OConnor uses situational irony when she reveals the mental picture of Julian, where he is living in his great grandfathers old slavery mansion. His mothers view is much more rigid, and suggests that a persons identity and worth are fixed. He dismisses her notions of proper conduct as part of an old social order that is not only immoral, but also irrelevant. That superiority we take, with pride, to be a measure of our intellectual station. In the world made by a George Washington Carver with synthetics on the one hand and by Sartre with synthetic existence on the other (the worlds pursued by the Negress and Julian respectively) things and actions have a value in respect to their surfaces. Style However, no one had suspected that Emily was capable of murder or necrophilia. In them, for instance, she could see every Saturday a fundamentalist column, run as a paid advertisement with the title Why Do the Heathen Rage, the title she had given the novel she left unfinished. That the fateful coin is a penny, and that it is newly minted, are both emphasized by OConnor through being twice mentioned. For example, the narrator reveals that the old man Grierson had intimidated many of his daughters suitors, as he did not consider them good enough for his daughter. As one might expect, Julians mother does not see any value in integration, whereas Julian favors it. 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. . While still enrolled there she dropped Mary from her name and published her first short story, The Geranium.. In fact, the theme of the story might be considered a search for human significance in the evolutionary process.. Martin, Carter W., The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery OConnor, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968. Because of this feminine revulsion to seeing people hurt, she remained in the car while her friend and lover, young Donald Boggs, killed four men. Everything That Rises Must Converge is a short story by Flannery OConnor that addresses life in post-Civil War South. Here the central character is not a country grandma moved to Atlanta, but an aspiring candidate for the intelligentsia. Everything That Rises Must Converge refers to the ideas of a Jesuit theologian and scientist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Julian, who feels his mother has been taught a good lesson, begins to talk to her about the emergence of blacks in the new South. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Yet just because the narrator has access to Julians innermost thoughts does not mean that readers are meant to empathize with him. At the same time that it sought to help working girls on a personal level, the YWCA of the United States was a surprisingly important force in national and international affairs. Print. The issue of race relations triggers a major conflict between mother and son. In the late nine-teenth-and early twentieth-centuries, then, a woman with the family background of Julians mother would have been an organizer and financial supporter of the YWCA; but to actually participate in the programs would have been unheard-of, since the Association was intended specifically to benefit young women of the operative classesthat is, young women who were either immigrants or poor native-born country girls seeking employment in large cities, and who were dependent on their own exertion for support. That the reducing class Julians mother attends is for working girls over fifty is thus not only a transparent joke on the self-image of a middle-aged woman (i.e., a fifty-plus girl) but also a sad commentary on Julians mother having become one of the desperate members of the operative classes: with the loss of the Godhigh/Chestny plantation, she is simply another poor, naive country girl trying to survive in a hostile urban environ ment. Despite constant discomfort, she continued to write fiction until her health failed. After Julians Mothers shocking experience, which is reflective of a new social order, she descends into a fantasy of the past. As Mrs. Chestny staggers away from Julian, calling for her grandfather and for Caroline, individuals with whom she had had a loving relationship, Julian feels her being swept away from him, and he calls for her, "Mother! 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.. Because Julian, unlike anyone else in the story, is distinguished by name, the story focuses on him and his development. When he thinks about making a black friend, he only images the "better types": professors, lawyers, ministers, and doctors. An Olympian, anonymous evaluation, by one who has not even noticed that Julian is the protagonist. Even the plantations rooster surrenders his gorgeous bronze and green-black tail feathers to decorate the green velvet hat. In his study of Flannery OConnor, [Stanley Edgar] Hyman contends that any discussion of her theology can only be preliminary to, not a substitute for, aesthetic analysis and evaluation. Aesthetically, Miss OConnor strived to produce a view of reality in the most direct and concrete terms. It is at this point of recognition that he sees his mothers eyes once more and interprets them. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. His chief asset, his intelligence, is misdirected: he freely scorns the limitations of others and assumes a superior stance. Ha. In contrast, Flannery OConnors view does not appear to be quite so optimistic: Everything That Rises Must Converge describes a bus ride in which there is no real communication between people, no understanding, and no harmony. Mrs. Chestny begins a conversation with the small child of that black woman, and when they get off of the bus together, Mrs. Chestny offers the small black boy a shiny penny. Her arguments are inherited, rather than learned as are Julians, for Julian has, in his view of the matter, gotten on his own a first-rate education from a third-rate college, with the result that he is free. Far from seeing slavery as morally repellant, she believes that blacks were better off in servitude, and is proud that an ancestor owned two hundred Negroes. "Everything That Rises Must Converge". Julian is worse than his mother is when it comes to racism but he just happens to take an opposing position against his mother. But the Christian implications of Julians tragedy separate him from Oedipus. 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. 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. Julians mother refers to her as an old darky but also claims that there was no. Setting: American South. This sounds optimistic and affirmativewhich faith, by nature, is. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Teilhards convergence of mankind from diversity to ultimate unity is of course brought to mind by the motto E PLURIBUS UNUM. The slogan would thus for OConnor relate both to Gods plan for unifying all men and to U.S. history, suggesting the two are connected. OConnor wrote from a Roman Catholic perspective. Once Emily becomes involved with lowly placed Homer, her stature in the society diminishes and she eventually becomes obscure to the town dwellers. Julian is a college graduate who has a fair understating of the world he lives in and because of this finds difficulty dealing Premium White people Black people Race 1463 Words The difference between the convergence described by Chardin and that which occurs in Miss OConnors story is ironic only in the contrast between the real and the ideal. . It is by virtue of such distinguished ancestry that Julians mother identifies with the antebellum Southern aristocracy, to whom she romantically attributes a lofty preeminence balanced by graciousness. That combination of qualities is suggested by the palladian architecture of Jeffersons stately home Monticello, depicted on the reverse of the nickel. In the final scene, Julian is ignorant as to the reality of his mothers medical condition. Finally, it seems, O'Connor has written a story which we can easily read and understand without having to struggle with abstract religious symbolism. Both possible meanings of E PLURIBUS UNUM are germane to the racial situation that existed in the South in 1961. 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." But she used as well the Atlanta daily papers (called by rural Georgians as often as not them lying Atlanta papers). Because Julians Mother finds black people to be inferior, she goes out of her way to show, especially to children, a kind of condescending tenderness. The generation gap between Julian and his mother manifests itself through their disagreement over race relations, an issue that was a pressing part of public discourse in the early 1960s. One notices, as Julian sees the large Negro woman get on the bus, that she has a hat identical to that his mother wears. In other words, a mother and son boarding a bus in a Southern town at the present time are important individuals; the way they live their lives is also important. Thus, we realize that "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is not entirely a "simple story.". Mrs. Chestny is a bigot who feels that blacks should rise, "but on their own side of the fence." OConnor, Flannery, Mysteries and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. His attempt at convergence with his mother comes too late as she dies before him, one unseeing eye raking his face and finding nothing. Now when he insists to her You arent who you think you are, the words begin immediately to redound upon him. All the tension that has been building within Carvers Mother releases when she strikes Julians Mother. Realizing that the four of them are all getting off the bus at the same time. [The Catholic novelist] cannot see man as determined; it cannot see him as totally depraved. [The Catholic writer] may find in the end that instead of reflecting the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by, she writes in another essay on the topic, Novelist and Believer.. 54955. Some critics maintain that OConnors reference to Teilhard must be ironic, since in the story there is so little evidence of convergence; but others suggest that Julians revelation at the storys close can be seen as a first step toward the higher consciousness that is God. Julian tries to stop his mother from giving the little boy a penny, but she tries to do it anyway. Julians Mothers interactions with Carver reveal the twisted brand of kindness exhibited by someone who is racist but who also believes in manners. Thus it is to be expected that the Negro woman explodes like a piece of machinery, striking Julians mother with the lumpy pocket book. More specifically, OConnor evidently saw the progress of race relations in the South since the Civil War as part of the convergence of all humanity towards Omega point. At that time, God would become "all in all." Imagery deflates ego. The narrator has access to Julians inner thoughts, private motivations, and fantasies. For, while the spectacle of the convergence of Julians mother with the Negro mother is indeed a convergence in a violent form, as one critic of the story [John J. Burke, S. J., in Convergence of Flannery OConnor and Chardin in Renascence, 1966] puts it, the most violent collision is within Julian, with effects Aristotle declared necessary to complex tragedy. Many critics view OConnors use of irony as integral to her moral outlook. The ultimate situational irony depicts the actual state of the Griersons when Emily becomes forgotten by the townsfolk who do not even care to check on her. However, when a Negro woman and her son board the bus, the situation changes. In trying to teach his Mother a lesson after she has been hit, Julian also comes off as condescending. Everything That Rises Must Converge Tone. He cannot make a decisively destructive move, since that would require his own self-shattering involvement. During the ride downtown, they talk to several people on the bus. Several works of literature employ irony as a major stylistic device. McFarland, Dorothy Tuck, Flannery OConnor, New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1976. 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