Mrs. May’s Dark Night in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf” was significantly influenced by her engagement with the notion of the “dark night of the soul,” which is closely associated with the Christian mysticism of St. John of the Cross. O’Connor became familiar with the dark night through her reading of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism not long before the composition of “Greenleaf.” The story incorporates imagery from St. John’s poem “On a Dark Night” as well as its source text, the Song of Songs chapters 2 and 3. Mrs. May, the protagonist of “Greenleaf,” undergoes a somewhat ironized version of the dark night over the course of the narrative. Her ultimate experience of mystical union is conditioned and even produced by the story’s “sacralizing” use of free indirect discourse.