"Everything That Rises Must Converge"

I think that O’Connor titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” as she did because it represents the historical standpoint from which she was writing. “Everything that rises” seems to represent problems of social class and race reaching a boiling point. She demonstrates how there is a divide between race on the bus, and she furthers this divide by attributing characteristics of the neighborhood that Julian and his mother reside in. She makes it obvious that Julian abhors how his mother is conflicted in thinking that she still lives in the time that her grandfather Chestney did. His mother seems to perceive the rise of African American people as related to her own family’s fall from economic and social heights. She also thinks she knows who she is, and where her family belongs in a social hierarchy. From her perspective, the fact that the family is no longer rich means that society is out of order. “Must converge” symbolizes Julian’s mother’s discomfort with race and time converging. She feels uncomfortable riding the bus without Julian, and she displays a rather condescending pity for those of mixed race. All in all, though, this “convergence” is inevitable because of the cultural and political changes taking place in the 1960s in the South (the civil rights decade).

Julian and Hulga are similar in that they both display a kind of arrogance about them that is rooted in the fact that they have received higher educations. In both “Good Country People” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” this seems to be their downfall. Hulga thinks she holds a superiority over Manley only to discover that he has been deceiving her the entire time. Julian wants to teach his mother a “lesson” because he thinks that she doesn’t know herself, but this eventually leads to her death. She becomes so stricken by the rejection of the “Negress” that it can be assumed that her blood pressure jumps to fatal heights. Thus, the fact that both Hulga and Julian believe themselves to be intellectually superior turns out to be the cause of their misfortunes.