Everything Racial Converges

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Everything that Rises Must Converge” focuses on the racial tensions in the post Industrialization era in the South as embodied in the strained relationship between Julian and his mother. Specifically, O’Connor emphasizes the fact that the mother and son duo operate within conflicting spheres of perception. Through her presentation of incompatible and ultimately, colliding conceptions of reality, O’Connor presents the socio-economic strife prevalent in the South when cotton was no longer king and races were intermixed.

O’Connor presents Julian’s mother as emblematic of the old South and its heavy reliance on the institution of slavery to support plantation life. Throughout the story, Mrs. Chestny expresses nostalgia for the past, especially as she laments to Julian: “With the world in the mess it’s in, it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything” (O’Connor 407). The “mess” that Mrs. Chestny refers to is the disruption of the previously instated social hierarchy by the abolishment of slavery and the subsequent desegregation efforts; she grieves that “the bottom rail is on the top” with blacks having gained social mobility. She later repeats the same thought, nearly verbatim, when she complains on the bus that the “world is in a mess everywhere” (410). Mrs. Chestny’s insistence on the chaotic state of “the world” refers only to her own loss of identity when her grandfather’s “plantation and two hundred slaves” prove irrelevant (406). She argues that blacks “were better off when they were” slaves and that it’s “simply not realistic” for racial equality to exist in her white reality.

Unable to cope with racial integration or the destruction of her identity as white gentry, she argues that Julian “hadn’t even entered the real world” or rather, her racially stratified world (411). While Mrs. Chestney envisions one world, through the course of the story Julian recognizes several. Julian often withdraws to a “mental bubble” that is safe from “any kind of penetration from without” and from which he has “absolute clarity” (411). Thus he identifies an internalized world of thought that allows him to see the “general idiocy” of