The title of the story offers a key to a more complete understanding of the epiphany or convergence process in an OConnor short story. Several works of literature employ irony as a major stylistic device. The final irony in the scene comes when Julian realizes that the stunned look on his mother's face was caused by the presence of identical hats on the two women not by the seating arrangements. 54955. Early approaches to her fiction tended to focus on the grotesque extremes of her characterization and the bleak violence of her plots. Unfortunately the denouement of the story (the good Southern lady drops dead) is uncomfortable. StudyCorgi. Everything That Rises Must Converge Analysis. Sources The abnormal description of the surroundings also creates an almost sinister, otherworldly tone, a trademark of Southern Gothic fiction. But now he cannot deny his own condition by any act of abstraction, by principle, his old means of escaping his emptiness. The authors of these stories rely on irony as a prominent stylistic device especially in relation to their stories main characters. This lack of respect is shown by his thinking of himself as a martyr because he takes her to her reducing class, by his making fun of her new hat, by his desire to slap her, and by his "evil urge to break her spirit." Some critics find OConnors satire heavy-handed, but others argue that her harsh portrayals must be understood in relationship to her more subtle use of irony and in contrast to the glimpses of redemption she offers her fallen characters at the violent conclusions of her stories. Nevertheless, she too is full of a language disproportionate to her position, as he points out with pleasure. Taking the only seats available, the woman sits next to Julian and the boy sits next to his mother. Thus, the features of the Lincoln cent just mentioned suggest (1) the freeing of Negroes by the Great Emancipator and (2), by extension, the activity of the Federal Government in OConnors own day to ensure the rights of Southern blacks. He has so carefully set himself off from his mother that, through the pretenses of intellect, he is as far removed from her as Oedipus from Jocasta. She appears confused and initially declines his offer to help her up. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Everything That Rises Must Converge refers to the ideas of a Jesuit theologian and scientist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Thus, when he gives the woman with protruding teeth and canvas sandals a malevolent look, he is practicing his revenge upon the mother at a level very close to June Starrs sticking out her tongue at Red Sammys wife. As is illustrated by the case of Everything That Rises Must Converge, those echoes could be used, comically or otherwise, to help guide our responses to the often enigmatic fiction of Flannery OConnor. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. Complete your free account to request a guide. Edwin OConnor died two years later. That is, Julian is, in effect, two presences in the story, the Julian who assumes himself aloof and detached from the human condition by virtue of his superior intellect and the Julian who destroys his mother before our eyes. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. Julian, who until the very end rails against his mother, finally breaks out of his distancing inner compartment and calls out for his her in child-like terms of affection, Darling, sweetheart Mamma, Mamma!. In fact, its as if he has no control over the dark tide that sweeps him back towards her. Where only a few years before the Y would have been the first source of aid for a desperate woman, by the early 1960s, it was as meaningless and impersonal as the gymnasium to which it had been reduced. Denham, Robert D., The World of Guilt and Sorrow: Flannery OConnors Everything That Rises Must Converge, in Flannery OConnor Bulletin, Vol. This also affords him the opportunity to morally grandstand over the other Southern whites instead of actively assessing the ways that he too might be contributing to misunderstanding between the races. . Julian feels that his perceived understanding of African Americans puts him in a superior position as compared to his mother and other white Americans with racist tendencies. Julian and his mother utterly lack Scarletts imagination and resourcefulness, although they have both deluded themselves into thinking they do possess these qualities. Because Julian interprets his mother's comment concerning her feelings for Caroline, her black nurse, as little more than a bigot's shibboleth, he is unable to understand her act of giving a penny to Carver, the small black boy in the story. These comments reveal her to be an individual who will be slow to change her attitudes (if they can be changed at all) and as an individual who has a nostalgic sense of longing for past traditions. . An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of [the Catholic writer] without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God, she maintains. Here, it becomes evident that Julians treatment of black people as symbols makes it difficult for him to make real connections. It is a technique Mitchell uses masterfully throughout the novel; with it, she compliments her audiences knowledge of and affection for the stereotype, but uses it for her own purposes (emphasis added). OConnor is known for her biting satire, which is the use of ridicule, humor, and wit in order to criticize human nature and society. Historical Context Chardin describes grace as Christic energy, an illuminating force operative on the minds of men. No doubt Julians mother would be flattered to see the connection between herself and Scarlett OHara signified by the cushion-like hat; and no doubt Scarlett herself would find that connection a grim commentary on the self-image of Julians mother. There was also on Saturday the famous Pickrick ads of Lester Maddox, with their outrageous turns of wit in the midst of absurdities. O'Connor also uses irony as a literary element to convey how Manley was not the good country person he pretended to be with Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga. boiling point when OConnor wrote the story. Scarletts response to the convergence which she sees around her in postwar Georgia is more constructive: she accepts what she must and changes what she can. As she dies, she looks at her son as if she doesnt know him and asks for her childhood nurse, who was a black woman. The civic-minded Miss Dodge managed to supplement her own generous personal contributions by soliciting enormous gifts from captains of industry such as George W. Vanderbilt, and YWCA chapters spread throughout the United States, including the rapidly industrializing post-World War I South. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. She wears the same hat as Julians mothera hat that Julians mother had considered too expensivethus representing the Negros rise in Southern society. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. Julians Mothers longing for the past is representative of many white Southerners relationship to their history. It will see him as incomplete in himself, as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace, she asserts in The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South., At the end of the story, both Julian and his mother are offered some opportunity for the kind of true convergence that Teilhard envisions. . Hence her insistence that its fine if blacks rise as long as they stay on their side of the fence, and her dismay over mulattoes, those emblems of the process of racial convergence. Her comments, "They [the blacks] should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence," and "The ones I feel sorry for . ." Yet Julian and his mother now live in a rundown neighborhood that had been fashionable forty years ago. She has sacrificed everything for her son and continues to support him even though he has graduated from college. By using a modified omniscient point-of-view, she is able to move unobtrusively from reporting the story as an out-side observer to reporting events as they are reflected through Julian's consciousness. Feeling triumphant, he awaits his mothers recognition of the hat, for it seems the chance he has waited to teach her a lesson that would last for awhile. But the real shocker is that he discovers his own likeness to the Negress, the ironic exchange of sons becoming ultimately more terrifying that he anticipated. When another administration comes into power and demands taxes from Emily, she instructs the tax collectors to talk to Colonel Sartoris who has been dead for ten years. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation by color in public buses was unconstitutional, and the protest movement gained force. How do you think your own religious or spiritual beliefs (or the lack thereof) influence your response to the story? Thus it is that he sees his mother as childish. A devout Roman Catholic, OConnor differed from other writers in her generation in that she wrote from a deeply religious perspective. While the mother doesnt hesitate to declare her sacrifices for him openly, he only acts out the pain of his own with expressions of pain and boredom. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Principle, as abstraction imposed upon the concrete circumstances, rather than derived from them, delays for the moment the threat of the abyss to Julian. The delusions of grandeur are responsible for Emily being unmarried at thirty years old. One of the most important ironies in the story is that Mrs. Chestny's very expensive and unique hat is also worn by an African-American woman on the bus. She portrays the pain and folly that are our broken condition, the recognition of which is the only means for the human soul to rise toward grace. Black Americans, long treated as second-class citizens, began to make themselves heard in America by demanding that they be given equal rights under the law. He wanted to teach her a lesson, but he ends up learning one himself. Everything That Rises Must Converge is a short story by Flannery OConnor that addresses life in post-Civil War South. The psychiatrists who worked over Dixie found she knew quite well all that was going on and knew it was wrong and wicked. She represents the reactionary element among white Southerners who want to reverse history with respect to race relations. Genre: Southern Gothic/Christian Realism/Anti-Romanticism. Thus, we realize that "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is not entirely a "simple story.". While OConnor uses dramatically ironic incidents to contrast Julians claims, Faulkner uses them to highlight Emilys deterioration. If not for this emergency, she would have continued wearing the slippers reinforced with carpeting and the raggedy, much mended dress which her harsh postwar life on Tara demanded. When Emilys father dies, she finds herself falling for a second class Yankee whom her father could have never approved of. Martin, Carter W., The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery OConnor, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968. Having thus been made aware of his depravity, Julian will have been placed in a position which may produce repentance and ultimately redemption. Another detail of both the Lincoln cent and Jefferson nickel which is relevant to Everything that Rises is the motto E PLURIBUS UNUM (Out of many, one). 5154. Nothing illustrates these changing times more readily than the issue of ladyhood, an issue which permeates both Everything That Rises Must Converge and Gone with the Wind. OConnor once famously said, If its a symbol, to hell with it. Perhaps reading life too symbolically also blurs peoples perception of reality. Julian's mother is a product of her upbringing and views towards Negroes. The sky does not open to reveal God. Thus, she begins to look unrecognizable and to insensibly call out for people from her past. "Everything That Rises Must Converge The aspect of the YWCAs decline which would most have disturbed a writer such as OConnor, however, is its secularization, for she knew only too well that the average American of the twentieth century was out of touch with Christianity. Small wonder that the gymnasium, a standard feature of even the earliest YWCA chapters since bodily health was seen as conducive to spiritual health, became divorced from its Christian context: for many Americans after mid-century, the Y is synonymous with the gym. Indeed, the secularization of the YWCA is conveyed dramatically by its nicknames. With just a few words, O'Connor nails down a character's persona. It seems that the few references to Christianity are largely emptied of meaning. HISTORICAL CONTEXT I would . and shook him from his meditation," and "He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped." He sees that his mother would feel the symbolic significance of the purple hat but not realize it, as he, Julian, is capable of doing. The story revolves around the eccentric lifestyle of Emily Grierson, a respected resident of Jefferson Town. Irony in Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Rose for Emily. The storys main character is Julian, a recent university graduate who is forced to confront the realities the post-integration South and his racist mother. What is the irony in Everything That Rises Must Converge? His mother lying on the ground before him, the Negro woman retreating with Carver staring wide-eyed over her shoulder, Julian picks up his old theme. Just as the somewhat Olympian Monticello suggests the superior position of the white aristocracy in a class and racially stratified order, so does the plan of the Godhigh house (the owners being elevated above the black cooks who work on the ground floor). Considering mans progress in human development, Flannery OConnor seems to be painting the most vivid picture possible to show mankind where his inadequacies lie and to open his eyes to some painful truth. Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. Of course, the ugly hat which the mother has purchased for an outrageous $7.50, a hat identical to that of the large black woman, will help confirm that they are doubles and, thereby, will make a statement about racial equality. From the start . "Don't think that was just an uppity Negro woman. That is why she looks at him trying to determine his identity. He begins to abandon his separateness (Are we walking [home].) Still, when she ignores him, he reads her the stock lesson of our moment of time. It is only after Julian realizes that his mother may be seriously hurt that his own movement toward convergence takes place. OVERVIEWS AND GENERAL STUDIES Referring to the Christian concept of revelation, Teilhard posits that at the end of time human spirit will have at last risen to the ultimate point of convergence, where all people are as one in Christ. That this rising is inevitably painful does not discredit its validity; rather, it emphasizes the tension between the evolutionary thrust toward Being and the human warp that resists itthe warp which OConnor would have called original sin. As mother and son begin their trip, the sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness, though no two were alike. Even the hat, which plays such a focal part in the conflict, is especially hideous: A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. Julian is hypersensitive: color and form possess an emotional equivalent for him. While the slogan is intended to refer to the United States as a nation federated out of various states, it also suggests the American ideal of a unified society tolerantly encompassing racial and ethnic diversity. It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation, the narrator reports as Julian observes a white woman change seats after a black man sits near her on the bus, It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles.. Julian is amused by the identical hats and by the idea that, according to their seating, his mother and the black woman have swapped sons. Julians mother recovers her composure and strikes up a conversation with the little boy next to her. are the ones that are half white," mark her indelibly as a member of that generation which failed to concern itself with the problem of social justice. ", In an interview which appeared a month later, when she was asked about Southern manners, O'Connor noted that "manners are the next best thing to Christian charity. These are changes not of the head but of the heart. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered on Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relationship to that.. As a Catholic, O'Connor considered this offense against God a venial sin, an attempt to place human power and ability above God's. Her uneasiness at riding on an integrated bus is illustrated by her comment, "I see we have the bus to ourselves," and by her observation, "The world is in a mess everywhere. 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