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Revelation
"Revelation" is a Southern Gothic short story by author Flannery O'Connor about the delivery and effect of a revelation to a sinfully proud, self-righteous, middle-aged, middle class, rural, white Southern woman that her confidence in her own Christian salvation is an error.
"Revelation" was first published in the Spring 1964 issue of The Sewanee Review. The author was notified shortly before her death in August 1964 that her work won the O. Henry Award first prize for 1965, and the story was subsequently reprinted in Prize Stories 1965: The O. Henry Awards published that year. It was her third O'Henry Award first prize.
"Revelation" was first published in the Spring 1964 issue of The Sewanee Review. The author was notified shortly before her death in August 1964 that her work won the O. Henry Award first prize for 1965, and the story was subsequently reprinted in Prize Stories 1965: The O. Henry Awards published that year. It was her third O'Henry Award first prize.
24 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1964
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277 people want to read
About the author
Flannery O'Connor
211 books5,369 followersCritics note novels
Wise Blood
(1952) and
The Violent Bear It Away
(1960) and short stories, collected in such works as
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style.
The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). Her Complete Stories , published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer.
People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). Her Complete Stories , published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer.
People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
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July 6, 2023
This one was not as good as A Good Man is Hard to find but it was still worth reading.
A bunch of terrible, God fearing, racist women talk with each other in the waiting room of a physician. The outlier, a student, who looks at the others with hate, suddenly looses it and attacks the worst of the ***es. I would have gone insane there too. An ironic short story about class inequality, racism, sin and redemption.
A bunch of terrible, God fearing, racist women talk with each other in the waiting room of a physician. The outlier, a student, who looks at the others with hate, suddenly looses it and attacks the worst of the ***es. I would have gone insane there too. An ironic short story about class inequality, racism, sin and redemption.
April 10, 2023
A week ago, all I knew of O’Connor was her name and that she’d written A Good Man is Hard to Find (see my review HERE). I didn’t care for the horror or religiosity of that, and given that this is named after the final book of the Bible, expected more of the same. As with A Good Man, this starts with satire around a judgemental and hypocritical southern matriarch and ends with religious introspection, but it was somewhat dialled down in comparison, and all the better for it, imo.
Intersection of class and race
Intersectionality is a fairly new term, but that's what O'Connor explored in 1964.
A doctor's waiting room is an excellent location for a short story: a confined and neutral space for a range of strangers to meet, with nervous tension, and for conversation to start and be cut short as people come and go. They all seem to be white, apart from an errand boy, bringing drinks. The N-word is used a lot and quoted below.
Mrs Turpin is a moderately well-to-do farmer’s wife. She’s 47 and they seem to be childless. She is obsessed with social class - more than race - but as a good Christian lady, she counts her blessings (specifically, that she was not born black, white-trash, or ugly) and proudly does good deeds:
“To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent.”
She mentally categorises everyone in the waiting room, and has particular disdain for an old woman and child who were “kind of vacant and white-trashy” and notes the woman’s cotton print dress matches the sacks of chicken feed they have on the farm. She thinks such people “Worse than niggers any day”, so probably considers herself enlightened, rather than racially prejudiced.
To the background of gospel music on the radio, someone else suggests sending all the black people “back” to Africa. Mrs Turpin disagrees:
“There's a heap of things worse than a nigger... It's all kinds of them just like it's all kinds of us.”
I know people like Mrs Turpin. They’re mostly elderly, snobbish, and always polite to people of colour (albeit excessively, patronisingly so). They may even befriend one or two families, and thus believe they are not prejudiced. But they still make derogatory generalisations and would be horrified if their own child or grandchild were to date, let alone marry, a person of colour - or someone poor and trashy. Poverty (white-trash) is deemed more of a choice, and more worthy of contempt, than being black, therefore, they don't see themselves as un-Christian or prejudiced.
Back to the Bible
The first part of the story was a thought-provoking and well-written exposé of pride, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. It was funny and sometimes shocking.
Then something dramatic happens, which Mrs Turpin interprets as a religious revelation. Back home, that spurs her to talking to the farm hands (cotton pickers are hard to find and retain) and then to God, when she's in the Pig Parlor (pigs are unclean in the Old Testament, but not the New). There’s a serpent (kind of), a vision, and maybe a secondary revelation. Meh.
Image: Hogwash (Source)
Quotes
• “The table was cluttered with limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ashtray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them.” [A doctor’s waiting room!]
• “On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them -- not above, just away from -- were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there some colored people who owned their homes and land as well…
Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”
• “It was not just that they didn't have anything. Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn't.” [white trash, not black people]
Postscript - my (incomplete) revelation
After I wrote the review above, a link to a New Yorker article, How Racist was Flannery O'Connor?, was shared in the short story group. Because I'd read this story as a strong denouncement of prejudice and hypocrisy of all kinds, including racism, I assumed the article would either conclude “not very”, or over-apply modern sensibilities. That was not the case.
You could perhaps ignore personal letters, written when she was very young, but I think this is hard to defend:
“On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later”
So much for my assuming she hated Mrs Turpin: she identified AS her. You could say she was joking, but that's the usual defence of those called out for racist, misogynistic, gaslighting behaviour.
I'm left confused about the story and O'Connor's motive and message:
• Is she really calling out prejudice, as I first assumed?
• Is it all a confection, more in tune with the social satire at the start?
• Or is it confession of and penance for her own flaws?
Short story club
I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.
You can read this story here.
You can join the group here.
Intersection of class and race
Intersectionality is a fairly new term, but that's what O'Connor explored in 1964.
A doctor's waiting room is an excellent location for a short story: a confined and neutral space for a range of strangers to meet, with nervous tension, and for conversation to start and be cut short as people come and go. They all seem to be white, apart from an errand boy, bringing drinks. The N-word is used a lot and quoted below.
Mrs Turpin is a moderately well-to-do farmer’s wife. She’s 47 and they seem to be childless. She is obsessed with social class - more than race - but as a good Christian lady, she counts her blessings (specifically, that she was not born black, white-trash, or ugly) and proudly does good deeds:
“To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent.”
She mentally categorises everyone in the waiting room, and has particular disdain for an old woman and child who were “kind of vacant and white-trashy” and notes the woman’s cotton print dress matches the sacks of chicken feed they have on the farm. She thinks such people “Worse than niggers any day”, so probably considers herself enlightened, rather than racially prejudiced.
To the background of gospel music on the radio, someone else suggests sending all the black people “back” to Africa. Mrs Turpin disagrees:
“There's a heap of things worse than a nigger... It's all kinds of them just like it's all kinds of us.”
I know people like Mrs Turpin. They’re mostly elderly, snobbish, and always polite to people of colour (albeit excessively, patronisingly so). They may even befriend one or two families, and thus believe they are not prejudiced. But they still make derogatory generalisations and would be horrified if their own child or grandchild were to date, let alone marry, a person of colour - or someone poor and trashy. Poverty (white-trash) is deemed more of a choice, and more worthy of contempt, than being black, therefore, they don't see themselves as un-Christian or prejudiced.
Back to the Bible
The first part of the story was a thought-provoking and well-written exposé of pride, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. It was funny and sometimes shocking.
Then something dramatic happens, which Mrs Turpin interprets as a religious revelation. Back home, that spurs her to talking to the farm hands (cotton pickers are hard to find and retain) and then to God, when she's in the Pig Parlor (pigs are unclean in the Old Testament, but not the New). There’s a serpent (kind of), a vision, and maybe a secondary revelation. Meh.
Image: Hogwash (Source)
Quotes
• “The table was cluttered with limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ashtray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them.” [A doctor’s waiting room!]
• “On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them -- not above, just away from -- were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there some colored people who owned their homes and land as well…
Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”
• “It was not just that they didn't have anything. Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn't.” [white trash, not black people]
Postscript - my (incomplete) revelation
After I wrote the review above, a link to a New Yorker article, How Racist was Flannery O'Connor?, was shared in the short story group. Because I'd read this story as a strong denouncement of prejudice and hypocrisy of all kinds, including racism, I assumed the article would either conclude “not very”, or over-apply modern sensibilities. That was not the case.
You could perhaps ignore personal letters, written when she was very young, but I think this is hard to defend:
“On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later”
So much for my assuming she hated Mrs Turpin: she identified AS her. You could say she was joking, but that's the usual defence of those called out for racist, misogynistic, gaslighting behaviour.
I'm left confused about the story and O'Connor's motive and message:
• Is she really calling out prejudice, as I first assumed?
• Is it all a confection, more in tune with the social satire at the start?
• Or is it confession of and penance for her own flaws?
Short story club
I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.
You can read this story here.
You can join the group here.
April 3, 2023
3.5~4★
“The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence.”
There’s an assortment of patients waiting for the doctor. Mrs. Turpin has to wait for a seat, and when she finally squeezes into one, she announces that she’s too fat.
“ ‘Well, as long as you have such a good disposition,’ the stylish lady said, ‘I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just can’t beat a good disposition.’
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled 'Human Development'. The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks.”
I’m not surprised. Mrs. Turpin may claim to have a good diposition but has been giving everyone the once-over. A thin, leathery lady is wearing a dress made out of the material the Turpins’ chicken feed comes in. Mrs. T classifies all people into social strata.
“Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and gray suede shoes to match her dress.
Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them—exactly what you would have expected her to have on.”
Much of her internal monologue is about her kindness. When her husband brings their black farmworkers in from the fields in the back of the truck in the evening, she takes out a bucket of water with a block of ice in it and a dipper so they can all have a cool drink. Of course they are all call n*rs, not blacks, and of course they are all considered inferior.
“Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You could never say anything intelligent to a n*r. You could talk at them but not with them.”
When she is finally insulted herself, she is so shaken that, although she tries to justify herself to herself, she begins to crack under the pressure.
Of course there is plenty of deep and meaningful food for thought, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.
It is not a cheery tale, but it is an excellent picture of an ignorant bigot I wouldn’t want to know (but probably do).
It’s one of the Short Story Club Group’s selections that you can download here. Revelation PDF
Join the group here for great stories and entertaining discussions.
The Short Story Club Group
“The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence.”
There’s an assortment of patients waiting for the doctor. Mrs. Turpin has to wait for a seat, and when she finally squeezes into one, she announces that she’s too fat.
“ ‘Well, as long as you have such a good disposition,’ the stylish lady said, ‘I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just can’t beat a good disposition.’
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled 'Human Development'. The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks.”
I’m not surprised. Mrs. Turpin may claim to have a good diposition but has been giving everyone the once-over. A thin, leathery lady is wearing a dress made out of the material the Turpins’ chicken feed comes in. Mrs. T classifies all people into social strata.
“Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and gray suede shoes to match her dress.
Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them—exactly what you would have expected her to have on.”
Much of her internal monologue is about her kindness. When her husband brings their black farmworkers in from the fields in the back of the truck in the evening, she takes out a bucket of water with a block of ice in it and a dipper so they can all have a cool drink. Of course they are all call n*rs, not blacks, and of course they are all considered inferior.
“Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You could never say anything intelligent to a n*r. You could talk at them but not with them.”
When she is finally insulted herself, she is so shaken that, although she tries to justify herself to herself, she begins to crack under the pressure.
Of course there is plenty of deep and meaningful food for thought, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.
It is not a cheery tale, but it is an excellent picture of an ignorant bigot I wouldn’t want to know (but probably do).
It’s one of the Short Story Club Group’s selections that you can download here. Revelation PDF
Join the group here for great stories and entertaining discussions.
The Short Story Club Group
April 2, 2023
"Revelation" is a well-written story about racism, social class, pride, hypocrisy, and the road to salvation. The story opens with a group of people from many social classes sitting in a doctor's waiting room. There was a large divide between what they were thinking about each other, and what they were saying aloud. Flannery O'Connor is noted for her use of the grotesque, and there were plenty of them in this story. The main character, Ruby Turpin, has to ponder whether predestination, or free will (with faith and good works) will bring salvation. O'Connor combined a religious revelation, the gift of divine grace, and Biblical references in a story written with a Southern Gothic vibe.
Read
March 30, 20237/10
I've struggled with O'Connor's work: while she is an exceptional story teller, she also strikes me as an unrepentant racist, which -- to say the very least -- makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Within the last decade, papers and letters have come to light which allow that perhaps some of us were not so wrong in considering her a racist.
I've had the same struggle, most recently, in reading through Hemingway's stories: there I bristled at his unkindness; here, I've become a veritable porcupine, and I may have to reconsider her value as a writer. To be made uncomfortable is one thing; to feel that she held these as the strength of her convictions, is ugly to the extreme. (It would certainly bear further research into the primary documents, for those who have the time, and inclination.)
Something to keep in mind when reading O'Connor.
O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.
The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.
It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.
from
"How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?" by Paul Elie, in The New Yorker, June 15, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
I've struggled with O'Connor's work: while she is an exceptional story teller, she also strikes me as an unrepentant racist, which -- to say the very least -- makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Within the last decade, papers and letters have come to light which allow that perhaps some of us were not so wrong in considering her a racist.
I've had the same struggle, most recently, in reading through Hemingway's stories: there I bristled at his unkindness; here, I've become a veritable porcupine, and I may have to reconsider her value as a writer. To be made uncomfortable is one thing; to feel that she held these as the strength of her convictions, is ugly to the extreme. (It would certainly bear further research into the primary documents, for those who have the time, and inclination.)
Something to keep in mind when reading O'Connor.
O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.
The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.
It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.
from
"How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?" by Paul Elie, in The New Yorker, June 15, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
April 1, 2023
Ruby Turpin wasn’t expecting a revelation when she took her husband Claud to see the doctor for his ulcerated leg. She tolerated the other people in the waiting room pretty well, she thought, though she was certainly glad to be HER and not THEM.
“She had been singled out for the message, through there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.”
We all have a thing or two to learn, shocking as that may be to some people. And Flannery O’Connor has a unique way of giving a lesson. I love her style. It can be blunt--crass even. But she’s funny and serious, reverent and irreverent. Full of surprises.
This is a very racist story, and a very religious story. Unfortunately, we are used to seeing those two concepts together far too often, but O’Connor does something special with this combo.
I have no idea the level of O'Connor's personal racism, but it seems to me she describes it very well--almost too well for someone who actually believes it. So it may be that she’s condemning, or it may be that she’s confessing. Regardless, she reveals hateful things in her stories, and the more important question for us readers is: what are we going to do with that revelation?
“She had been singled out for the message, through there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.”
We all have a thing or two to learn, shocking as that may be to some people. And Flannery O’Connor has a unique way of giving a lesson. I love her style. It can be blunt--crass even. But she’s funny and serious, reverent and irreverent. Full of surprises.
This is a very racist story, and a very religious story. Unfortunately, we are used to seeing those two concepts together far too often, but O’Connor does something special with this combo.
I have no idea the level of O'Connor's personal racism, but it seems to me she describes it very well--almost too well for someone who actually believes it. So it may be that she’s condemning, or it may be that she’s confessing. Regardless, she reveals hateful things in her stories, and the more important question for us readers is: what are we going to do with that revelation?
February 11, 2025
# short stories in the shortest month #7
Revelação, de Flannery O’Connor
“Vieram para cá”, disse a mulher rasca da escumalha branca. “Voltam da mesma maneira que vieram.”
“Não eram tantos nessa altura”, explicou Mrs. Turpin. (…) “Nããão”, disse, “vão ficar cá, pois daqui podem ir até Nova Iorque, casar com brancos e melhorar a cor da pele. Isso é o que todos querem fazer, cada um deles, melhorar a cor da pele.”
“Revelação” foi o último conto que Flannery O’Connor escreveu, já no hospital, na fase terminal da sua longa luta contra o lúpus. Independentemente de a autora sulista ter sido ou não racista, ter sido uma cristã fervorosa ou não, e de como é que essas duas atitudes na vida se conciliam - questões que já fizeram verter muita tinta-, é dos textos mais penosos e deliciosos que li sobre mentes tacanhas. Mrs. Turpin, a personificação da ignorância e da sobranceria, apesar de ser uma mera lavradora criadora de porcos, está na sala de espera de um consultório a dizer as maiores barbaridades sobre os negros e pensar o pior de uma família considerada “white trash” ali sentada. A tensão crescente entre quem aguarda a sua vez e a epifania final da protagonista compensam todos os insultos e sentimentos de superioridade tão difíceis de suportar durante a leitura.
Às vezes, à noite, quando não conseguia adormecer, Mrs. Turpin ocupava-se com a seguinte questão: se não pudesse ser quem era, que pessoa escolheria ser? Se Jesus lhe tivesse dito antes de a criar, “Existem apenas dois lugares disponíveis para ti. Podes ser uma preta ou uma gaja rasca da escumalha branca”, o que teria ela respondido? “Por favor, Jesus, por favor”, diria talvez, “deixa-me esperar até que haja outro lugar disponível.”
Revelação, de Flannery O’Connor
“Vieram para cá”, disse a mulher rasca da escumalha branca. “Voltam da mesma maneira que vieram.”
“Não eram tantos nessa altura”, explicou Mrs. Turpin. (…) “Nããão”, disse, “vão ficar cá, pois daqui podem ir até Nova Iorque, casar com brancos e melhorar a cor da pele. Isso é o que todos querem fazer, cada um deles, melhorar a cor da pele.”
“Revelação” foi o último conto que Flannery O’Connor escreveu, já no hospital, na fase terminal da sua longa luta contra o lúpus. Independentemente de a autora sulista ter sido ou não racista, ter sido uma cristã fervorosa ou não, e de como é que essas duas atitudes na vida se conciliam - questões que já fizeram verter muita tinta-, é dos textos mais penosos e deliciosos que li sobre mentes tacanhas. Mrs. Turpin, a personificação da ignorância e da sobranceria, apesar de ser uma mera lavradora criadora de porcos, está na sala de espera de um consultório a dizer as maiores barbaridades sobre os negros e pensar o pior de uma família considerada “white trash” ali sentada. A tensão crescente entre quem aguarda a sua vez e a epifania final da protagonista compensam todos os insultos e sentimentos de superioridade tão difíceis de suportar durante a leitura.
Às vezes, à noite, quando não conseguia adormecer, Mrs. Turpin ocupava-se com a seguinte questão: se não pudesse ser quem era, que pessoa escolheria ser? Se Jesus lhe tivesse dito antes de a criar, “Existem apenas dois lugares disponíveis para ti. Podes ser uma preta ou uma gaja rasca da escumalha branca”, o que teria ela respondido? “Por favor, Jesus, por favor”, diria talvez, “deixa-me esperar até que haja outro lugar disponível.”
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April 30, 2023Thanks to Patty, I got to read this short story. I cringed all the way. What more can I say?
I wanted to learn more about the author and find several articles in which Flannery O'Connor as an author was discussed.
Quote from the article: Flannery O'Connor controversy: Three scholars, three views
August 6, 2020, By Mary Farrowone
In many ways, O’Donnell noted, O’Connor is the perfect author for this moment in history especially because of how she treats racism in her work, which faces its ugliness head-on and views it as a sin.
“Her stories are powerful, iconic stories, and very realistic gritty depictions of what it was like to be alive in a culture, the very, very racist culture of the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, during a time of enormous change,” O’Donnell said.
(Professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has studied Flannery O’Connor, an American Catholic author from the South, rather extensively. She wrote a book on O’Connor’s treatment of racial issues specifically, entitled “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor.”)
My opinion about Revelation
It was written in a period of history when racism was confronted head-on by courageous authors, political leaders, and masses of disenfranchised people. I thought the author, in this particular story, did not soften the ugliness and hypocrisy behind racism. She exposed the holier-than-thou misconception that was embedded in so many religious dogmas. It was so obvious in this story that she called a spade a spade, or as the fat, purple-faced young woman(according to Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist) finally spat out to her face: You are n old wart hog from hell!
Mrs. Turpin then had to confront her version of a god, and she was embittered, angry, and revengeful.
What a well-written, extremely skillfully-plotted story. Mrs. Turpin's visit to the doctor began when she ended up in the waiting room, where she classified all the patients into the different existential social classes, as she was taught all her life. She did not know anything else and would have struggled to comprehend anything foreign to her own beliefs anyway.
The story served as a metaphor. A powerful one for the period in American history. Her renaissance—or revelation in the title—was triggered, when the N...s, as she called the African Americans, were kind to her when she least expected, or deserved, it. My opinion.
The ending was dramatic and thought-provoking. Major! Brilliant. And sad. But good.
Thank you Patty for recommending this story. There are still many people who should read it.
You can download the free pdf of Revelation HERE
AND
Patty's thoughtful review
I wanted to learn more about the author and find several articles in which Flannery O'Connor as an author was discussed.
Quote from the article: Flannery O'Connor controversy: Three scholars, three views
August 6, 2020, By Mary Farrowone
In many ways, O’Donnell noted, O’Connor is the perfect author for this moment in history especially because of how she treats racism in her work, which faces its ugliness head-on and views it as a sin.
“Her stories are powerful, iconic stories, and very realistic gritty depictions of what it was like to be alive in a culture, the very, very racist culture of the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, during a time of enormous change,” O’Donnell said.
(Professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has studied Flannery O’Connor, an American Catholic author from the South, rather extensively. She wrote a book on O’Connor’s treatment of racial issues specifically, entitled “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor.”)
My opinion about Revelation
It was written in a period of history when racism was confronted head-on by courageous authors, political leaders, and masses of disenfranchised people. I thought the author, in this particular story, did not soften the ugliness and hypocrisy behind racism. She exposed the holier-than-thou misconception that was embedded in so many religious dogmas. It was so obvious in this story that she called a spade a spade, or as the fat, purple-faced young woman(according to Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist) finally spat out to her face: You are n old wart hog from hell!
Mrs. Turpin then had to confront her version of a god, and she was embittered, angry, and revengeful.
What a well-written, extremely skillfully-plotted story. Mrs. Turpin's visit to the doctor began when she ended up in the waiting room, where she classified all the patients into the different existential social classes, as she was taught all her life. She did not know anything else and would have struggled to comprehend anything foreign to her own beliefs anyway.
The story served as a metaphor. A powerful one for the period in American history. Her renaissance—or revelation in the title—was triggered, when the N...s, as she called the African Americans, were kind to her when she least expected, or deserved, it. My opinion.
The ending was dramatic and thought-provoking. Major! Brilliant. And sad. But good.
Thank you Patty for recommending this story. There are still many people who should read it.
You can download the free pdf of Revelation HERE
AND
Patty's thoughtful review
February 2, 2021
my exact fear of doctor's waiting rooms made manifest
May 9, 2022
This is my favorite of O’Connor’s short stories (that I’ve read). Her writing is convicting and compelling. She has a way of allowing you to despise a character yet see yourself in them. Ugh.
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August 18, 2022Unenjoyable to progress through all the crude and unkind thoughts of Mrs. Turpin's stream of consciousness. But the end left me imagining all the ways, even through their hardships and disfunction, that those more seemingly crude people in the waiting room may have had much more virtue behind their inner narratives than Mrs. Turpin, despite all her outward niceties.
-Imagining that "up north," the 'ugly girl' may have befriended a few black people in her newly independent life at college. Maybe heard their stories, saw their humanity, and experienced kindness from the people all her family and community considered a low-class "other." Maybe she (always looked down on for being ugly) always felt like an "other," too. And so, maybe she felt a sense of comradery with the people who were being ridiculed in the waiting room. -Did she feel a righteous anger with and for them, but didn't yet know a healthy way to channel that gut reaction against the ugliness she felt and saw in the attitudes of the others in the waiting room?
-Imagining that --despite their closed-mindedness towards people in the "other" category-- the multiple generations of "white trash" in the waiting room had possibly endured challenges that made them chose to love each other, even when it cost so much just to stay together as a family. More than can probably be said for Mrs. Turpin, whose 'love' for her husband seemed to consist in valueing that she could order him around and knowing he'd always oblige her desires.
I think the 'revelation' at the end does display some truth in that we would all be surprised how broadly God may be working among people we might too quickly dismiss. Attitudes that certain types of people are unhelpable, like Mrs. Turpin expressed about "white trash", are too easy to fall into. Thankful that God loves to be near and a help to the broken, lost, and the ones who don't have it all put together.
-Imagining that "up north," the 'ugly girl' may have befriended a few black people in her newly independent life at college. Maybe heard their stories, saw their humanity, and experienced kindness from the people all her family and community considered a low-class "other." Maybe she (always looked down on for being ugly) always felt like an "other," too. And so, maybe she felt a sense of comradery with the people who were being ridiculed in the waiting room. -Did she feel a righteous anger with and for them, but didn't yet know a healthy way to channel that gut reaction against the ugliness she felt and saw in the attitudes of the others in the waiting room?
-Imagining that --despite their closed-mindedness towards people in the "other" category-- the multiple generations of "white trash" in the waiting room had possibly endured challenges that made them chose to love each other, even when it cost so much just to stay together as a family. More than can probably be said for Mrs. Turpin, whose 'love' for her husband seemed to consist in valueing that she could order him around and knowing he'd always oblige her desires.
I think the 'revelation' at the end does display some truth in that we would all be surprised how broadly God may be working among people we might too quickly dismiss. Attitudes that certain types of people are unhelpable, like Mrs. Turpin expressed about "white trash", are too easy to fall into. Thankful that God loves to be near and a help to the broken, lost, and the ones who don't have it all put together.
February 19, 2022
This is the second time I’ve read Revelation. It’s not my absolute favorite O’Connor story, but I still really like it. I love discussing her stories in class.
April 25, 2022
I'm beginning a study at church of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Revelation was the first story read; we will discuss tonight.
October 29, 2023
The first will come last and the last shall come first
October 16, 2025
I read this for the St. Aidan's Anglican Church Co-Ed Book club. This was a fascinating and jarring story. After listening to some lectures about Flannery O'Connor along with reading this, I understand that O'Connor intentionally uses mean, ugly, violent, and shocking characters and events to jar the characters (and therefore the reader) into a revelation or realization of God's grace. This story epitomizes that. I really enjoyed it and loved how O'Connor flips everything on its head at the end.
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August 5, 2021Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. I read this in a book I'm working my way through, a textbook, "On Literature" and I did NOT know what I was getting into - it's just a short story. Flannery O'Connor is famous and yet I've never read anything of hers before.
Is this story even OK to read anymore? It has a LOT of a certain verbotten word (seriously like 50 times at least) and just general hateful racist sentiment. But it's not from the voice of the author; it's more like she's challenging it? However, today most people can't read past the obvious to even want to discuss or consider that so I assume this is like, NEVER taught in college or high school or anything anymore. (I might regret posting this before reading others' reviews of this story, tbh.)
The "small talk" in the waiting room at the beginning is ABSOLUTE HELL to me, haha. THIS is why I hate small talk. These people do not give a shit about or like each other - why are they wasting breath and energy even trying to interact? If you clearly hate every person in a room, why talk to any of them? It's no different or less fake than later when the hired cotton pickers just agree with everything Mrs. Turpin says and tell her platitudes, which she is mad about, except at least they are being kind, not like, master-manipulating and insulting people for, what, entertainment? (Patronizing and sucking up, maybe, but kind.)
Mrs. Turpin seems angry then because she knows it's fake; not because she really thinks she's a bad person but because she knows their whole relationship is fake, built on fake niceties, and she wanted something else in that moment, something real, but they wouldn't give it. They don't trust her, and they don't owe her anything. They're returning what they have been given. (A fascinating statement about so much in itself, that one tiny scene.)
The "revelation" at the end - it's funny to me that old short stories love this - is both a gimmick and a literal revelation (there is no hierarchy, we're all the same). It's surprisingly VERY religious. I was intrigued that rather than turn all Mrs. Turpin's faulty beliefs based on religion on their head by rejecting all religion rather O'Connor goes DEEPER into religion to show her faults. But apparently she was actually super religious and like, made a point of making it part of her life's work as a writer to make that clear, and to explore those ideas in depth. Huh.
The whole story is pretty dated, it doesn't feel fresh. What was a poignant and moving formula back then, these character studies with big internal "AHA!" moments hinging on some insignificant outward event, that kind of thing feels beyond overdone to me now. It makes me wonder if I re-read some older short stories I loved in high school or college if I would find my feelings on them have changed now. (The Awakening, anyone?)
One thing I thought was not super well done was that there was no reason at all for the girl in the waiting room to be so immediately hateful, let alone to lose her shit. You can say "she's crazy", sure, but it's also very "evil villain is evil, does evil things, no explanation needed" (not that she's the "villain" per se but the Deus ex Machina stands). Maybe she hated Mrs. Turpin because she just wouldn't shut up - I can totally relate to that, haha. It still felt like a plot device.
I looked up some info after reading this and was STUNNED at how much symbolism, depth, religious allegory, etc. was in it. Tons of stuff I didn't pick up on. This is the kind of story - it's only like 4 or 6 at most pages! - people can center a thesis on. I learned like 5 new terms - anagogical? hermeneutics? exegesis? tropological? Yeesh. I'm kinda surprised and impressed that Flannery O'Connor was apparently like, this intellectual. I also looked up articles to see whether people in general consider her a racist or not (I mean, on some basic level, yes, b/c she's a white woman and racism is institutionalized and inescapable but also for SURE because of where and when she lived) but I was surprised to see a lot of people (Toni Morrison, Angela Davis) writing in defense of her work or this story in particular. It does seem like she is trying to.... actively dismantle overtly racist attitudes in her writing - in this very story. In herself. She's almost like... proto-anti-racist?? Whoa. Apparently she was also super sensitive to never trying too write from a perspective she didn't feel she could adequately portray - she literally stated she didn't want to "culturally appropriate" something before I knew that term had even been coined.
I never wanted to delve this far into Christian theology but the whole "anagogical" thing was fascinating to me. Tropological studies especially made my brain fire off - that the word is related to "tropes" made me think immediately of fanfiction. Are there tropological interpretations to bodies of FF work?? Whoa. Could there be?
I want to read more by and about Flannery O'Connor in general, now.
Is this story even OK to read anymore? It has a LOT of a certain verbotten word (seriously like 50 times at least) and just general hateful racist sentiment. But it's not from the voice of the author; it's more like she's challenging it? However, today most people can't read past the obvious to even want to discuss or consider that so I assume this is like, NEVER taught in college or high school or anything anymore. (I might regret posting this before reading others' reviews of this story, tbh.)
The "small talk" in the waiting room at the beginning is ABSOLUTE HELL to me, haha. THIS is why I hate small talk. These people do not give a shit about or like each other - why are they wasting breath and energy even trying to interact? If you clearly hate every person in a room, why talk to any of them? It's no different or less fake than later when the hired cotton pickers just agree with everything Mrs. Turpin says and tell her platitudes, which she is mad about, except at least they are being kind, not like, master-manipulating and insulting people for, what, entertainment? (Patronizing and sucking up, maybe, but kind.)
Mrs. Turpin seems angry then because she knows it's fake; not because she really thinks she's a bad person but because she knows their whole relationship is fake, built on fake niceties, and she wanted something else in that moment, something real, but they wouldn't give it. They don't trust her, and they don't owe her anything. They're returning what they have been given. (A fascinating statement about so much in itself, that one tiny scene.)
The "revelation" at the end - it's funny to me that old short stories love this - is both a gimmick and a literal revelation (there is no hierarchy, we're all the same). It's surprisingly VERY religious. I was intrigued that rather than turn all Mrs. Turpin's faulty beliefs based on religion on their head by rejecting all religion rather O'Connor goes DEEPER into religion to show her faults. But apparently she was actually super religious and like, made a point of making it part of her life's work as a writer to make that clear, and to explore those ideas in depth. Huh.
The whole story is pretty dated, it doesn't feel fresh. What was a poignant and moving formula back then, these character studies with big internal "AHA!" moments hinging on some insignificant outward event, that kind of thing feels beyond overdone to me now. It makes me wonder if I re-read some older short stories I loved in high school or college if I would find my feelings on them have changed now. (The Awakening, anyone?)
One thing I thought was not super well done was that there was no reason at all for the girl in the waiting room to be so immediately hateful, let alone to lose her shit. You can say "she's crazy", sure, but it's also very "evil villain is evil, does evil things, no explanation needed" (not that she's the "villain" per se but the Deus ex Machina stands). Maybe she hated Mrs. Turpin because she just wouldn't shut up - I can totally relate to that, haha. It still felt like a plot device.
I looked up some info after reading this and was STUNNED at how much symbolism, depth, religious allegory, etc. was in it. Tons of stuff I didn't pick up on. This is the kind of story - it's only like 4 or 6 at most pages! - people can center a thesis on. I learned like 5 new terms - anagogical? hermeneutics? exegesis? tropological? Yeesh. I'm kinda surprised and impressed that Flannery O'Connor was apparently like, this intellectual. I also looked up articles to see whether people in general consider her a racist or not (I mean, on some basic level, yes, b/c she's a white woman and racism is institutionalized and inescapable but also for SURE because of where and when she lived) but I was surprised to see a lot of people (Toni Morrison, Angela Davis) writing in defense of her work or this story in particular. It does seem like she is trying to.... actively dismantle overtly racist attitudes in her writing - in this very story. In herself. She's almost like... proto-anti-racist?? Whoa. Apparently she was also super sensitive to never trying too write from a perspective she didn't feel she could adequately portray - she literally stated she didn't want to "culturally appropriate" something before I knew that term had even been coined.
I never wanted to delve this far into Christian theology but the whole "anagogical" thing was fascinating to me. Tropological studies especially made my brain fire off - that the word is related to "tropes" made me think immediately of fanfiction. Are there tropological interpretations to bodies of FF work?? Whoa. Could there be?
I want to read more by and about Flannery O'Connor in general, now.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 30, 2025
"who do you think you are"
Pheeeww, this was dark but not terrifying. Intense imagery.
6/10 on the Flannery O'Conor psychic damage scale
Pheeeww, this was dark but not terrifying. Intense imagery.
6/10 on the Flannery O'Conor psychic damage scale
September 21, 2022
What is striking about this short story is that O'Connor incorporates elements of her own Christian lamentation. According to the article, "The Passion of Flannery O'Connor", "Beneath the surface, as recorded on the 47 and a half handwritten pages to which we now have access {A Prayer Journal includes a facsimile), she was refining her vocation with the muscularity and spiritual ferocity of a young saint-in-waiting... A few lines later, she offers the characteristic lament of the apprentice mystic: "I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside" (Parker 38). O'Connor was a fierce critic of much, but especially herself; "Revelation" is a representation of her spiritual critique of not only other Christians, but herself as a Christian woman. Continuing, Parker notes, "For O'Connor, the space left by the destroyed ego—we can imagine it as a kind of humming vacancy, drifting with pieces of burned paper—was holy because it belonged to God. And she wanted it. Or, more precisely, and more poignantly, she wanted to want it. "Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss … to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfilment." Electric with literary ambition, she prays to be erased" (38).
O'Connor sought to utilize her literary abilities to uplift God's word while destroying her own vanity. In "Revelation", the audience is privy to a poignant moment that mirrors the author's sentiments. When Mrs. Turpin sees the ascension of "white trash" and Black people, she is uncharacteristically silent. Seeing as this story was written towards the end of Flannery O'Connor's tragically short life, this serves as a quiet preponderance of the author's own death and perceived afterlife. O'Connor used "Revelation" to express her own doubts about the solidity of her salvation, and her own nature. Without asking outright, Flannery O'Connor questions if her deeds have really aligned with God's word, or the word of her class.
"Revelation" serves as a window into the mind of Flannery O'Connor; the audience can clearly observe her spiritual anxiety as she utilizes violence to cleanse her impure characters. Perhaps O'Connor adhered more closely to the Catholic tradition than many of her contemporaries - by never truly "believing" in the sanctity of her salvation.
O'Connor sought to utilize her literary abilities to uplift God's word while destroying her own vanity. In "Revelation", the audience is privy to a poignant moment that mirrors the author's sentiments. When Mrs. Turpin sees the ascension of "white trash" and Black people, she is uncharacteristically silent. Seeing as this story was written towards the end of Flannery O'Connor's tragically short life, this serves as a quiet preponderance of the author's own death and perceived afterlife. O'Connor used "Revelation" to express her own doubts about the solidity of her salvation, and her own nature. Without asking outright, Flannery O'Connor questions if her deeds have really aligned with God's word, or the word of her class.
"Revelation" serves as a window into the mind of Flannery O'Connor; the audience can clearly observe her spiritual anxiety as she utilizes violence to cleanse her impure characters. Perhaps O'Connor adhered more closely to the Catholic tradition than many of her contemporaries - by never truly "believing" in the sanctity of her salvation.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 29, 2023
As I am trying to catch up with the Short Story Group, I started Revelation a few hours after I finished A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories…I therefore felt that the Godmother of the previous story had resuscitated and come back to the world as Ruby Turpin. I recognized the self-satisfaction, the prejudices, the religiosity, the bossiness.
The new story seemed to unfold with the literary skills that O’Connor had demonstrated in the previous story. Her great ability at characterisation and at pushing a banal situation onto a point of climax that she then uses to bring her beliefs to the fore (to an extent that it becomes greatly disconcerting particularly if the reader is an agnostic) were newly displayed in Revelation too.
But Revelation had more congruity than A Good Man, at least when I connected the spiritual course Ruby takes with that of Dante (parodic revelation, but a revelation after all). After sinning in the doctor’s waiting room, and being issued the sentence of being a hog, she then descends to the circle of hogs in her farm, and after seeing the crack of hell (her husband’s car getting into a fatal accident) she transforms her being, in parallel to the sun -- that turns from a bleaching white to a lighting yellow to a burning crimson-- so that she can participate in the procession of souls as they climb towards salvation. It is revealed to her that if blacks are forgiven for being black, if white-trash are forgiven for being white-trash, she can also be forgiven despite holding all the prejudices that hogs have.
April 8, 2023
It’s easy to Ms. (n) Turpin: Here's the reveal, no spoilage, stubborn southern lady laments to piggies after surreal episode; some see vision as her coming into the light, others see it for fraulein's fraudulent mind or still not there yet spirituality (for sure). It took me a while (revelation!), but here's the kicker: It's biblical but not so much Revelation as much as Gospels. Even while first reading, I knew it had to tie to casting the legions to the pigs (and I was so so hoping literally so). Well what we have here is a lady with multiple multiple demons (legions), a slightly confusing or confused exorcism: the ugly girl, but consider how many early christians considered Jesus ugly to ordinary at best and isn’t the truth as they say ugly, who cleverly cleverly refers to Ms. Turpins demonhood as warthog worthy, and now we're off to the races. Time warp, Ms. T can’t wait to unload her demons vis a vis her “clean” piggies (which she makes sure of first, supersoaker reassurance) in a ‘pigstye’. So this “vision” is actually the reality of her prejudices in their best Sunday suits riding off into the sunset. One could hardly expect such “vision” to be commendable, contrariwise, likely to be quite awful, but isn’t awfulness awfully well concealed in some so called holiness. Whether these internal “demons” will be permanently exorcised is doubtful, but not the concluding subject of her story. So in fact, the subject returns, materially unaffected, to her, similarly unaltered, southern landscape and culture. Pigs fed for a day.
March 12, 2025
Book 29/31 of her complete stories.
If y’all don’t like Christianity and get offended by words used commonly in the past, don’t read Flannery if you are going to leave a bad review. It’s like me going to see a drag show and comment how disgusting it is. So logically, I don’t go see them if I know I won’t enjoy myself.
This book is interesting as it explores a woman of class (in mind) in the South many years ago. It definitely makes one think on how greatful you can be for what you were born as, or also regretting on what you chose as well.
Maybe I was stuck with choosing what parents or body I had, and maybe Flannery did too. She had a most brilliant mind and gifted in that she achieved success in the writing world. On the other hand, she was plagued with lupus and couldn’t live a full life. Love her or hate her, she was a very critical thinker and was not “ignorant” by any means. She explored the world and came to a viewpoint by her own life experiences. She wasn’t white trash who just hated black people for their color. She disliked them for their lack of inteligence primarily, and enjoyed being kind to them.
The question we never get the answer to is if Mrs. Turpin changed her viewpoint on whether it is better (in her mind) to be just a hateful ignorant white trash woman, or a well-meaning negro.
If y’all don’t like Christianity and get offended by words used commonly in the past, don’t read Flannery if you are going to leave a bad review. It’s like me going to see a drag show and comment how disgusting it is. So logically, I don’t go see them if I know I won’t enjoy myself.
This book is interesting as it explores a woman of class (in mind) in the South many years ago. It definitely makes one think on how greatful you can be for what you were born as, or also regretting on what you chose as well.
Maybe I was stuck with choosing what parents or body I had, and maybe Flannery did too. She had a most brilliant mind and gifted in that she achieved success in the writing world. On the other hand, she was plagued with lupus and couldn’t live a full life. Love her or hate her, she was a very critical thinker and was not “ignorant” by any means. She explored the world and came to a viewpoint by her own life experiences. She wasn’t white trash who just hated black people for their color. She disliked them for their lack of inteligence primarily, and enjoyed being kind to them.
The question we never get the answer to is if Mrs. Turpin changed her viewpoint on whether it is better (in her mind) to be just a hateful ignorant white trash woman, or a well-meaning negro.
April 19, 2023
Another story from The Art of the Short Story which I am reading my way through.
Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" is a powerful and thought-provoking short story that explores the complexities of religion, morality, and the human condition. This story is a true masterpiece of American literature, and it is sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads it. "Revelation" is a story about how our assumptions and prejudices can blind us to the truth. The main character, Mrs. Turpin, is a deeply religious woman who believes that she is superior to those around her. However, as the story progresses, she is forced to confront the reality of her own limitations and the shortcomings of her faith. O'Connor's writing is both precise and powerful, and she conveys the complexity of her characters' thoughts and emotions with skill and nuance. The story's climax is shocking and unforgettable, and it will leave you questioning your own beliefs and values.
Some readers may find the story's themes and imagery too disturbing or graphic. However, for those who are willing to grapple with these difficult ideas, "Revelation" is a powerful and unforgettable work of literature that deserves to be read and discussed. 5 stars
Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" is a powerful and thought-provoking short story that explores the complexities of religion, morality, and the human condition. This story is a true masterpiece of American literature, and it is sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads it. "Revelation" is a story about how our assumptions and prejudices can blind us to the truth. The main character, Mrs. Turpin, is a deeply religious woman who believes that she is superior to those around her. However, as the story progresses, she is forced to confront the reality of her own limitations and the shortcomings of her faith. O'Connor's writing is both precise and powerful, and she conveys the complexity of her characters' thoughts and emotions with skill and nuance. The story's climax is shocking and unforgettable, and it will leave you questioning your own beliefs and values.
Some readers may find the story's themes and imagery too disturbing or graphic. However, for those who are willing to grapple with these difficult ideas, "Revelation" is a powerful and unforgettable work of literature that deserves to be read and discussed. 5 stars
June 16, 2022
Mrs Ruby Turpin and her husband Claud were church-going farmers. They produced a little bit of this and that but not a lot of anything. One day they drove into town to see the doctor— cow kicked Claud in the leg. The doctor’s waiting room was full of all sorts of characters. It was one of those times when the atmosphere was such that a conservation ensued. Mrs Turpin was one of those stout ladies (180 lbs.) that was willing to to share her faith, her wisdom, and her good fortune with the lessers. There was a heavy-set, pimply girl present, reading her book, and getting more and more irritated with every word spoken, especially those emanating from Mrs Turpin. Finally she lost control throwing her book at Mrs Turpin, hitting her just above the eye, she the jumped over the table and commenced strangling her, and calling her a wart hog from Hell. Ruby and Claud returned to the farm whereupon Claud napped and Ruby reflected—her reflection eventually leads to revelation.
Flannery O’Connor is a five-star author, ‘Revelation’ is representative.
Flannery O’Connor is a five-star author, ‘Revelation’ is representative.
June 12, 2023
It is a many-layered Southern Gothic story in which the author with irony explores such topics as social inequality, prejudice and rasism.
The main character of the story, sensible and self-satisfied Mrs. Turpin at first, as a believer, has an unshakable faith in being eligible for Salvation and then her world falls apart when she suddenly has an a terrifying revelation. Is she ready to accept it?
'Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.'
The main character of the story, sensible and self-satisfied Mrs. Turpin at first, as a believer, has an unshakable faith in being eligible for Salvation and then her world falls apart when she suddenly has an a terrifying revelation. Is she ready to accept it?
'Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.'
September 11, 2023
I read this book for one of my university classes. To be honest I was white-knuckling my way through the entire story. I understand the entire idea behind the story is growing past prejudice but at a certain point we as an audience need to ask ourselves whether the point the story is trying to get across is worth the harm that it causes to get there, and with Revelation I don’t think it is.
Out of 190-some paragraphs in the story nearly 140 are straight up hate-speech both racially and class wise. Additionally, when we consider comments the author has made about the topics of race, specifically “I’m integrationist in practice and segregationist by taste” along with other comments I personally don’t feel comfortable typing anywhere, I think it’s fair to say that Revelation is not the equalizing story it presents itself to be.
Out of 190-some paragraphs in the story nearly 140 are straight up hate-speech both racially and class wise. Additionally, when we consider comments the author has made about the topics of race, specifically “I’m integrationist in practice and segregationist by taste” along with other comments I personally don’t feel comfortable typing anywhere, I think it’s fair to say that Revelation is not the equalizing story it presents itself to be.
November 18, 2022
Striking. As O'Connor always is. O'Connor is so good at crafting characters to make judgements about. Yet she makes them just enough like ourselves that both the cringe and the shock of realization is poignant, strong, and painful personal. She makes me want to see these characters suffer, and then when they do, I end up feeling the pain of the suffering because I made a wrong judgment, or a hypocritical one.
This story challenged my ethics and character. I wanted to sympathize and relate to the main character, while also holding myself out against her-- which was exactly what she did to those around herself. I should be lumped into the criticisms and suffering that she endured, and I am grateful to Flannery for being bold enough to call it out so boldly.
This story challenged my ethics and character. I wanted to sympathize and relate to the main character, while also holding myself out against her-- which was exactly what she did to those around herself. I should be lumped into the criticisms and suffering that she endured, and I am grateful to Flannery for being bold enough to call it out so boldly.
February 6, 2022
I found the pdf file of this after having listened to T. Keller's sermon on Unity where he references this piece of work. As humans we compare ourselves in order to find things to pick apart in others to raise ourselves up. We all do it. It's not a good attribute, and yet we are good at justifying this type of behavior - in others as well as ourselves. Mrs. Turpin as well as a few others in the waiting room are front and center pharisaical which is what makes this so thought provoking. I hadn't read this short story before. I think people would say that this is no longer time relevant. I can't agree. The message is timeless.
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January 27, 2024Probably my least fav O'Connor short story so far; its probably the only one of her stories where the main character is just too awful. Though her other stories seem to balance the grotesque and the beauty, this one leans too much to one side. I wanted more bad things to happen to the main character ... is that what O'Conner wants me to think? If that's her intention than kudos to her I guess the story is genius than. fuck who knows
October 3, 2023
full of symbolism and rich with spiritual presence. o’ connor writes about the hypocrisy of christianity often & this story is done very well. there are so many lines that i have highlighted because the wording is so incredible. not necessarily my favorite of hers but still a really good story with an important message.
December 27, 2022
What a strange short story! I really didn’t know what to make of the main character… but I suppose maybe we’d all look that bad if our inner hatreds and prejudices were displayed. I did like diving into all the biblical allusions with our book club—O’Conner definitely knows what she’s doing!
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