Cities and Agelessness in O'Connor

Asbury considers the urban life far superior to his own rural upbringing. This is evident in the demarcation he makes between Dr. Block and city doctors. He says to his mother, "'Don't you think if I'd wanted to go to a doctor I'd have gone up there where they have some good ones? Don't you know they have better doctors in New York?'" (549) The city functions as an escape for him, and his return to rural life is a failure. "Ever since he had first gone away to college, he had come back every time with nothing but the necessities for a two-week stay and with a wooden resigned expression that said he was prepared to endure the visit for exactly fourteen days." (548) The country is a setting that Asbury powers through, making his surrender to the place - he says to his mother, "This visit. . .will be permanent" (555) - all the more painful to him.

Before actually sojourning there, Old Dudley from "The Geranium" places New York City on a similar pedestal. "[T]here was that thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. . .Big towns were important places. . .It was an important place and it had room for him!" (702) The pace and grandeur of the place thrills Old Dudley - at least until he arrives.

Nelson from "The Artificial Nigger" has a similar attitude towards "the city" (this time, Atlanta), before his second trip. He is anxious to "'see what all it is to see'" (219), if only to best his grandfather in all of their bizarre competitions: "It would be Mr. Head's third trip. Nelson had said, 'I will've already been there twict and I ain't but ten" (211) ; even the fact that Nelson beat Mr. Head to making breakfast inspires in Nelson a proud posture, "his entire figure suggest[ing] satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head." (212)

Nelson and Old Dudley both grow resentful of the city by the end of their stories. After Mr. Head denies his grandson to the toppled woman, Nelson becomes a passionless thing, "his face bloodless . . . His eyes were triumphantly cold. there was no light in them, no feeling, no interest." (229) The entire experience puts a bad taste in Nelson's mouth, and he revises his own history, remarking after his second trip, "'I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never go back again!" (231)

Old Dudley's growing contempt for New York is both a product of loneliness - "Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn't have been so big - he wouldn't have felt pressed down every time he went out in it" (704) - and his daughter's bucking of custom. When he finds out she has a black neighbor, he thunders, "'You ain't been raised to live tight with niggers that think they're just as good as you, and you think I'd go messin' around with one er that kind!'" (707) New York throws Old Dudley into a culture shock, the close living of all sorts without familiar faces dashing his dreams of the big, important city he had seen in the picture show.

Nelson and Dudley's attitudes after their stays in the city resemble Mrs. Fox's, Asbury's mother. Mrs. Fox takes great pride in her little rural empire. "[S]he had said more than once to Asbury, 'You have a home here that half those people up there would give their eyeteeth for!'", especially considering the squalor and close quarters that Asbury occupied during his years in the city (552)

There are blurring allegiances between the rural and the urban, but I think that these are only symptomatic motifs of a larger theme. Though Mrs. Fox is sixty years old, Asbury believes his death will "assist her in the process of growing up" (547). This confusion of age persists in "The Enduring Chill" when Mary George, Asbury's sister, notes that "'there is something the matter with him. He looks a hundred years old." (553)

Nelson is, like Asbury, thrilled by the city - and aged beyond his years. "[T]he boy's look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it" (212). After he and his grandfather's grace experience at the eponymous statue, "Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man." (230) Now Nelson and Mr. Head, both abhorrent of the city, are too of inscrutable ages.

Which brings us to Old Dudley. His age is, in contrast, very scrutable - he insists that had he been left at home, "[t]here was his pension that could feed him and oddjobs that kept him his room in the boarding house" (702), a situation speaking both to his lifetime of work and the accrual of experience, as well as his curmudgeonly stubbornness. But in relying on his daughter to take care of him, Old Dudley embarks on a role reversal - once the parent, he is now the parented. "Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow," "She held him by the coat sleeve and pulled him through the people" (704-05). Dudley's daughter pampers him, even babies him. Dudley may in fact be Old, but in the care of his daughter he is just a child.

These ageless characters all abhor the city - except for Asbury, who pines for it, perhaps because he was poisoned by the unadulterated countryside itself. There too is a difference in his agelessness - Asbury's premature graying is a physical toll on his body, whereas Nelson and Mr. Head have grown the wiser for their conflation, Old Dudley has stopped progressing and instead regresses, and Asbury's assumed naiveté in Mrs. Fox gives her the innocence of youth. The agelessness of these characters is a play on wisdom, achieved or lost; Asbury's agelessness is the petulance of a child that has never been purged. He "crie[s] in an agonized voice, 'can't we go on?' (552), and with all the self-important angst of an adolescent repeats, over and again, "'What's wrong with me . . . is way beyond Block.'" (550)

O'Connor plays urban/rural allegiances off of ageless characters to put the wise at home in the country.