She is practical and has no illusions about herself or about what she must do to survive. Julian remembers the mansion, which he regards with secret longing, while his mother continues to reminisce about her nurse, an old darky whom she considers the best person in the world. Julian finds his mothers condescension and racism intolerable. On an integrated bus, he forces her to address her prejudices, hoping to teach her a lesson about race relations, justice, and the modern world. It is only after Julian realizes that his mother may be seriously hurt that his own movement toward convergence takes place. Unfortunately the denouement of the story (the good Southern lady drops dead) is uncomfortable. But now he cannot deny his own condition by any act of abstraction, by principle, his old means of escaping his emptiness. 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. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. OConnor again characterizes Julian in terms of his desire to resist any kind of human connection when she describes the inner compartment of his mind that is the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. Julian attributes what he believes is his judgment and insight to his ability to sever bondsespecially that with his mother. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Even the plantations rooster surrenders his gorgeous bronze and green-black tail feathers to decorate the green velvet hat. They get on the bus and his mother tells their fellow white passengers about her sons ambitions as a writer. As the story continues, the narrators perspective becomes more distinct from Julians; by the end, readers are in a position to criticize Julian as strongly as he has criticized his mother. Afterward the Negro woman slaps the obnoxious child as Julian only imagines doing to his mother. It seems that the few references to Christianity are largely emptied of meaning. He believes in equality, but his family history connects him to a racist tradition. Source: John Ower, The Penny and the Nickel in Everything That Rises Must Converge, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. OConnor is widely considered one of the most significant writers ever produced by the United States. Thomas R Arp and Greg Johnson. But, on a larger scale, the story depicts the plight of all mankind. [In the following essay, Montgomery examines the character of Julian in detail, finding the convergence of the title in Julians confrontation with himself, when he realizes that he has destroyed that which he loved through his blindness.]. Previous A pseudo-existentialist, he builds a fairyland, that magnificent ersatz of the science of Phenomena [Jacques] Maritain declares existentialism to be. bookmarked pages associated with this title. In a discussion of the authors unique comedy, [Brainard] Cheney contends [in his essay Miss OConnor Creates Unusual Humor out of Ordinary Sin in the Sewanee Renew Autumn, 1963] that this kind of humor might be called metaphysical humor. He describes the effect in this way: She begins with familiar surfaces that seem secular at the outset and in a secular tone of satire or humor. If you are the original creator of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal. She had immediate access to her Christhaunted, The tragedy is Julians, in which he recognizes that he has destroyed that which he loved through his blindness. Julians Mothers longing for the past is representative of many white Southerners relationship to their history. 10710. The crux of the difference lies in perspectives: Chardin looks to the future; Miss OConnor is concerned with the present and its consequences in the future. The new possibilities for betterment opening to blacks are intimated not only by the abovementioned details of the Lincoln cent but also by its bright, shiny freshness. It is from such an apparently secure social eminence that Julians mother looks down on Negroes with a blend of snobbish condescension, graciousness and paternalistic benevolence. Theyre tragic.. The patronizing act of offering a coin is completely natural to her, yet offensive to the Negro. And later, we see her carry the child down the bus steps by its arm as if it were a thing and not a child. While Emily is still suffering from this sense of superiority, she tells the tax collectors that she does not pay taxes in Jefferson (Faulkner 527). In a society where man is fragmented from his fellow man, however, such gifts have come to be suspect temptations to perversion, acts of condescension, or, at the very least, attempts by old busybodies trying to stick their noses where they are not wanted. It appeared posthumously, as the title story of the final collection of her fiction, in 1965. Actually it is he who lives in the past, though only his own private past, for he can deal only in abstractions fed by reverie and memory. When it finally dawns on him that it is the hat that is familiar, he thinks the problem solved. The irony of this scene comes from the reader's realization that the two women have, indeed, changed sons. For OConnor, Julians mother would be painfully typical of most mid-century Americans, who neither understand nor appreciate the meaning and purpose of the original Young Womens Christian Association. Nationality: Irish. At the bus stop, he finds in himself an evil urge to break her spirit. Neither evil nor spirit here carries full meaning, for he intends only to express his impulse to embarrass her in public. Irony allows OConnor to expose Julians lack of self-knowledge and his distance from a state of grace. And so the possibility of catastrophe is remote indeed to his thinking as he sets about harassing his mother. In 1949 she moved to New York City. . The retrograde desire of Julians mother to reduce Negroes to their antebellum servitude stands in ironic contrast to her penny as recalling Lincolns emancipation of blacks. Tone. The author uses the irony of the Griersons stature in the society to explore the unusual dynamics in their relationships. He can make a surface response to surface existence. Yet when his mother dies, he recognizes the evil he has done. At this point, evolution continuesyet only on a spiritual level. It is easier of course to make gestures of compassion or brotherhood in the daily press than to deal directly with our Dixies or Dons whom Miss OConnor translates as a Misfit or Rufus Johnson. At the same time, the antipodal orientations conveyed by the purple flapdown on one side up on the othergraphically depict the twin socioeconomic movements in the South: the downward movement of aristocratic families like the Godhighs and the Chestnys, and the upward movement of upwardly mobile blacks who, because of improved economic status, have as much freedom to pursue absurdity as the whites. In part, then, the hats purple flap renders semiotically the impact of the civil rights movement on southern society. Genre: Southern Gothic/Christian Realism/Anti-Romanticism. What OConnor sees when she looks at the world from her Catholic perspective is mostly dark, chaotic, and divisive. In 1952 Wise Blood was published, followed by her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find in 1955 and her novel The Violent Bear It Away in 1960. 1985 It was Flannery OConnors contention that the strange characters who populate her world are essentially no different from you and me. Julian believes that by sitting next to the African American man on the bus, he is teaching his mother a valuable moral lesson. While species diversified biologically until humans came to dominate the earth, evolution began to take the form of rising consciousness and led back toward unification or convergence. Short Stories for Students. On the surface, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" appears to be a simple story. The lesson that he had hoped his mother would learn turns out to be meant for him; the confrontation of the two women with identical hats is comical, but the comedy is quickly reversed. He goads her, calling after her that the hat looked better on the black woman than on her and that the old world is gone. Julian's mother, for example, believes "if you know who you are you can go anywhere" (16) and her catchphrase is "Rome wasn't built in a day" (8). With the help of Mammy, Scarlett makes a dazzling dress out of the mansions moss-green velvet curtains and a petticoat out of the satin linings of the parterres; her pantalets are trimmed with pieces of Taras lace curtains. Her literary influences have been discussed, as well as her place within the Southern Gothic regional tradition. In being drawn back to his Mother, Julian is drawn back to a symbol of the old Southhis mother, who is also literally the source of his life. Almost every dollar she has goes to her beloved son, Julian; this financial support has allowed him to complete college and attempt a life as a writer. To join the nineteenth-century Ladies Christian Association, a woman had to prove herself a member in good standing of an Evangelical church; by 1926, church membership was no longer a requirement, and the declaration that I desire to enter the Christian fellowship of the Association was deemed adequate for membership. Then she presses those responses, through the presence of antagonists, to the point where the response proves inadequate. Consider how Julian arrives at his moment of truth: he does not seek it, nor does he achieve it himself through thoughtful deliberation. She makes her indignation felt in the most direct way possible. Even though she's old-fashioned, we think that . She even threatens to "knock the living Jesus out of Carver" because he will not ignore the woman who has smiled at him, using a smile which, according to Julian's point of view, she used "when she was being particularly gracious to an inferior. OConnor is suggesting that the old South called to mind by the five cent piece is gone forever. The title of the story offers a key to a more complete understanding of the epiphany or convergence process in an OConnor short story. Both women are shocked at first, but Julian is delighted: He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson. These are changes not of the head but of the heart. Thus as she goes to her reducing class, she tells Julian: Most of them in it are not our kind of people,. Since the main impetus towards desegregation came from the U.S. Federal Government, the resistance of Southern white reactionaries threatened to create strife not just between the races, but also between Dixie and the rest of the nation. The way she expressed her Roman Catholic faith remained a subject of fascination and debate for scholars. Irony in Everything That Rises Must Converge is one of the most prominent literary devices. As we noted, the plot line of the story appears to be simple; the major impact of the story, however, is generated by the interaction of the attitudes held by Julian and his mother. What is reality? True, Julians mother did not actually make her hat out of a cushion, but it is entirely possible that, at some level, Julians motherherself a widow from a good southern family down on her luckmay have been identifying with the plucky Scarlett, using her as a role model of a lady who survives by making do with what she has. These scenes close with the comments "The bus stopped . Or in another figure also appropriate to our story we play childishly with our supposed inferiors, as Julian does: we hold up before a mirror a message only we can decipher in its backwardness since we were privy to its writing. O'Connor reviewed and was impressed by several of his works, and, at one stage in her life, she appears to have been interested in Teilhard's attempt to integrate religion and science. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is set in the American South soon after racial integration has become the law of the land. . June 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/irony-in-everything-that-rises-must-converge-and-a-rose-for-emily/. This demonstrates again that Julian might be more interested in the appearance of a liberal value system than he is in acting in a sincerely progressive manner. All the events that unfold in this story are modeled around the irony of a former slavery beneficiary whose welfare has changed but her point of view remains the same. Furthermore, as one considers the allusion in the title, the universality of Miss OConnors message becomes even more evidentas does the intensity of her vision and her aesthetic. When the game of Peek-a-boo starts between Julians mother and Carver, Carvers mother threatens to knock the living Jesus out of the child. Instant PDF downloads. He then took them away from the car so that Dixie would not see the killing. Our reading of Julians mother, then, is made for us by him, so that one might very well see the basic plot line as dealing with an old-guard Southern lady, afraid to ride the buses, as our anonymous reviewer put it. 2023 Course Hero, Inc. All rights reserved. In opposition to both possible evils, the motto E PLURIBUS UNUM indicates how the South should accept the will of the Federal authorities and help create a society where the races can coexist in harmony. She stares, "her face frozen with frustrated rage," at Julian's mother, and then she "seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much." Everything That Rises Must Converge Tone. In addition, various commentators have pointed out that the color purple has religious associations, most notably Easter redemption and penance. 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 mother insists on her sons company because she doesnt like to ride the bus alone, especially since the bus system was recently integrated. The story concerns questions of right and wrong, with the contrasting moral sensibilities of Julian and his mother forming the basis of the plots conflict. Print. Julian tries to stop his mother from giving the little boy a penny, but she tries to do it anyway. As Julian attempts to help his mother up from the pavement, he realizes that the shock of the experience has caused her to suffer a strokethus she actually becomes victim to the outdated code by which she has lived. "Everything That Rises Must Converge". Magee, Rosemary M., ed., Conversations with Flannery OConnor, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. The Young Womens Christian Association has been functioning in some form in the United States since 1866; the national organization of the Young Womens Christian Association of the United States of America was effected in 1906. 18, 10. Mentioning her familys former plantation, Julians mother talks about slavery. Therefore, Julians claims against racism are just a representation of his feelings of superiority towards his mother. It is helpful to remember that Teilhard conceives of humankind as the midpoint between the ultimate unity of offered by God and the chaotic savagery of animal life. The situational irony is that Julian makes no money, has a next to worthless college education, and lives with his mother whom he is financially dependent on. It is not a world in which everything is either black or white. . When he recounts his disillusionment in discovering that his distinguished looking Negro acquaintance is an undertaker, when he imagines his mother desperately ill and his being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her, when he dreams of bringing home a suspiciously Negroid fianceethe comedy runs high. She was a widow but she had "struggled fiercely" to put Julian through school, and at the time of the story, she is still supporting him. Boston: Bedford/St. SOURCES The individual realizes his potential as a person through self-awareness, which is the ultimate effect of grace. As Maida notes, a reducing class at the Y is a bourgeois event; but more than this, it suggests how much Julians mother, and the socioeconomic system she represents, has declined by the early, Mentioned no less than five times in this brief story, the Y serves as a gauge of the degeneration of the mothers Old South family and, concomitantly, of the breakdown of old, church-related values in the United States of the mid-twentieth century.. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. The world in which he lives is grotesque, and perhaps the way in which he comes to his self-realization is appropriately grotesque. Finally, it seems, O'Connor has written a story which we can easily read and understand without having to struggle with abstract religious symbolism. These issues demonstrate clearly enough the failure of humans to achieve spiritual unity. Julians distortions are those that a self-elected superior intellect is capable of making through self-deception; he is an intellect capable of surface distinctions but not those fundamental ones such as that between childish and child-like. . . How does one relate to the world and others in it? Already the possibilities of grace are present as he cries out to her with the voice of a child. To see Mrs. Chestny as a simple bigot is to ignore the clues to her character which O'Connor gives us. Her family name is central to her identity, reinforcing her belief in her value as a human being and her superiority to those around her. She wont ride the bus without her son, imagining some abstract danger or indignity in simply sharing space with people of a different race. CRITICISM The collision is presented initially in the comical exchange of sons, Julian for the small Negro boy, on the bus. When he recognizes that his mother will be able to recover from this shock, he is dismayed because she has been taught no lesson. Was the motivation of Don Boggs (and Dixie) something in their genesor in their environmentor both? There were also displays of the mind of her Julians and Sheppards and Raybers, in the editorial columns and on the book review page. The convergence of the hats and the personalities of the respective owners is a violent clash unpredictable and shocking. . In the tradition of the Christian humanist, he affirms the value of the individual by emphasizing his role as an intelligent being capable of cooperating with his Creator through gracea term used for the communication of love between God and man. Style In the beginning of the story, it is also noted that the Grierson estate was largely isolated from the rest of the community and only tragedy opens it up to public scrutiny. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. Here, it becomes evident that Julians treatment of black people as symbols makes it difficult for him to make real connections. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation by color in public buses was unconstitutional, and the protest movement gained force. I don't know how we've let it get in this fix." This challenging work of theology, which is the source of the storys title and the inspiration for its message, sheds light on OConnors ideas about religion and morality. OConnors use of the YWCA as the destination of Julians mother is Petrys focus in this article, in which the critic shows how the Y serves as a gauge of the degeneration of the mothers Old South family and, concomitantly, of the breakdown of old, church-related values in the United States of the mid-twentieth century.. At the summit you will find yourself united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. 45, No. Introduction On a larger scale, moreover, the story has mythic and universal proportions in terms of the treatment of how an individual faces reality and attains maturity. The authors of these stories rely on irony as a prominent stylistic device especially in relation to their stories main characters. The old manners and your graciousness is not worth a damn. She is breathing hard but Julian doesnt recognize that she is in physical distress. In addition, Julian feels that he is too intelligent to be a success and this is the reason he does not fit in with the rest of the population (OConnor 440). It is he (as well as we) who begins to realize, as we watch his mother die from the blow, that the world is, perhaps, not that simple. From O'Connor's point of view, a society divided about fifty-fifty requires "considerable grace for the two races to live together." He purports to be a liberal; yet he acts primarily out of retaliation against the old system rather than out of genuine concern for the Negro. When he sits down by the Negro man, he stares across at his mother making his eyes the eyes of a stranger. His tension lifts as if he had openly declared war on her, which of course he has, thus making his withdrawal from the world possible. But the Christianimplications of Julians tragedy separate him from Oedipus. 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. . For instance, Julians mother believes that she dedicated her life towards raising her son. Consider, for example, the way realistic and grotesque elements form the imagery of the story. Dixie will offend most those who say that children become delinquent today because of a lack of religious influence about the home. Because Teilhard is both a man of science and a believer, the scientist and the theologian will require considerable time to sift and evaluate his thought, but the poet, whose sight is essentially prophetic, will at once recognize in Teilhard a kindred intelligence. His feelings of superiority towards his mother point where the response proves inadequate was Flannery OConnors contention that the purple... No illusions about herself or about what she Must do to survive students to analyze literature like LitCharts.! Clash irony in everything that rises must converge and shocking he stares across at his mother may be hurt. 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