Flannery O'Connor Comparison
...tend, and she told him that he had to go with her to her reducing class downtown (3). Julian also has other possessions, which are simplistic by their non-materialistic nature. He possesses the ability to feel guilt and remorse, which symbolize the love and compassion he has for his Mother. For example, when his Mother has the heart attack and dies, he feels lost because the person that always told him what to do and where to go had just left him to make his own decisions about life and about happiness (23). Julian’s possessions symbolized his need for commonness and clarity that he so desperately needs to have in this stage of his life. The objects a person owns can make that person's life or become that person's life. A person's attitude can change according to how he or she feels about his or her possessions. In the mother’s case, she believes her existence is of the utmost importance to keep her “kind” alive. Her attitude toward the African-American woman exemplifies herself as of more important than a woman with a different ethnic background (18). Integration has no meaning whatsoever in her vocabulary, and that is how she thinks all white people should look at these kinds of situations. The mother feels that the feelings other people do not matter because she knows what is right and wrong about the society in their day and age. Her attitude toward Julian was completely different as to what it was with the African-American woman. She wanted Julian to be just like her and live the same way she did at the time (4). Julian had his own style and personality that his mother has not realized yet. The mother is stuck in an era where she thinks white supremacy still reigns. In contrast to his mother, Julian’s attitude was one of less “white supremacy” and more equality among all people, including him and his mother. As one critic would say, “ ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’ is another attempt o chronicle the disproportion between the Hulgas and the ‘Good country people’” (Friedman 22). Julian’s attitude toward everything his mother thought was right was wrong. He felt he had to correct his mother’s wrongs, which denote his philosophy on her outlook toward integration and white supremacy. He felt that all men were created equally and had the same rights as did the white community. Julian was living for the future, and his mother was still living in the past. The attitude that Julian was portraying was one of knowledge of the future in which his mother knew nothing about. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods,” the use of symbolism is portrayed through the use of color shown in clothing and in nature and the nomenclature used for the main characters Mary Fortune Pitts and Mark Fortune. Usage of this particular element of literature allows the reader' full comprehension of this story and why events are happening. Color adds character to the items in the story and also adds mystery to the element of which the color has been added. Yellow was the color of Mary Fortune’s little dress identifying her as one with nature (yellow being the color of flowers and the sun). She wore silver-rimmed glasses as did Mark Fortune, her grandfather (O’Connor 59). In doing this, she was expressing her need and desire to be just like her grandfather, which is the ability to be confident in herself and know what she wants out of life and in the future. Not only does clothing symbolize color, but also nature symbolizes color. Red is the color used to describe the lake and the whole in the ground that the bulldozer was plowing in order to build a convenient store in its place (54). This color represents the animosity and the rage between the two main characters of Mary Fortune and her grandfather. A yellow-dotted field that Mary Fortune and her grandfather pass after an argument about the property he wants to sell resembles the same yellow cotton dress she was wearing meaning she was one with nature (64). Yellow is a very significant color in this story. Not only does the color foreshadow that something severe was going to happen between the two main characters, but also the color represents nature, an atmosphere that Mary Fortune didn’t want to give up without a fight. Pink, yellow, and purple weeds adorned the field in front of the Pitts/Fortune house (69). Bright, pastel colors characterize the field as a place of serenity and quiet for Mary Fortune and her brothers and sisters. The field is a place where she can release all her tension and anger that she has bottled up internally. Color, in nature, is very...