Wildcat

“Wildcat” is the third story Flannery O’Connor wrote for her master’s thesis, finished in June 1947, which she completed while participating in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. At the end of her first year in this program, O’Connor travelled home to Milledgeville, where she continued writing and submitting her work to literary magazines with the hopes of being published. She received two rejections during the summer of 1946, including one from Southwest Review concerning her submission of “Wildcat.” Biographer Brad Gooch explains that the editor of the magazine criticized that this story “about an old black man’s fear of a prowling beast” was “highly imitative” of “The Evening Sun,” by William Faulkner (129). Robert Fitzgerald, a writer and close friend of O’Connor, submitted “Wildcat” for publication posthumously in 1970, and The North American Review published the story in their summer 1970 issue.

As with O’Connor’s first two stories, “The Geranium” and “The Barber,” this third story also deals with race, perhaps in a more significant way than the first two. Not only does “Wildcat” introduce and contemplate race, all of the characters in this story are African American, and O’Connor focuses the story’s narration on Old Gabriel, an elderly African American man, who proves a questionable yet captivating choice of focus for a young, white, female author. However, unlike “The Geranium” and “The Barber,” whose overall meanings derive more so from race than theology, the references to Christian theology carry much greater weight and significance in “Wildcat.” For example, the constant, suspenseful conflict between Gabriel and the wildcat may represent Biblical teaching on idolatry, where Gabriel, out of fear of the mysterious wildcat, obsesses and fixates on detecting when the wildcat might be near, despite the fact that in Gabriel’s long life, he has never directly encountered the animal. As a result, Gabriel’s obsessive fixation on the wildcat mirrors the Bible’s portrayal of idolatry. When Matthew, George, Willie, and Boon first tell Gabriel that they are going out to hunt a wildcat in the woods, Gabriel says, “‘Yawl ain’t got nothin’ fit to kill a wildcat with.’ [...] ‘How many wildcats you killed, Gabrul?’ Their voices, rising to him through the darkness, were full of gentle mockery. ‘When I was a boy, there was a cat once’” (O’Connor 26). Gabriel’s worry about the present wildcat stems from his fear of the wildcat as a boy, which he never sees and only hears stories about. The other men try to explain to Gabriel that when their friend saw the present wildcat, “‘he thought it was after him.’ ‘It was,’ old Gabriel murmured. ‘It after cows.’ Gabriel sniffed. ‘It comin’ out the woods for mo’ than cows. It gonna git itssef some folks’ blood” (27). Gabriel’s somewhat unjustified obsession over the wildcat mirrors the detrimental infatuation of idolatry against which the Bible warns.

Worshipping idols first appears in Exodus, where God warns the Israelites in the Ten Commandments that they “must not have any other god” but God (Ex. 20.3 NLT). The Book of Psalms adds that “troubles multiply for those who chase after other gods” (Ps. 16.4 NLT), and Paul clarifies in his letter to the Colossians that idols are not limited to physical objects but include any earthly fixation that distracts people from worshipping God. Specifically, Paul instructs that people should “put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3.5 ESV). Therefore, Gabriel’s obsession with the wildcat reveals that it is potentially an idol in Gabriel’s life, causing him uncontrollable fear, as demonstrated by the way he “sat stiff in the chair with his hands gripped tight to the stick across his knees,” feels “the sweat on himself,” and worries above all else that “it was gonna get him” (O’Connor 30). As a result, O’Connor may use Gabriel’s idolization and obsession with the wildcat to condemn his actions as contradictory to Biblical teaching.

Gabriel’s thoughts that turn to God as he fearfully waits for the wildcat support Gabriel’s idolization of the wildcat. Gabriel envisions that “across on the river bank the Lord was waiting on him with a troupe of angels and golden vestments for him to put on and when he came, he’d put on the vestments and stand there with the Lord and the angels, judging life. Won’t no nigger for fifty miles fitter to judge than him” (31). Gabriel’s imagination of God waiting for him with angels and then allowing Gabriel to be a judge has no Biblical foundation, which separates Gabriel from God and the Bible in the same way that his idolization of the wildcat does. Several Biblical passages emphasize God waiting on people to come to him instead of people waiting on God, such as in the Book of Isaiah, which says that “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isa. 40.31 ESV). Similarly, Psalm 27:14 pointedly instructs readers to “wait patiently for the Lord” (NLT). The Bible also gives no account of people being adorned with golden vestments upon entering Heaven or being judges, as Gabriel envisions. Therefore, Gabriel’s idolization of the wildcat and his skewed view of Heaven contradict Biblical teaching, potentially demonstrating Gabriel’s idolization of the wildcat as the cause of his Biblical inaccuracy.

Further passages and verses in the Bible critique and condemn Gabriel’s conduct, specifically the story of Jacob stealing his brother Esau’s birthright from their father, Isaac, in Genesis. Gabriel mirrors Isaac as a blind man who relies on his sense of smell. Readers first meet Gabriel as he “shuffled across the room waving his stick slowly sideways in front of him,” revealing his blindness (O’Connor 26). Then, as Gabriel approaches the porch where the young men sit and states, “I smells fo’ niggers” (26), he reveals his reliance on his sense of smell. Likewise, Genesis 27 first characterizes Isaac as “old and turning blind” (Gen. 27.1 NLT), thus paralleling the blind Gabriel. In the Biblical story, Jacob, the younger of the two brothers, steals the blessing belonging to the firstborn son, his brother Esau. As the blind Isaac makes Jacob prove he is the firstborn son, Jacob, clad in Esau’s clothing, succeeds in his treachery when he “went over and kissed [Isaac]. And when Isaac caught the smell of his clothes, he was finally convinced, and he blessed his son” (Gen. 27.27 NLT), causing Isaac to make a great mistake by blessing the wrong son. The ESV Study Bible explains that “the paternal blessing that Isaac wishes to give Esau is important because it will establish the identity of the heir to the divine promises given to Abraham and Isaac” (96). Therefore, this Bible story demonstrates the downfalls of relying on smell in the absence of sight, foreshadowing the downfall Gabriel experiences in the form of his obsessive fear as a result of using his sense of smell to seek out the wildcat. Thus, the Bible’s further revelation of Gabriel’s inadvisable conduct of relying on smell, in addition to his idolization of the wildcat and inaccurate imagination of God and Heaven, additionally condemn Gabriel.

The Bible’s condemnation of Gabriel’s actions culminates in Gabriel’s name, which evokes images of the Angel Gabriel, who appears in multiple books of the Bible. Since God uses angels throughout the Bible to warn people, the imagery of the Angel Gabriel evoked in “Wildcat” may represent a warning to Old Gabriel. Specifically, God uses the Angel Gabriel to reveal, explain, and give understanding. For instance, the Angel Gabriel gives understanding twice to Daniel (Dan. 8.15-17, 9.20-27), such as when Daniel says that Gabriel “explained to me, ‘Daniel, I have come here to give you insight and understanding’” (Dan. 9.22 NLT). Later, Gabriel explains the miraculous birth of Jesus, who is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born to a virgin, to Joseph in a dream in Matthew (Matt. 1.20), also revealing the details of the same situation to Mary in Luke (Luke 1.26). The two New Testament books in which the Angel Gabriel appears in the Bible strategically match the names of two of the men on Gabriel’s porch in “Wildcat,” Matthew and Luke (O’Connor 26). Therefore, O’Connor immediately warns readers against Old Gabriel’s idolization of the wildcat, behavior that contradicts Biblical teaching, by matching Old Gabriel’s name to that of the Angel Gabriel, whom God uses to warn people in the Bible. As a result, parallels to the Angel Gabriel and Christian theology reveal, explain, and help readers understand O’Connor’s emphasis on the importance of following Christian doctrine.

Scholar Sandra Lee Kleppe supports that religious implications in “Wildcat” warn against Gabriel’s action and create imagery of salvation, countering common criticism against of O’Connor’s master’s thesis stories that they lack the Christian-based direction that O’Connor solidified in her later stories. Kleppe counters this criticism by arguing that “O’Connor had indeed found her primary concern [with humanity’s reaction to Christian salvation], but because the artistic expression of redemption is very different in ‘Wildcat’ from its expression in her later work, this concern may seem veiled” (132). Kleppe furthers the argument that O’Connor uses Gabriel’s character to demonstrate the importance of practicing Biblical teaching by claiming that Gabriel “understands the meaning of the [wildcat] in Christian terms” (124) to the point that he fears for his salvation. For instance, Gabriel demonstrates fear for his eternal life while waiting for the wildcat in his house, where he says that God “‘don’t want me with my face tore open. Why don’t you go on, Wildcat, why you want me?’ He was on his feet now. ‘Lord don’t want me with no wildcat marks’” (O’Connor 31). Using Caroline Walker Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, Kleppe explains that “terror of bodily mutilation has for centuries been connected to anxiety about redemption and resurrection” (132), so that Gabriel fears that the wildcat mutilating his body will “be a sign for the Lord that he is not worthy of resurrection” (133). Therefore, Kleppe argues that O’Connor not only condemns Gabriel’s actions in “Wildcat” but also makes Gabriel, already aware of the Christian implications of his actions, fear for his salvation and the fate of his eternal life.

Works Cited

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.

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

Kleppe, Sandra Lee. “Memory, Perception, and Imagination in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wildcat.’” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 26/27, 1998-2000, pp. 124-34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26674749.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Wildcat.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 26-32.