Mary Flannery O’Connor’s life was lived at the intersection of illness and faith, both of which conspired to constrain her. If not to utterly silence her.
Her gift for writing was apparent early on. O’Connor earned multiple degrees and attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her Southern Gothic style won her awards and a book contract. She gained attention in the world, but as lupus took hold of her, she was forced to return to her mother’s secluded home outside Milledgeville, Georgia, and her stories began to feature characters made grotesque by disability, race, or religion.
Rereading O’Connor’s work prior to seeing Wildcat, it struck me that her stories might have been well illustrated by the photographs of Diane Arbus. Both writer and photographer observed freakish subjects with a sympathetic eye.
Nonetheless, all characters are candidates for redemption by God’s grace. The hard truth about grace is that one is required to admit sin. And that grace granted may be violent, if that’s what it takes to get a sinner’s attention. As O’Connor said of the hard-hitting style she referred to as Christian Realism,
“My audience are the people who think God is dead…To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Director Ethan Hawke made the interesting decision to incorporate the story of O’Connor’s writing journey with the stories she wrote. As a writer, I’m quite aware that every character I create is at least a bit autobiographical. And I’m convinced that the brides in Parker’s Back and The Life You Save May be Your Own, both played by Maya Hawke, represent different aspects of how O’Connor saw herself. In the first case, as a religious zealot, and in the second, as a woman with a (in this case, intellectual) disability. The husbands are played by Steve Zahn and Raphael Cassall.
“I don’t think you have to make them [your readers] suffer,” says O’Connor’s editor. “I don’t understand why you don’t write something people would like to read, says her mother (Laura Linney.) But her priest (Liam Neeson) asks, “Is your writing honest? Is your conscience clear?” The rest is God’s business.” The film concludes with O’Connor at peace with her secluded, but productive, life.
The film is named after one of O’Connor’s stories in which a man struggles with his impending death. The writer herself struggled with the disease that killed her father at a young age. She died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. A short life, but long enough to produce two novels and twenty-four stories, as well as many book reviews and extensive correspondence with other writers.
She was a woman constrained, but unsilenced. A supporter of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, O’Connor was at the same time anti-integration and not fond of Blacks in general. I can’t help but believe that, given her empathy for outsiders, if she had lived through the whole of the Civil Rights movement, her thinking would have changed.
Brilliant casting is this film’s strength (as if any of O’Connor’s powerful stories need support.) The small smirk Linney’s character allows herself in The Life You Save May be Your Own, after she convinces the tramp to marry her daughter in exchange for her old car, tells us all we need to know about how relieved and clever she feels to have unloaded her life-long burden.