Petry's discussion in this essay centers on the echoes of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind that she perceives in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and the resonance these echoes add to the reader's understanding of the story.
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 (1936). That familiarity enabled O'Connor to incorporate into her fiction various echoes of Mitchell's novel, echoes sometimes transparent and sometimes.....
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