Flanner O'Conner's "everything That Rises Must Converge"

Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" depicts a stifling mother-son relationship in which the conflict is never resolved, or even acknowledged. This relationship is a metaphor which describes the transition from the Old South, with its inherent values used to justify slavery alld segregation, to the New South, striving for justice based on equality. Mrs, Chestney (old South) and her son Julian (New South) represent, on an individual scale, the interactions of their corresponding constituencies, "'The world is a mess everywhere... I don't know how we've let it get in this mess", states Mrs, Chestney on the subject of segregation, Unintentionally, she implicates her kind as the party responsible for the tension between Negroes [sic.] and Whites, She is saying, in effect, "We dominated this race of people. Now it has become too difficult for us to maintain that control." Naturally, she feels threatened. Josephine Hendin wrote that:

The desegregation of buses and the general rise of the Negro seem to her so much chaos, a chaos in which the old and the young, the present and the past, must violently collide.

Blacks encroaching upon the power structure which is integral to her behavior have forced her to either reassess her behavior, or substantiate it. She is an old woman, whose meaning to life is reliant upon segregation, and she will, in every case, opt for the latter, In her discourse with her son, Julian, she proudly refers to a great-grandfather who was a slave owner, the tragedy of "half-whites", and, as proof for not riding integrated buses alone, a large Black passenger sitting adjacent to her, reading a newspaper. Her manipulative council and rhetoric of self-identity offers her son no valuable insight. Although good-intentioned, her concepts are either too lofty or ambiguous to utilize. Kathleen Feeley wrote that "eventually the mother's 'culture of the heart' fails because it is unreal" , and her inability to advise Julian clearly is indicative of this. Julian does not like his mother. To him, she is an embarrassment, a burden, and backward. He has learned to identify racism, and has learned to argue against it, However, when his mother is the perpetrator, the issue becomes wrapped around the hostility he feels for her. For example, he resents her methods of motherhood, or perhaps her headstrong commitment to her unwitting ignorance. Most likely, when taking the issue into account, he feels the most anger towards her for raising him as a racist, and now, despite an education that presumes the opposite, he finds that he remains racist. Instead of addressing these problems, he seeks to belittle her, When the large Negro woman first enters the story, he immediately wished that she sit beside his mother, in order to disturb her. Yet "to his annoyance, she squeezed herself into [the seat next to his]". His lack of insight regarding their relationship is revealed when he has fantasies of presenting his mother with a Black acquaintance: either a business associate, a lover, or even the doctor whom he could hire to heal her. When he asks the man with the newspaper for a light (with neither cigarettes nor the desire to smoke), he embarrasses himself solely to confound her. He remains racist not because it was ingrained into him by his mother, but because, ironically, he continues to exploit Negroes for the sole purpose of shocking his mdther out of her racism. "Julian's 'culture of the mind' fails because it does not touch his whole being". A college graduate, he still lives at home, with only the vaguest notion of a means to independence or a career.