafts in Why Do the Heathen Rage? Reading O’Connor’s drafts encouraged me about my own writing: characters in the book change names, they disappear or appear, and alternative plots branch into oblivion. The field hand in Why Do the Heathen Rage? would later be repotted in his own story, Parker’s Back. I spoke to Wilson about this view behind the scenes. Readers “needed to see Flannery in process,” she said. “People need to recognize that genius is also a matter of craft and development. And it is grace. There is grace involved in the process, but also agency and freedom and choices to be made by writers as they’re working.”

Through her interaction with O’Connor’s manuscript, Wilson aims to teach us how we can interact with art. The best art, even when finished, is only the beginning of a reaction in the reader’s soul.

While scripting and writing, the Hawkes and Wilson wrestled with how to approach the flaws in O’Connor’s life and legacy. Intentionally and otherwise, O’Connor’s work has furthered conversations about what can be considered good. Ironically, critics and readers now discuss O’Connor in the same way they once examined her characters, asking how she could contain humility and pride, insight and blindness, depravity and divinity. Although she might be disgruntled by her reception, I cannot help but wonder if O’Connor would be somewhat pleased that her own shortcomings prompted conversations about what is good.