SOURCE: "Miss O'Connor and Mrs. Mitchell: The Example of 'Everything That Rises,'" in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Summer, 1989, pp. 5-15.

In the following essay, Hall Petry outlines allusions to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind found in O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

Flannery O'Connor knew only too well that she could not assume her audience brought a solid background in Christianity to their readings of her fiction. It was part of the price she paid for being an insistently Roman Catholic writer in the increasingly secularized United States of the mid-twentieth century. One element which she could count on being familiar to any American reader from any socioeconomic or educational stratum was, however, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. That familiarity enabled O'Connor to incorporate into her fiction various echoes of Mitchell's novel, echoes sometimes transparent and sometimes subtle, sometimes parodic and sometimes serious...