A "silver bullet ready to drop into her brain": The Crisis of White Motherhood in Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf," "The Enduring Chill," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

Abstract

A "silver bullet ready to drop into her brain":The Crisis of White Motherhood in Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf," "The Enduring Chill," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" Katie Frye National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. —Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth 29) In her work, Flannery O'Connor was no friend to white women. As has been noted, the most badly botched bodies in O'Connor—those that are mangled, maimed, supersized—often belong to white women, women who have been colored and coded as ladies.1 But instead of propagating the mythos of Southern Virtue, this recycled character is used for comic value, a mocking display of what it means to be southern and female. Dying violently and gracelessly, her son(s) unwilling to perform as the chivalric defenders of her existence, she is chastity on ice. In "Greenleaf," "The Enduring Chill," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," this legacy takes shape in the maternal figures, both real/biological and imagined/surrogate, as well as in each text's encryption of the politics of breastfeeding. Because the mothers in question are almost all past childbearing age, they do not literally engage in the act of breastfeeding; rather, they are spun in a web of imagery that sublimates breastfeeding.2 In the case of Mrs. Chestny ("Everything That Rises Must Converge"), [End Page 147] she calls for her grandfather and then her childhood nurse, a black woman known only as Caroline, at the moment of her death. This invocation references the historic exploitation of black women in child-rearing practices of the white South. In the cases of Mrs. May ("Greenleaf") and Mrs. Fox ("The Enduring Chill"), they own and supervise dairy farms that rely upon black labor to produce vats upon vats of milk, some of which would have been intended for the infant formula industry that thrived during the time of O'Connor's writing. The milk produced on these farms—what I refer to as "mother's milk"—is a symbol of white maternity, and as such, it becomes implicated in the mid-century construction of white motherhood and infant feeding practices. And because the mother's milk in these narratives is depicted as impure at best and poisonous at worst, I argue that these texts offer themselves up as politicized allegories about the failed milk of white mothers. Mothers and Sons In a letter dated September 13, 1956, O'Connor wrote: "It usually takes somebody else to point out to you what you're doing" (Habit 175). To point out what O'Connor was doing requires a quick review of the child-rearing practices of the white South and of infant feeding practices common at the time of O'Connor's writing. Of the former, social critic and southern historian Lillian Smith notes the "treacherous partnership" that evolved between white mothers and black caretakers (116). In this [End Page 148] system of childcare, with the white mother typically passing off the infant to a black mammy, the maternal body was split into separate and unequal halves—black women were "de mule[s] uh de world,"3 whereas white women of economic privilege supplied the phenotype against which the slaveholding establishment would evaluate an enslaved woman's so-called animalistic traits. This uneasy coalition between white and black maternity illustrates an important distinction between hybridity and the grotesque. The white South, particularly the male beneficiaries of slavery, insisted that this union of the white mother and an enslaved black woman must produce a hybrid figure of maternity, a sum of something better than its parts. In reality, it amounted to a realization of the grotesque, as two bodies codified as irreparably dissimilar (the one human, the other animal) were forced into a bizarre mating ritual. As a result, a pattern developed that outlasted slavery, one in which white motherhood was enabled by black surrogates. In this performance of maternity, the mammies and, later, the nannies were deemed more capable, more moral, more productive than the aging white women...