The Crop

Written around the same time as her first story, “The Geranium,” Flannery O’Connor penned “The Crop” as the fourth story in her master’s thesis, which she completed in June 1947 while participating in the Writers’ Worship at the University of Iowa. In February 1946, at the encouragement of Paul Engle, the director of the Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor submitted to Accent “The Geranium” and “The Crop,” which, according to biographer Brad Gooch, “concerned a spinster schoolmarm with pretensions of becoming a writer of ‘social problem’ stories” (127). While “The Geranium” was accepted and then published in the summer, “The Crop” was ultimately rejected. Later, however, after her death, literary colleague and friend Robert Fitzgerald submitted “The Crop” for publication posthumously to Mademoiselle, which accepted the story and published it in its April 1971 issue. In his note submitted with the story, Fitzgerald wrote, “Although it is obviously far from her best work, The Crop would never be mistaken for anyone else’s production … We enjoy a small caricature of that shady type, the imaginative artist … The exacting art, the stringent spirit, and the sheer kick of her mature work are promised here” (qtd. in The Complete Stories, 551).

While scholarship generally agrees that, in the words of essayist Sarah Gordon, “‘The Crop’ contains no overt religious theme” (112), a Biblical allusion to the story of Lot and his wife from the Book of Genesis takes hold of Miss Willerton’s tale of Lot Motun. The Bible references Lot’s wife in three locations. In Genesis, once the angels warn Lot that God plans to destroy Sodom, where Lot and his family live, and Gomorrah, Lot, his wife, and their daughters flee from the city, running toward a nearby village to avoid God “rain[ing] down fire and burning sulfur from the sky on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen. 19.24 NLT). However, as they flee, “Lot’s wife looked back as she was following behind [Lot], and she turned into a pillar of salt” (Gen. 19.26 NLT). Two other mentions of Lot’s wife, one in Luke (Luke 17.31-33 ESV) and the other in the Wisdom of Solomon (Apocrypha, Wisd. Sol. 10.6-7), reveal that the death of Lot’s wife “is an example of divine judgement that comes quickly on those who do not obey the Lord’s commands” (ESV Study Bible, 1994). In this context, therefore, God condemns Lot’s wife to death for the same reason as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, sexual immorality. When Lot invites two angel messengers of God to stay in his home, “all the men of Sodom, young and old, came from all over the city and surrounded the house. They shouted to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to spend the night with you? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them!’” (Gen 19.3-5 NLT), ultimately revealing the sexual immorality of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the same way that God condemns Lot’s wife to die in Genesis for looking back with longing toward the cities that represent sexual immorality, Miss Willerton immediately condemns the female character she introduces to Lot Motun’s story for promiscuity.

Miss Willerton, an aspiring author who sits at her typewriter and produces Lot Motun’s story, determines that “there had to be a woman, or course. Perhaps Lot could kill her. That type of woman always started trouble. She might even goad him on to kill her because of her wantonness” (“Crop,” 36). Automatically, Miss Willerton negatively characterizes the woman in Lot Motun’s story as promiscuous, paralleling her with Lot’s wife in Genesis. Gordan parallels Lot Motun and the woman to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by explaining that “in proper order, the man exists with his dog and then is joined by the woman, who will lead the man to sin, specifically murder” (105), which further portrays Miss Willerton’s woman as sinful. Building on the foundation of the woman as promiscuous, Miss Willerton continues to degrade the character of the woman to the point that “Miss Willerton could stand it no longer. She struck the woman a terrific blow on the head from behind” (“Crop,” 37), revealing the extent of Miss Willerton’s agitation and disgust with the woman, which causes Miss Willerton to insert herself directly into the story she writes. Therefore, considering the sexually immoral implications placed on Lot’s wife in Genesis and the sureness of death for Lot Motun’s promiscuous wife, O’Connor perhaps demonstrates what she believes to be the immorality of sexual promiscuity, warning readers against this behavior.

Alternatively, critics predominantly believe that O’Connor’s purpose for “The Crop” is, according to scholar Margaret Earley Whitt, to “venture in[to] telling a story about the process of writing and reading fiction” (212). For instance, Gooch pointedly claims that Miss Willerton is “like the young Miss O’Connor” (127) exploring the writing process. Miss Willerton relays that “there were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about then she did writing” (“Crop,” 33-34). In this way, O’Connor perhaps satirically mocks Miss Willerton’s excessively prolonged writing process, while the potential parallel between Miss Willerton and O’Connor herself may shed light on the evolution of O’Connor’s personal writing process. Gordon believes that, for O’Connor, “this early story constitutes a dialogue with herself, for it is a powerful statement of the author’s attempt to exert control over her own textuality, even as it describes, albeit in fiercely humorous fashion, the attempt of a woman writer to exert that same control” (100). “The Crop,” one of the first stories O’Connor wrote, therefore provides a humorous and satirical view of the writing process from the perspective of Miss Willerton, an emerging female writer determining her artistic craft, while also potentially demonstrating O’Connor’s exploration of her own writing process.

Works Cited

The Apocrypha: Translated out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised by His Majesty's Special Command. 1992. Pitt Brevier ed., Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2017.

ESV Study Bible: English Standard Version. Translated by Crossway, ESV text ed., Wheaton, Crossway Bibles, 2011.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.

Gordon, Sarah. “‘The Crop’: Limitation, Restraint, and Possibility.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 96-120.

Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Translated by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

---. “The Crop.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 33-41.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O'Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.