Revelation (short story)

"Revelation" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1965 in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor finished the collection during her final battle with lupus. She died in 1964, just before her final book was published. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work.

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."—Flannery O'Connor

Plot summary

Ruby Turpin, a smug, Southern woman, enters,and dominates by her large size, a crowded waiting room at a doctor's office. She is accompanied by her submissive husband Claude, who takes the last empty seat in the room. Almost immediately, Mrs. Turpin begins surveying the room and assessing the others seated around her. In her head, she labels each person, judging them by her own self-important standards : a pleasant woman, her daughter, a white trash woman and her sleeping son, and an old woman (the white trash woman's mother).

Mrs. Turpin strikes up a conversation with the pleasant woman about the importance of being refined and having a good disposition. They also talk about being grateful and how it is important to be thankful for the good things you have been given in life, clearly tied to their notions of what it means to be a good Christian. The entire time they are conversing, the white trash woman repeatedly interjects comments that show her ignorance and lack of intelligence. The pleasant woman's daughter, Mary Grace, a fat ugly college girl with bad acne, scowls at Mrs. Turpin and seems to grow angry during the course of the conversation. She becomes more resentful still when her mother, Mrs. Turpin and Claude begin to speak about her as though she's a small child, saying she ought to be paddled at one point.

Outraged, Mary Grace hurls the book she is reading at Mrs. Turpin and lunges at her throat. The book, significantly titled Human Development, strikes Mrs. Turpin above her eye. The girl is subdued by the doctor and nurse who call an ambulance to come and take the girl away. Before she leaves, she whispers a powerful message to Mrs.Turpin. The reader should realize the typically O'Connor notion that her name, Mary Grace, reveals her role as a vehicle of God's grace and the Virgin Mary's true motherly concern for all of God's children, not just those inclined to a Protestant Calvinist theology. Just loud enough for Mrs. Turpin to hear, Mary Grace says, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog." Mrs. Turpin finds this comment very unsettling, and she wonders if it may have been a message from God, who may be trying to intervene in her life. Hating the notion, and still upset, she returns home. There she lashes out at the blacks around her. They flatter her, telling her that Jesus loves her--as they've always done in the past. But blacks' flattery, according to Mrs. Turpin (who uses the N word), no longer satisfies. She sees the sham of it, for she is now beginning to realize the shallow foolishness that has characterized her life.

While hosing down hogs, there on the pig pen of her farm, significant of her life as a Prodigal Son far far from Home, Mrs. Turpin rages at God. As she contemplates the "message" he has sent her, her wrath growing, she has a vision of redeemed souls wending their way to Heaven as if on a highway (the Jacob's Ladder motif). At last casting aside her self-righteousness, having truly repented, Mrs. Turpin is converted through the violent confrontation with an instrument of God. She sees her and Claude's souls bringing up the rear of the parade to God and their eternal Home.

Characters

• Mrs. Ruby Turpin
• Claud
• Pleasant Woman
• Mary Grace
• Red-headed woman (Miss Finley)
• Old sleeping man
• White Trash Woman
• Old Woman
• Young Sleeping Child
• Negro Boy
• Doctor
• Nurse