Wildcat: Finding Flannery in her Stories

Before I saw Maya Hawke in Wildcat, a film directed by her father Ethan, I knew that she plays Flannery O'Connor when the author was in her early 20s. I knew that Maya also plays several characters from Flannery's stories.

I also knew Flannery's work, how funny it is when she gets deep into the mindset of people who are quirky, sometimes repulsive. Whether her protagonists are Bible-brandishing bigots or condescending liberal atheists, illiterate or college-educated, they often come to a reckoning when their most precious truth is attacked. That can be at the same time both funny and horrific.

I thought I also knew Flannery. In her essays and published letters, she comes across as highly ironic, magisterial, fierce in her defense of Roman Catholic faith, even against other Catholics who water it down. For instance, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” About her work, she writes, "I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality...." (Both quotations are used in the movie.) I knew that she was confined to her mother's farm by lupus, the disease that killed her father, but I imagined her there a bastion of confidence in God and herself.

What I didn't realize until I saw the movie is how vulnerable Flannery O'Connor was. In the scenes from her life, we see Hawke tremble with fever, cry in anger, flush with embarrassment as Flannery endures chronic humiliations and acute disappointments. Flannery's patronizing editor withdraws plans to publish her novel because she refuses to follow a conventional outline. Near tears, she tells him she won't outline because "I write to discover what I'm doing!" Her mentor makes promises he doesn't keep. Her mother shows disappointment in her daughter with every sigh and helpful suggestion. Then there's Flannery's diagnosis and worsening condition, as climbing stairs and even walking to the mailbox become ordeals.

We see parallels to Flannery's inner life when Hawke also plays characters abandoned, bereft of what's most precious to them, betrayed by people they thought they knew, or staring down the barrel of a convict's gun. We're meant to see resonances between Flannery's experience and her work.

Actor Laura Linney also plays multiple roles as Flannery's mother and characters in the stories. As Flannery's mother, Linney projects smug self-righteousness. She wants her daughter to smile more, and she responds to a story by Flannery with a dismissive chuckle, "Well, it really isn't Harper's Bazaar, is it?"

At the same time, Linney shows genuine concern for her daughter. She forces Flannery to the doctor, then shields her from the diagnosis. Worried by her daughter's depression, she calls in a priest and listens intently from the next room as that priest validates Flannery with an imperative, "Write!"

In Flannery's story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," she's the mother who sells her mute daughter for the price of a wedding license. Linney's smile shows how the mother is relieved to pass on the burden of caring for the girl, while her lingering gaze at the receding car also shows hope that her daughter will rise to the challenge and grow. In another story, Linney plays a prim bigot whose adult child scorns her, then mourns her -- an intense ambivalence that Flannery may have shared.

Flannery's mother complains when her daughter imports some pea fowl to the farm. They sit on her flowers, she says, and the male doesn't even spread his tail feathers. Flannery smiles and assures her that he will, when he's ready. Thus Ethan Hawke (who co-wrote the script with Shelby Gaines) sets up an inspired conclusion.

Where I've looked on the web, the title of the movie is said to describe Flannery herself, a "wildcat" writer who refuses to be tamed by the doubters who want conventional fiction. That does describe Flannery in the movie, but Flannery's story "Wildcat" isn't about the animal, but the blind man who "smells" it in the vicinity of his little cabin. He can't sleep, he won't go out. There's resonance with Flannery, for whom disability and death lurked every day of her adult life.

Unlike the character in her story, Flannery made a blessing of the wildcat, writing furiously in the fourteen years before it finally got her.

[I toured Flannery's farm in 2016 and finished the day by viewing the movie John Huston made from her novel Wise Blood. See Flannery Would Have Loved it (06/2016).]