Revelation (1964). Content and Description

“Revelation” was published in the 1964 spring issue of the Sewanee Review; it was the last story to appear separately before O’Connor’s death that summer. Many critics consider it her finest work. At the center of the story is Ruby Turpin, a 180-pound middle-class white woman who is obsessed with class-consciousness and racial relations.

The story takes place in two locations: a doctor’s office, where Ruby and her husband have gone to have a cow-kick-induced ulcer on his leg treated, and at the Turpin farm, where the story’s climactic scene occurs at the Turpins’ “pig parlor,” a pen raised on a slab of concrete the Turpins hose down every evening. In many ways the story is the culmination of O’Connor’s writing career and spiritual vision, with the final scene containing the most comprehensive epiphany in all of her works: a vision of “a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.

Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven.” As with many of her works, especially those in the posthumously published collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, the central character, Mrs. Turpin, witnesses a moment of “convergence” as it might be described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Roman Catholic priest, mystic, and paleontologist whose works O’Connor read and reviewed in 1960 and 1961. She called Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man “a scientific expression of what the poet attempts to do: penetrate matter until spirit is revealed in it” (“Outstanding Books, 1931-1961,” American Scholar 618).

O’Connor was drawn to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “Omega Point,” a scientific explanation of human evolution, a movement toward self-awareness that would ultimately lead to a form of supreme consciousness. For Teilhard de Chardin, no human being is fixed. Instead, all human beings evolve toward a point of transcendence—universal love—a point where the outside world and the inside world converge in Christ.

Ruby Turpin reaches this grand epiphany after a series of disillusionments, the most significant of which occurs in the doctor’s office when a homely acne-covered girl aptly named “Mary Grace” assaults Turpin with a book—entitled Human Development—and then wrestles her to the floor. Before the girl can be sedated, Mrs. Turpin insists that the girl has something to say to her, that she knows her and can see through her. In reply Mary Grace exclaims, “Go back to hell where you come from, you old wart hog!” As O’Connor readers come to expect, this moment is suffused with comedy and pathos.

It is the sort of violent scene usually accompanying sudden moments of awareness in O’Connor’s works. Prior to this violent encounter, Ruby Turpin has been sizing up the members of the waiting room, judging their social status according to their clothes, shoes, and sense of propriety. Mrs. Turpin is haunted by the social pecking order; her thoughts often veer from the waiting room to the materialist and racial hierarchy with which she classifies human beings. She literally holds simultaneous conversations inside her head and aloud in the waiting room, at times conversing with those waiting for the doctor, at other times responding to her own thoughts with verbal utterances and even emphatic praises of thanks to Jesus, who has created her with a little bit of everything and spared her the shame of being an underprivileged white person or a person of color.

After she spends the afternoon in bed with an ice pack over her left eye, a sign of renewed vision, Turpin makes her way to the pig parlor, where she questions God. Believing that the encounter with Mary Grace is the result of divine providence, Turpin asks, “What do you send me a message like that for. . . . How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Finally, after mulling over about her social status and religious standing, Turpin demands, “Who do you think you are?” an impassioned cry that has been building in her since her confrontation in the doctor’s office.

In a moment that mirrors the epiphany the grandmother has in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Mrs. Turpin is struck speechless. She then experiences an unfolding of mystery as “a visionary light settled in her eyes.” She sees the various stratified members of southern society “rumbling toward heaven.” As her vision ends, she hears “the voices of souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.” It is the most complete moment of awareness in all of O’Connor’s works, one that embodies the inclusive vision of grace O’Connor held throughout her life.

In the end Ruby Turpin may form O’Connor’s strongest social commentary. Turpin embodies a bigoted southern culture consumed by notions of race and class, a culture O’Connor often represents and comments upon in her stories. Among those who represent the stratified ranks of southern society, Mrs. Turpin confronts her self-image, one over which she stews during waking and sleeping hours. In a recurrent nightmare reminiscent of the exportation of Jews during the Holocaust, Mrs. Turpin sees “all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head,” dreaming “they were all crammed together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”

This vision not only haunts Mrs. Turpin, also it forms the vision of humanity given by O’Connor in her other works, one in which violence provokes in both her characters and her readers dramatic epiphanies, moments of awareness in which the blind indeed do learn to see—the stuff of which biblical revelations are made.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. On one level, “Revelation” deals with social and religious hypocrisy. With this in mind, read other O’Connor works treating a similar theme, such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Displaced Person,” “Greenleaf,” “Everything

2. That Rises Must Converge,” “The Partridge Festival,” and Wise Blood. What connections can be made? Why is this theme so important to O’Connor? What significance does this theme have in understanding her body of works?

3. Discuss Mrs. Turpin’s vision of heaven. Is it possible that this vision is a commentary on stereotypical visions of the afterlife afforded by mainstream Christianity? Why or why not?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.
Balee, Susan. Flannery O’Connor: Literary Prophet of the South. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.

Baumgaertner, Jill P. Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. Wheaton, Ill.: H. Shaw, 1988.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Browning, Preston M. Flannery O’Connor Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.
Caron, Timothy Paul. Struggles over the Word: Race and Religion in O’Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000.
Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.
Clark, Beverly L., and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1972.