JULIAN AND O'CONNOR'S "EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE" Alice Hall Petry Rhode Island School of Design In a brief note published in 1978, Mary Frances Hopkins argues that critics of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" should desist from imposing the name "Mrs. Chestny" on Julian's mother . "No author names characters more deftly than does O'Connor, with all the deadliness of a Thackeray or Waugh but with none of the weaknesses inherent in their lack of subtlety,"1 so the omission of a name for the mother is not an oversight but rather a statement in itself. As much as there is a studied purpose behind O'Connor's decision to give her character the generic label of "Julian's mother," so too there is a rationale underlying the name of the son: Julian. Marion Montgomery sees it as evocative of St. Julian the Hospitaller,2 while a more suggestive explanation is offered by Josephine Hendin. She perceives a connection between the fictional Julian and the emperor Julian the Apostate (AD 331 or 332 to AD 363), remembered to this day for his vigorous campaign to rid the Roman Empire of its official religion, Christianity, and to reinstate the paganism of the ancient Greeks. Writes Hendin, "Julian's relation to his mother and the past she represents is implied in his name. He is an apostate Julian raised to be a gentleman. . . . Although raised as a Christian, . . . Julian still yearns after the old gods, or, more specifically, the old Godhighs."' Hendin takes the matter no further, unfortunately, for the connections between the Julian of O'Connor's story and Flavius Claudius Julianus are too numerous to be coincidental. More to the point, these connections help to guide the reader's responses to this most analyzed and enigmatic story. In terms of their personal situations and temperaments, the fictional and the historical Julian have much in common. Each was born to the purple, albeit this proved to be a mixed blessing for both. The Julian of O'Connor's story is perpetually reminded by his mother of his aristocratic background: "'Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state. . . . Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh'" (p. 407).4 This is cold comfort for Julian, whose knowledge of his aristocratic background serves only to intensify his bitterness that this blue-blooded youth must sell typewriters for a living and accompany his mother on weekly trips to the YWCA. Julian the Apostate found his own aristocratic links problematic at best, deadly at worst. Although eventually he would be designated Caesar (AD 355) and then acclaimed Emperor during the Gallic campaigns (AD 360), 102Notes Julian spent his entire childhood and adolescence under house arrest at a series of private homes and fortresses scattered throughout the Roman Empire. The power struggles of the fourth century hit close to home: His father and brother had been slaughtered before his eyes by his older cousin , the emperor Constantius, who spared the five-year-old Julian but kept him surrounded by guards and spies until he reluctantly named him Caesar to replace Julian's older brother, the Caesar Gallus, whom Constantius had murdered in AD 354. The point would not be lost on a writer such as O'Connor, who utilizes "estrangement within the family" as a major source of "sublimated violence and overt feuding" in her stories.5 Such familial internecine strife is particularly evident in "Everything That Rises," and no better model for verbal and physical violence directed against blood relatives could be found than the personal and historical situation of Julian the Apostate. Fourth-century Rome was characterized by political turmoil, bloody religious clashes, a costly policy of military aggression, and severe inflation. Whether one attributes this situation to climactic change, birth control, or low-level lead poisoning from the city's water system,6 the fact remains that Julian the Apostate lived in a world where old standards, old values, and the secure old lifestyle had been obliterated. To someone living in the South of the early 1960s, chaotic fourth-century Rome would be an apt emblem of the turmoil attendant...