A Summary and Analysis of ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ is an oddity within the Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925-64). The shortest story in the book, it is actually a kind of fragment, and the earliest version of what would have been O’Connor’s third novel (the manuscript of which has been published in full – or as ‘full’ as it ever got before O’Connor’s death – in 2024).

The short story ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage’ was published in Esquire magazine in 1963. The story is about a mother whose son is reluctant to take on his new role as the man of the house, after his father suffers a stroke.

Summary

Tilman, the father of the house, has had a stroke and is being conveyed home in an ambulance ready to begin his recovery. During the ride home, his wife, Mrs Tilman, observes her husband’s face and detects in his left eye a remnant of his ‘former personality’: this eye, the third-person narrator tells us, ‘burned with rage’.

Realising that her husband is unlikely to survive for long and will never return fully to his former self, Mrs Tilman consoles herself with the fact that Tilman’s decline may be just what it takes to shake their son, Walter, out of his apathy. They arrive home to find their two children present: their daughter, Mary Maud, who works as a teacher, and their son, Walter, who is twenty-eight and spends most of his time reading at home. They also have a black servant, named Roosevelt.

Mrs Tilman hopes that her son, Walter, will now assume the role of the man of the house, and do the things that his father is now unable to do, such as telling Roosevelt what to do around the place. However, Walter appears reluctant to step into this new role. To his mother, he is idle and obsessed with trivia. Although she had suspected he wanted to become an artist or a philosopher, he doesn’t seek to write anything of any note.

Instead, he spends his time writing letters under various assumed names and sending them to the newspapers. When she happens to read a passage from a book her son is reading, Mrs Tilman is struck by the language and discovers it is a letter St Jerome, one of the early church fathers, wrote to Heliodorus, chastising him for leaving the desert, where he had been establishing a hermitage with Jerome.

The passage in the book includes a reference to a General, from whose mouth a double-edged sword emerges to cut down everything in its way. Mrs Tilman cannot make any sense of this passage at first, but then she realises, with a sudden jolt, that the General with a sword in his mouth, marching to do violence, was Jesus.

Analysis

O’Connor’s story takes its title from a biblical quotation, found in both the Old and New Testament: ‘Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?’ (Psalms 2:1); ‘Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things?’ (Acts 4:25). The quotation from the Acts of the Apostles refers to those people who rebel against God, with ‘rage’ here specifically referring to horses who buck and throw their heads before their rider tames them.

In the New Testament, the ‘heathen’ are the Romans and the ‘people’ are the Jews. In choosing this quotation for the title of her story (and planned but unfinished novel), O’Connor seems to be inviting us to ask: who are the ‘heathen’ in the Tilman family?

The obvious answer is that the title alludes to Walter’s parents, rather than Walter himself. Although they are clearly a Christian family in the American South (in keeping with many of Flannery O’Connor’s families in her short stories), it is Tilman, the fading patriarch of the family, who has ‘rage’ burning in his left eye, while Walter is noncommittal and even-handed to the point of inaction.

Indeed, the narrator, summarising Mrs Tilman’s disapproving view of her son, tells us that it was impossible to know what Walter thought about anything. The books he read appeared to be irrelevant. Slightly earlier in the story, he had been described as a man with no innocence and no conviction. He ‘courted good and evil impartially’ and was so committed to seeing both sides of any argument that it rendered him inactive. Mrs Tilman is worried that such an attitude might invite evil to make a home within him: the devil, as the proverb has it, finds work for idle hands.

Yet by her own admission, it is Mrs Tilman and her husband who harbour an inner rage. It appears to have been a key characteristic of Tilman before his stroke (the burning rage in his left eye is the one vestige of his former personality, we are told), and when Mrs Tilman reads an underlined passage in one of her son’s books that states ‘love should be full of anger’, she acknowledges that her love certainly is.

In other words, Walter clearly identifies himself with St Jerome in that passage – monkish, hermit-like, and happier writing than acting or doing. And like Jerome, he spends his days writing letters to others which are both private and public (or published). His mother and father, then, are Heliodoruses, having strayed from the path. Mrs Tilman would probably consider herself a good Christian and one of those ‘good country people’ in O’Connor’s famous story with that title.

It is only at the end of ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ that she realises she may have got this wrong. Her son has been spending his days in deep theological contemplation. She, by contrast, has been concerned – overly concerned, perhaps – with the day-to-day practicalities of running the house and keeping the black servants in order.

Of course, Mrs Tilman is also misguided in overlooking her daughter, Mary Mead, for the role of running the house: she is the older of the two children, but because Mrs Tilman has an old-fashioned attitude towards gender roles, she believes Walter – despite his being ill-suited for such a task – should be the one to take charge. She overlooks herself for the responsibility for the same reason, believing that only a man can keep things running.

Another Interpretation

However, Flannery O’Connor’s stories are often interlaced with irony and carry the potential for more than one reading. It is perhaps significant that she chose, for her title, a biblical quotation that takes the form of a question. Is it rhetorical or not? Arguably, the ‘heathen’ such as Mrs Tilman ‘rage’ because they have to keep the house going while their indulgent sons engage in reading and theological questioning.

The critic William Empson once wittily made the point that, whilst monks may choose not to have children, someone else had better keep on having them, if only to keep the world supplied with monks. In some ways, we might view ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ in such a way: O’Connor may approve of Walter’s soul-searching, but this doesn’t mean she condemns Mrs Tilman’s failure to understand her son, either. Life – and, by extension, good fiction – is more complex than that.