Comparison of Short Stories Winter Night and Everything that Rises Must Converge - Research Paper Example

Comparison of short stories “Winter Night,” “Everything that rises must converge” and their authors Kay Boyle and Flannery O’Connor Abstract This paper explores the short stories “Winter Night” by Kay Boyle and “Everything that rises must converge” by Flannery O’Connor. After extensive research on both the authors and their particular work a comparison is made between these short stories and their authors. The research involves internet resources and books. In paper, some specific terms are used, for instance metaphor, characterization, conflict, theme and symbol. The paper provides complete definition of these terms in notes. Comparison of short stories “Winter Night” and “Everything that rises must converge” Flannery’s “Everything that rises must converge” is the story of relationship between a son, Julian and his aging mother. It begins in hallway with the son waiting for his mother with intolerable claustrophobic impatience because he wants to take her to the diet class that was prescribed by the doctor. Son is very young and has got lots of stuff to do. Everything feels like depressing, even evening and colors are mauve, florid and grey. Reader visualizes street light and it’s only his mother’s intense blue eyes that comes out and lighten up the environment. Son seems quite pressurized and gets ready to escort her only by continuous remainders of how his mother slaved alone in order to raise and educate him. During this time, she sacrificed herself and any potential chance for herself. Son hates and feels responsible for all these years that made her an old lady who keeps fretting and muttering in front of the mirror in trivial wonderment that which over-priced hat she should wear to the diet club. Finally when they set off, when son reached the heights of irritation and started counted minutes, mother is having second thoughts and running back to change her dreadful hat. She was also apprehensive of traveling in bus with Negro people. Julian was amused to see Negro woman wearing the same hat in bus. He forbids her mother to give a penny to Carver but she tries it and faces outrageous reaction from his mother. Julian callously kept passing remarks on his mother without realizing that she is in physical distress. When finally Julian realizes and reaches for her help, it was too late to save her life (Cullen, 2010). Kay Boyle’s “Winter Night” depicts social realismi. The story revolves around Felicia who belongs to upper-class and stays in New York apartment while her mother is out for work. She is as usual alone with her maid in a dark winter night. Her father is on war front and her mother is busy in earning for raising her. Maid tells her that mother will come after she is asleep and defends her absence by saying that she is overworked and needs some freedom to prepare herself for the next day. After maid there always come a baby-sitter, both figures change quite frequently that never let Felicia become emotionally attached to them. They do their work in a mechanic way and leave Felicia. But it is different today; new baby sitter was not only different in appearance but they way she behaved. She narrates story of a little child who was just like Felicia and loves ballet .She had lost her mother and living in camp. The baby sitter is a victim of holocaust and reminiscing on her troubled past. Despite different plot and characters, both stories share common values and context of war and its consequences. Authors’ lives may or may not resemble but the time period they breathed in influenced and touched them in more or less the similar ways. The paper compares and analyses both stories and identifies a similar relationship triangle of love, loss and pain. Born on March 25, 1925 in Georgia, Flannery O’Connor was the only child of her parents. She got education in Roman Catholic schools. Therefore, her work depicts unique and strong perspective of her Catholicism. Despite her religious and orthodox orientation, her stories were not conventional. Due to her father’s death in 1941, O’Connor moved to Atlanta with her mother and then to her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. There she graduated in 1942 and attended local Georgia Woman’s College. She edited a literary quarterly, i.e. Corinthian. From 1945 to 1948 she got master’s degree by attending Iowa Writers Workshop and then set off for New York where she stayed briefly at Yadoo writer’s place. In 1950s she moved to farm in Connecticut where Fitzgeralds encouraged and connected her with other writers. In 1950, she became ill with disseminated lupus that had killed her father. She returned to her mother and farm in Milledgeville where her health stabilized somehow. However, illness exhausted her and she could only manage to write for few hours in the morning. She avidly wrote to people who contacted her and cherished the company of friends and visitors. She died of Lupus on her farm at the age of thirty-nine on August 3, 1964 (Williams, 2000, p.263).Kay Boyle’s life was dynamic and full of energies in comparison with O’Connor’s. Her diverse nature of jobs, relationships and surroundings always bestowed her new horizons. Kay Boyle, the last surviving member of the “lost generation,” was born on February 19, 1902, in St.Paul, Minnesota, and died after a seventy-years writing career on December 27, 1992.She was labeled the most dangerous woman in America by S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College, who in 1967 peremptorily fired her from her faculty position during the antiwar protests and strike staged at the college. Following a successful lawsuit, Boyle was reinstated as a professor of creative writing and taught until her retirement in 1980(Hileman, 2000, p.45). Being always in relationship with independent and politically active women as grand-daughter, daughter and niece, Boyle was more than ready to take up her unique writing career and adopt a strong stance on political and literary issues of her times. During 1920s and 1930s, as an expatriate woman, she took the initiative to sign twelve-point writer’s manifesto “The revolution of the word,” that asserted beliefs of modernism and criticized “the plain reader”. She selected political issues instead of aesthetic one in 1930s and 1940s.Her writings are set in war-stricken Europe and depicted the rise of Nazism in addition to consequences of war and the collaboration and resistance against Germans. Her publication were stopped due to her third husband’s death in 1963, after that she worked as a faculty member in San Francisco State College and remained politically active in 1960s and 1970s that also influenced and stimulated her writings Hileman, 2000, p.45). At the age of twenty, she went to New York, where she became an assistant to Lola Ridge, editor of Broom magazine. She enrolled in a fiction writing class at Columbia University and soon had her first poem published. Boyle’s writing career truly began in France…During these years Boyle wrote and published poems and short fiction in avant-grade literary magazine such as This Quarter, Poetry, and Transition; her fellow contributors included Pound, Joyce, Hemingway, and Stein. Her first novel was lost by the publisher to whom it was sent, but in her second, Plagued by the Nightingale, Boyle employed autobiographical elements and gave voice to the experience of the expatriate woman artist, a topic not articulated in the works of her modern male contemporaries. (Hileman, 2000, p.45) By living as a nomadic in different countries during 1930s, Boyle got another focus for her writing i.e. international politics; Death of a man was her one of her earliest fictional narration of Nazism, her short story The white horses of Vienna in 1935 also portrayed Nazis and Jews. After getting married with Joseph von Franckernstein she worked as a correspondent for The New Yorker raised issues of WWII in her fiction. The relationships of her characters are woven around death, loss, resistance, guilt, suffering and pain that she observed during her stay in Europe. In early 1950s Boyle and her husband Franckernstein were accused of McCarthyism and fired from their jobs and had a difficult decade of their lives. (Hileman, 2000, p.46) At the time Boyle accepted a teaching position at San Fraccisco State (SFS) College and became active in civil rights and antiwar activities. Earlier in her life, the Sacco-Vanzetti case had caused Boyle to denounce the U.S. government, and her recent experience with McCarthyism had personalized her awareness of destructive practices sanctioned by the U.S. government. Consequently, she supported the student strike at SFS, hosted Amnesty International meetings in her home, and was twice arrested for Oakland Induction Center. Her essays about these events were collected in The Long Walk at San Francisco State; her poems from the same period appeared in Testament for My Students. Boyle’s last novel, The Underground Woman (1975) incorporated her political experiences…at the age of seventy-eight, the “dangerous woman who was the subject of a 2,000-page security file accumulated by U.S. intelligence agencies retired from San Francisco State. She remained in California until her death on December 127, 1992. (Hileman, 2000, pp.46-7) “Everything that rises must converge” is a third person narration and storyteller can read Julian’s mind, motivation and secret fantasies. Characterizationii is indirect mostly like it is in “winter night”. One of the major themes is comparing and brining conflicting identities together. Julian is highly objective and individualistic new South youngster while his mother is old Southern emotional woman who is not ready to give up her fading social status (Mullen, 2003). Similarly, Boyle portrays conflicting identities of mother and daughter relationship in upper-class and migrant camps. Besides the issue of dealing with traditional values, conventional perceptions and generation conflictiii, the major theme ivthat is similar to Kay Boyle’s “winter night” is lack of connectivity in relationship that gradually builds into the loss of loved ones and regrets associated with it. Flannery O’Connor represents strong visual symbolsv in the story. Major symbols are green and purple hat that is attributed as “hideous” and “atrocious”. Hat is more than an accessory for her; it’s more of an identity. Her orthodox, old Southern perceptions inspire her to look different and unique. That’s why despite unwanted price she keeps the hat because she believed, “at least I won’t meet myself coming and going.”It reflects her mind that associate hat with identity. Ironically, she encounters a blank woman wearing the same hat that equates “meeting herself” (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”, n.d.). Hat is a symbol of transforming cultural landscape in 1960s south that brought the two “different” women at equal social status. In historical perspective, Julian’s mother felt herself superior to the black women who were supposed to be the epitome of ugliness regardless of any comparison between wealth, knowledge, education and status. Even the poor whites have got reasons to feel superior, but O’Connor artfully symbolizes status with hat that puts them on the same social status. The hat demonstrates that both are same now, they use same transportation shop from same place and even their tastes in clothing are similar. O’Connor draws our attention to the absurdity of racial inequality and suggests those human beings are more alike than different (SparkNotes Editors, 2007). Another symbol is the penny that Julian’s mother gave to Caver in order to show her kindness for African Americans. It symbolizes white Americans’ hold on material goods and enslavement of Africans. Her penny seems to be a continuation of the similar attitude and symbolizes Black dependence on Whites. Carver’s mother reaction is the depiction that is fuel by centuries rage and promises of civil rights movements. The way Carver’s mother lashes out symbolizes an end to white patronage and declares the independent status of African Americans (SparkNotes Editors, 2007).The story also points towards raising social status of African American and increasing insecurity of old white woman in a symbolic way. To some extent it is a form of convergence that is mentioned in the title (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”, n.d.). Boyle uses metaphorsvi that refer to her womanly concerns, in a symbolic narrative baby-sitter tells Felicia about other little child, “She had little coats of golden hair on her arms and legs”…and when we were closed up there the lot of us in the cold, I used to make her laugh when I told her that the fur that was so pretty, like a little fawn’s skin on her arms, would always, help to keep her warm up” (as cited in “Fiction Reading List”,n.d.). In the last paragraph Boyle states, “And then ,as startling as a slap across her delicately tinted face, she saw the woman lying sleeping on the divan and Felicia, in her school dress still, asleep within the woman’s arms” (as cited in “Fiction Reading List”,n.d.). Another symbol is light on the carpet that Felicia never crosses, she may be afraid of crossing that limit between the maid and herself or it is the insecurity that is ceasing her to move ahead of the limit she assumed. However, with the warm and friendly baby-sitter she feels secure and light does not bother her. Boyle highlights the social lifestyle of today’s mothers and wants to aware the readers about working woman lifestyles and its effect on their kids. O’Connor’s witty humor intelligently criticizes the social set up and human nature that is often distorted. The very distortion is expressed in terms of physical traits, For instance, “grotesques”. Well biting satire is used to ridicule orthodox perceptions and superiority complex in society. For instance, O’Connor narrates, old lady “holds[s] herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity.” And a self-pitying son “wait[s] like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to start piercing him” (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”, n.d.). Basic motivation and concept behind the both story is to accept love and realize the prejudice and hatred in all its forms. The stories beautifully extract love as ultimate destination of human irrespective of orientation, race, age and ideology they belong to. However, characters struggled for relationships and loss and pain dominated the themes. O’Connor’s believed that the weakness and sin infect basic human nature. Her writings represent orthodox Catholic perspective about a secular and wicked world (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”, n.d.).Apparently simple and innocuous threads of social life and trivial dealings indirectly take us to Flannery O’Connor’s influences and background of the story. With little effort reader can be able to retrieve the hidden message in her Christian books. For instance, is the title “everything that rises must converge” true, her own perception or someone else’s influence? It is believed that her resolute Catholicism and works of Pierre de Chardin had great influence on her short stories. This title is extracted from his writings, philosophical and mystical reflections. The title is one of his quotes. Story presents many themes including suppressed anger, guilt, anxiety, sacrifice, love, faith, fears, violence, dependence, race, and morality skillfully woven in the narrative. However, the idea of convergence for all these still poses the inspiration from a particular idea (Cullen, 2010). Boyle’s work has always been influenced by her surroundings. Her nomadic life began in the very childhood when her family moved to Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati (Hileman, 2000, p.45).Initially Boyle defined herself as a poet but she achieved the status of acclaimed short story writer and novelist. Her works developed such themes as her poetry couldn’t. Her fiction revealed the problems in love relationships and highlighted the obstacles that prevented her characters to achieve the ultimate state of being in love. Bourgeois morality, pain of exile, alienation or death of lover depicted the reasons that stopped her characters to establish long lasting and close relationships. She spoke for her generation, against racism, militarism, war and lack of association in human relationships (Hileman, 2000, pp.48-9).Her short story “Winter Night” also depicts the social reality of a relationship between mother and a seven years old child during the war period. It highlights the family bond and lack of emotional nourishment in high class children due to ignoring parents. It represents conflicting identities and beautifully paints the consequences of war that has brought young people engagement in war and misery of life in camps. Conclusion “Everything that rises must converge” is the title story of O’Connor’s collection. Its core concept is bigotry and hatred that finally converged into pain and love. The story is focused on the rising of a young man and ultimately “convergence” of his own perceptions. “Winter Night” represents conflicting roles of mothers in different classes at the time of war. It reveals the way war damaged the social fabric. After studying both authors and their lives, the paper concludes that these writers have never been friends or in close contact but what inspired and influenced them to revolve around the same theme is social and political environment they lived in. Both stories reveal transitional stages of relationships and strong external influences on them. Characters’ lack of association and selfishness in both stories is manifested in their loosely bounded relationships that transformed into loss, pain and revealed the real love in the relationship. Read More